Some Raw Kael

 

When you're in the game blog game, what you're doing is writing nonfiction where you are describing fictions.

That's also what movie reviewers do--including Pauline Kael, the New Yorker's old critic--widely regarded as the best. Is she? She's interesting, but often wrong and gross. But whatever--either way, she had a way with prose and there's a few RPG-adjacent Pauline Kael lines that will stick with me til my grave.

Her take on Boorman's too-late-to-be-psychedelic Excalibur is about right, spotting its best images for what they are:

When Mordred is fully grown, he wears golden spiked armor and, on his head, a gold gargoyle mask that his own sneering mouth completes. This apparition of evil comes closer to mythological scale than Arthur or Lancelot or Guenevere or any of the others do.

and:

The Dark Ages section, with its armored brutes—they’re like crustaceans tearing each other apart—is a thrilling piece of moviemaking.

Her Time Bandits review not only actually explicitly references D&D, but actually kinda reads like a review of a D&D campaign:

Time Bandits

UK (1981): Fantasy/Comedy

110 min, Rated PG, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc

Written by two members of the "Monty Python" group, Michael Palin and the American expatriate Terry Gilliam, who also directed, this surreal adventure fantasy has been conceived as a movie for children and adults. It's about a little English boy who is hurtled from one era to another by a pack of six dwarfs who have stolen The Supreme Being's map of the holes in the space-time continuum, and it's as picaresque as you can get, with Ian Holm as Napoleon, John Cleese as Robin Hood, Sean Connery as Agamemnon, Ralph Richardson as The Supreme Being, who's too busy to get his three-piece-suit pressed, and David Warner, who's a great-looking Evil Genius--he wears talons and a Nixon nose out of a David Levine drawing. (The light shining up from hell makes his nostrils red.) All this seems to do something for the 8-to 12-year-old boys in the audience-the ones known to be very high on d & d (Dungeons and Dragons)-that it may not do for adults, who will probably see and hear a lot of jokes without feeling much impulse to laugh. The whimsical rhythms of the vaudeville-skit humor often seem to be the result of mistiming; the interludes with Palin and Shelley Duvall as wonky sweethearts are especially musty--the two of them seem more amused than the audience. Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It's far from a bad movie, but it doesn't quite click together, either. The director doesn't shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas.

"Suffering from a surfeit of good ideas" that haven't been satisfyingly shaped and wasting "magical incongruities" is definitely how you feel trying to wade through all the RPG material that's been put out over the years. And many is the GM who has piled on another goblin when theres too much going on to fully freak everyone out with the one they already have.

...though if pulp entertainment tells us anything, it's that the other problem is there are no bad ideas--which Kael alludes to in her review of Godard's kinnnnda heist movie Bande à part.:

It's as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines.

 There's a reason Tarantino named his production company after it.

Kael was notoriously hard on Stanley Kubrick's films--not dismissive, but still hard--but she had a way of moralizing about their creepiness that only made them seem more unique:

She said cyberless-punk classic A Clockwork Orange might be "....the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy."

On Barry Lyndon, the greatest treasure-trove of D&Dable NPCs in the history of cinema, Kael opines: "The film says that people are disgusting but things are lovely."

Fair enough, but look at those sheep, neither people nor things.

She made the same mistake with Blade Runner--her Nexus 6 eye identifying everything about the film's virtues except for the fact that that's what they were:

"Ridley Scott isn’t great on mise en scène—we’re never sure exactly what part of the city we’re in, or where it is in relation to the scene before and the scene after."

Spoken like a true Manhattan bumpkin just dropped off in downtown LA.

Noir is mystery and mystery means you don't know where you are, or why. Even gamers know that--that's why even though D&D is all about maps, Call of Cthulhu isn't. It's also why Manhattan--the orderly little isle of named neighborhoods and numbered streets--isn't where Hammett or Chandler lived.

--

At other times, Kael's descriptions are like the stylish picture on a disappointing VHS box--they evoke way more than the thing she's reviewing.

Her take on Vampire's Kiss-- "This may be the first vampire movie in which the modern office building replaces the castle as the site of torture and degradation."

That is 100% a Demon City mini-campaign. Or Call of Cthulhu if you don't have 20 bucks.

Same for this stray shot from her review of Octopussy:  "The picture doesn't deliver on the chic perversities suggested by the inelegant title (and some of the decor)."

I don't know what would, but I know James Raggi would publish it.

For more chic perversity, here.

-

-

-

Why Everybody's "Deeply Magical" But Humans

Elves have magic--they're so magic that there's boots just called "Boots of Elvenkind" and they're magic just because they're elvenkind. Halflings can't be seen half the time, even when they're right there, and they just stumble ass-backwards into the best artifacts in the game. Dwarfs are out here mining mithril and making armor and axes that're double-strong just because dwarfs made them. And gnomes are always talking to badgers or whoever.

But humans are just these guys. If you found a "Axe of the Human Lords" what would that even do?

A great mystery--but I just now figured out why.

This table:

The demihumans all have level limits.

So, ok picture this:

You're elves, ok? Just won a fight:

Here comes the human general:

"Hail to thee, brave captain of the elderkin! Were it not for thee and thine veterans of aeon wars untold we mayhap would not hast defeated Sauron!"

"Not a problem, bro! He sucked, It was an issue, had to be handled."

"Yeah fair! Cool, so I talked to the DM and he says we get 9 billion seven hundred and sixty-eight thousand xp for defeating the horde of unfathomable darkness bent on wending all life and time round the iron gauntlet of its iniquitous will. So it looks like your share is...."

"Nah keep it."

"Whoa what? Are you peacing out on the campaign? Tolkien says next week he's got a one-shot with halflings!"

"Nah just we're all 7th level dude. We can't level up. And I checked with our wizards--they're all maxed out at 11, too."

"Truly the songs were modest when it cometh to praising the generosity of the eldár!"

"Nah its cool man, is it cool if we take the items?"

"Like the magic items?"

"Yeah...sure?"

"Cool! See you next week!"

Why are all the other races but us so magical?

After a certain point, every time they go adventuring, they get all the items. That's why Galadriel's over here just giving campaign-saving items away because she's got extra.

Campaigns Are Inconvenient--And Always On Your Mind

Here's a thing you notice if you hang out in fan spaces--I'll use comics as an example because with games it'd be confusing.

A comics critic/pundit/gadfly starts talking: "Batman Batman Batman Spider-Man Iron Man Batman Superman X-Man X-Men Spider-Man Batman"

But then they're asked what their favorite comic of the year is--is it any of those superhero comics? No it is not. It is some indie comic they haven't mentioned all year.

They then go back to talking about Spider-Man and Batman.

--

I don't think they're being disingenuous or just trying to sound smart. I think that person genuinely does like the niche indie comic that they are trumpeting far more than the latest iteration of the fannish pop stuff they spend most of their free time in the fan-space talking about--even when they're not being paid to talk about that popular market-dominating thing.

Because the thing is, no matter how much you love any slice-of-life indie comic: it started, it ran for a few years or months, and then it ended.

Batman, on the other hand, not only has had thousands of stories, not only has been in print since 1939, not only is connected to Wonder Woman, Aquaman and every other character in his publisher's intellectual-property universe, not only has been translated into every medium imaginable where even more stories are being produced, but also: will have a dozen more stories out next month.

If you want to talk about only what is topical and what just happened--your favorite indie comic is over when it's over. Batman is still making moves. Stupid moves, maybe, but who doesn't want to talk about stupidity?

Even if (and perhaps especially if) all you have to say is how bad the new Batman material is compared to the stuff you like, there is always something to talk about. Whereas your favorite indie book is just sitting there, still being done and finished and not breaking news.

--

This isn't just about market share or popularity--it's about the content mill continuously putting the subject in the commentators' head. There's always something new going on with the X-Men, even if it's not new. You can't say that about Maus.

In the world of RPGs the equivalent isn't just a product with a content mill (like D&D or Pathfinder) it's a campaign.

Lots of you have off-label favorite games. Maybe you even get to play them once in a while. But what do you talk about, spread the word about, kibitz about? Your favorite game over and over? No: you talk about the campaign you're in.

You talk about what's going on--even if you like Barbarians of Lemuria better you're still talking about the breaking news: what happened in your D&D campaign.

--

I especially think about this in terms of the games from the indie RPG boom that are mainly good for one-shots: they have limited popularity not just because they're one-shots (there are, for example, indie-crazy groups happy to try a different indie game every month) but because you just don't want to keep talking about a single session that happened 4 months ago.

Despite indie rhetoric that games designed for one-shots and mini-campaigns should be more popular with busy adults than the time-consuming, scheduling-nightmare, lore-heavy, years-before-you-even-get-to-cast-Fireball-gorilla in the game store that is Dungeons & Dragons, the fact is that life-devouring games just make you talk more about them, which means people hear about them more, which means they get popular.

I also wonder this: do one-shot-friendly games have a popularity ceiling? Like: a point of popularity past which they just can't grow?

I don't know. Anyway I guess we'll eventually find out.

--

Collectivity, Cooperation and Challenge

Failures of Collective Spirit

Everyone on the internet, and many people who aren't, have had an experience like this:

-"Hey guys don't we all love this boat we're on!"

-"Yes we do! Or, at least--it is better than having no boat!" all agree

-"Ok, do whatever, have fun doing your thing just please nobody press the red button or the boat will explode!"

-Someone--just for funsies, or for clown clout--presses the red button.

-Boat explodes. Everyone regrets this.

--

This is a failure of collectivity.

That is: a set of behaviors that everyone involved acknowledges benefits everyone, including themselves, and someone just cannot stop themself from putting some other short-term personal goal first.

--

In a role-playing game one of the fun parts is having your PC do weird or funny stuff, things you wouldn't do in a more practical world--the fun of being someone else.

In a role-playing game with a heavy challenge element (one where there's a real threat that you will lose a character and therefore no longer be able to play the game in the specific way you were having fun playing it and have to start over and do it a different way) the usual best strategy to succeed in the challenge is to engage in collective thinking.

This can involve explicit planning--"We all benefit if we kill the monster and get the treasure, so let's pay attention to who we each are as a group and figure out how to use those aptitudes to best do that", but it can also involve just, as a player, being aware of who the other peoples' characters are and what they can do.

Many people experience a mild conflict here in the moment:

• They want to succeed!
• They also wanna do what they wanna do because its playtime, dammit!
• (Also sometimes failing because one PC cannot help but be the squeaky wheel they are is fun, too.)

--

Outside a role-playing game online there are other obvious examples of this in forums online:

For example, there's no piece information that can be passed on via namecalling on a forum that can't be passed on in some other way, but someone will, eventually, always do it even when there's an explicit rule against it. Somebody gets bounced and nobody is hurt but them.

Every time somebody does one of these things they're failing to act in a way that's best for everyone--including them--and they know it, but they just can't stop themself.

--

D&D and Cooperation

D&D is very much a game about cooperation.

It is much more so than most triple-A video games or nearly any other popular entertainment you'll be involved with outside of actual sports.

This is an oddly-smothered point.

The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy about cooperation, as is Star Wars. The ideal that people with diverse skillsets and attitudes need to work together to achieve laudable long-term goals is deep deep in the DNA of the media that inspired most RPGs.

The current post-5e, post-Critical Role, post-D&D The Movie temperature of conversation about D&D broadly online emphasizes many things including:

-Character-creation options (related to conversations about peoples' interest in video game character gen options) and the ability to use them to express yourself

and

-Progressive social principles.

Considering this, its very odd that one of D&D's radiant innate progressive virtues--the emphasis on working together--isn't placed front and center all the time.

--

Here's Why

Despite any open claims of holding to progressive principles, the people most responsible for the current conversation in RPGs absolutely suck at collective thinking. So many pay more attention to what happens to an imaginary orc than to a real human player at the table with them.

I know. I've seen them play games. I was often in games with them.

Right now the conversation is defined by:

-the post-Storygame narrativist scene which largely grew out of people being unable to communicate with their fellow D&D or Vampire or RIFTS groups, especially in challenge-oriented play and so invented games full of rules to police interhuman communication or simply gatekeep any player out unless that player wanted to play the exact narrowly-defined microsubgenre of game they themselves wanted to play instead of just agreeing they all wanted the fucking ring to go in that fucking volcano

and

-2010s OSR veterans who, when given a choice between politely asking one sacred crackpot friend to stop lying on the internet or letting the entire ship sink, absolutely chose letting the ship sink

I reiterate-I have seen these people play games. 

They are absolutely blown away by 101-level collective-success tactics. See you're outnumbered? Back up, close the door, pour flaming oil on the floor, drop marbles in the oil, have a resilient PC hold a torch over the oil (remember which PCs are resilient!), ready to drop it, protect the wizards. Works all the time.

They are filled with shock and awe by even just the most basic gestures in this direction, they will make you leader immediately.

Patrick Stuart once killed one of Zach Marx Weber's PC because he thought throwing green slime on him would help.

If the current version of progressivism in the RPG scene seems oddly fascist, I'd posit this is why--these are the people who have absolutely zero practice self-governing, who made their clout by talking about how they were proudly unable to play with anyone else and needed very new very specific new gates built to keep people out rather than just learning how to throw a party.

-

-

Universal Ultimate Theory of OSR Play

GO! PLAy! GO! NOW! HURRY!

After two decades of RPG theory, I have boiled down the principles of the Old School Renaissance RPG down to a single maxim.

--

(Oh wait before that, important announcement on the legal front:

That's the third case down if anyone's keeping track. Details here, anyway...)

--

This principle explains why we keep playing D&D despite the creator and copyright holders' tremendous flaws.

It explains why we keep playing old versions, with less detail in the characters.

It explains why we tend to disdain too much backstory or involved character creation.

It explains why we so often hack an existing game instead of playing custom-built games from scratch.

It explains why we favor compact, easily-portable and modular blog-sized bits of content that can fit lots of versions of D&D.

It explains why we don't do Session Zeroes much.

It explains why safety tools, while not incompatible with OSR play, aren't really a big thing in OSR.

It explains why "on-boarding" of all kinds--where the DM carefully explains to the players what the premise and expectations of the campaign will be, are--is disdained.

It explains why the GM is given as much power as the group will let them have.

It explains why we the OSR is so improv-friendly and the modules often ask for improv.

It explains why rulings (on the spot) are privileged over rules (new books, to be read).

It explains why 3d6-in-order, character-dies-roll-again is so common.

It explains why dungeons are so common.

It also explains why certain post-80s improvements to games have been picked up by the OSR--including expressing to-hit as a bonus instead of a chart value and improvements in layout and adventure packaging, and various rule-of-cool hacks.

It's this:

I wanna play.

That's it: I wanna play now. I want to play an RPG right away!

I am busy I am an adult. I do not have time for anything!

ROLL ALL THE DICE AT ONCE! HURRY! GO!!!

OSR PRINCIPLE NUMBER ONE

Any innovation to the RPG experience which extends the time between all the players figuring out when they can all meet to play and when they will actually start playing is unlikely to become standard across Old School play, no matter how great the other advantages of said improvement.

OSR is born of desperate, time-poor circumstances. We play 2 hour sessions before everyone goes to work or school, we play in hotel lobbies, drunk, because 3 people were all like....Hey! We should Play!!!, we play in a box, we play with a fox, we play with dice made from our own blood, we play. We need to play asap!!!!!!

----

An example

Several months ago I talked about the possibility of my suicide on this blog. This was occasion for great consternation on the part of the good-hearted people in the RPG-o-sphere.

I had a long zoom conversation with Jeff Gameblog and James Edward Raggi about the various problems in my life created by people who had been inspired to make game stuff by myself, Jeff Gameblog and James Edward Raggi. They had initiated contact because they were concerned, but they had no idea what to do.

Jeff finally said "Well...we should play a game."

I almost said "Go fuck yourself."

Like: given fake felony accusations destroying my life your plan is we play a game? Jeff my dude.

But I decided to play.

What did we play?

We played D&D. Not even LotFP.

What characters did we use? Whichever ones we could dig up fastest from games we already played.

What edition were we using? We still don't know.

What spell list are we using? Couldn't say.

Are we using LotFP or Holmes or AD&D or Moldvay versions of spells? Figure that shit out as we go!!

Why? Why not any of the other games or variants on games we have all had so much fun discussing over the decade-plus? Because we wanted to play NOW. Jeff runs his game in a tight 2-hour slot between waking up and getting his kids to work. There is not time for fripperies like playing a game we don't already know already.

No reading no figuring no planning. Get a character, get a dungeon, get a guy, get a girl, get a they, get a whatever, get in there and playyyy.

As the game expanded, we got new players.Who did out first recruit play? A henchman that was already there. Who did they play when that character died? An ogre that was already in the dungeon. What were their stats? We figured it out as we went.

Does this mean each rule we use is possibly not the most optimal one? Yes!

Does this mean the lore is an utter patched-together trainwreck devoid of subtlety? YES!

Is this reliance on the One Game totally fair to other games--including ones we ourselves wrote? NO!

Does this means over a dozen years of pondering all of us have done about clever hacks of the building blocks of D&D got ignored? Yes!

But we played! And so we had fun, more of it, faster! We logged more fun-hours! We are playyyyying. 

Efficiency is beautiful, efficiency is art.

The Joker, World's Greatest Art Critic

I listen to a lot of comics podcasts--here's a paradox you're always hearing on there, from the savvy comics-reading grown-ups.

Them: "So tired of the same shit on a different day. Why isn't anything new? We want something new! So excited when someone's trying something new!"

Also them: "So I picked up so-and-so's new (Spider-Man/Superman/X-Men/None of those) and, come onnn, who wants to read this? I mean, on page one (something that seems maybe weird but benign to me happens). Lol. They don't have a handle on the character at all!"

Wait.

Do people really want the same thing over and over? Or do they want something different?

Whenever something is popular we always see one of these two completely opposite explanations: people like it because its the same old shit and people are idiots, or people like it because its showing them something they never saw before and they want something new.

--

While the question goes far beyond comics, I found the most cogent answer in an issue of Batman.

Writer James Tynion IV has given The Joker (who is still, 70 years on, fighting Batman) a daringly oblique scheme to fuck with the Caped Crusader's head:

He will make the citizens of Gotham City all watch The Mark of Zorro, the movie the Wayne family was on its way out of when Bruce Wayne's parents were killed.

Afterwards he makes them into nano-zombies or something I can't remember but Jorge Jimenez drew it so it's all lovely and I don't care that I can't remember but at one point halfway through some hapless NPC says something about the movie and the Joker answers:

And that's it right there.

He's totally right--that's what all this is about isn't it?

You read something, see something, play something as a child and it's compelling. And it keeps being compelling, even when you grow older and think you can see right through it and don't want it to be compelling.

And when you go back to it you want to strip back a layer and learn why it was compelling--and you want to be able to experience it all over again without it feeling repetitive because that peeling back and learning makes it new. It ceases to be nostalgic at that point.

This is what all the D&D bloggers and RPG bloggers and alternate-take RPGs were always doing: trying to do it all over again, but this time with a layer peeled back, to keep the grown-ups interested.

Consider each variation on the theme of Gary and Dave's game you see in the indie RPG sphere as that: as trying to do it again with a layer stripped away, with something previously immanent now made explicit, with some part of the subtext made text.

These games are compelling: you shouldn't be playing them, it's hard to get people together to play, every classic game is dripping with countermodern impulses, WOTC has an unbreakable monopoly on the game stores, the game community itself is shit, the games take far too much time and yet and yet...

People are compelled, all in different ways.

Next time you see someone propose yet another hip new spin on the what-RPGs-could-be wheel, ask yourself what part were they trying to pull back and look beneath?

-

-

-

REAL D&D!

Continuing the Disagree-A-Thon, today we have Matthew, who wants to disagree about what D&D even is...

So Matthew said:

"Fans of modern D&D (3e+) don't actually want or even like D&D - they just want a generic fantasy game to play make believe with."

And I said:

So the first question is: how would you define "D&D"?

M:

For me, D&D is a specific game where adventurers go into dangerous places to earn riches and power in a largely indifferent (or perhaps slightly malicious) world.

Z:

And do you think of that as "Matthew's version of D&D" or do you feel that definition has some rational claim to be The D&D?

M:

I don't think of it as Matthew's version of D&D. Matthew's "D&D", or more realistically, Fantasy Roleplaying Game, when I started, quickly developed generous sets of ability scores, multi-classed humans, paladin/ranger/magic-users, shadow flame ninjas, muppets, +8 weapons, chocobos, and narratives. There wasn't a huge chance component in what you would find or encounter unlike D&D by its written rules. Looking back, for me, to say it was D&D was more dishonest than my friend's Rifts game where you can play a Timelord or Amberite in Phase World but at least you're still playing in the greater Rifts setting and not ignoring systems. Meanwhile, D&D itself has a specificity. The world is humancentric. There are limitations to what PCs can do and PCs have to scrape by and weather the storm of fortune to obtain the game's objectives - treasure and power. The worlds D&D emulated in prior editions had this rigid foundation to build upon which more than a handful of people wanted to toss out. I hope this makes sense.

Z:

It all makes sense but it doesn't answer my question:

"do you feel that definition has some rational claim to be The D&D?"

What makes one definition of D&D special, primary, "more real" etc?

M:

Yes. I think the definition (D&D is a specific game where adventurers go into dangerous places to earn riches and power in a largely indifferent (or perhaps slightly malicious) world) I originally proffered has a rational claim more than just my preference. The rules laid in the earlier books support this. Throughout the '80s and '90s, I would always run into people either amending the rules OR adhering to the rules but no one questioned that level limits, class restrictions, random encounter tables, and level draining undead were D&D, they just claimed it was unfair or at best arbitrary. Now, experience rewards in 2E muddies this by making treasure experience optional and replacing it with story awards but that just undermined how the game was meant to be played and also highlights how the game was being shifted to suit people who wanted something else.

Z:

So, just to clarify and not argue (yet) your position is:

This is a "realer" definition of D&D because it is the definition the game had in its earliest incarnations.

Correct?

M:

Yes. I cannot argue against that.

Z:

Ok, so, I'd say two things:

1. D&D as originally conceived seemed to me already two things, on day one. One was Gary and Dave saying "This is rules for making fantasy campaigns, I'm pretty open to you all adding things, I myself have taken a melting-pot approach to what's in the game, it's got some Tolkien, some Vance, other stuff,  whatever, do what you want" the other one was Gary and Dave running their own games with their friends and producing material that, consciously and unconsciously, had a narrower focus on a specific kind of desperate-adventurer play like what you decide, at least in the beginning. Early materials all show this dichotomy (like almost all RPGs) between "What this game is meant to enable" (a large canvas) and "What I think to do with it at home" (a smaller one).
2. I don't see any linguistic advantage in using the phrase "D&D" or "real D&D" when you mean, more precisely "D&D as originally conceived". It takes longer to say, maybe, but it is more precise. For example: it condenses what took us 4 email exchanges to establish down into one phrase. Saying "Y'all aren't playing D&D as originally conceived" may not be as FUN as saying "Yall aren't playing D&D" but it explains to everyone listening what you're saying and that's kind of the point of language, right?

M:

Fair points all around. I should have been more specific. Are we still in disagreement about something?

Z:

I guess not.

Thanks for writing in!

M:

No problem. It was a pleasure!

A Fistful of D6s

Today on the Disagree-A-Thon we tackle a central issue in gaming: using big pools of dice instead of just like a d20 like Gary and Dave intended.

Here to represent this heresy is David.

David says:

Rolling multiple dice (e.g. Shadowrun, WoD, FATE) is intrinsically fairer and *more fun* than rolling a single die (e.g. D&D)

Zak:

My big issue with rolling lots of dice is it takes a second to know what happened. When it's just that d20 or d100 it's like BAM! Instantaneous, it's exciting. 

You roll lots of dice it might be fun to roll them but then you gotta pick through trying to figure out what happened. It's not the lost time it's more just the momentum.

D:

Firstly, there is a visceral thrill in holding lots of dice in your hand. You know by weight if you stand a good chance of succeeding. And if you’re only holding one dice (when you could be holding many), your chance of success feels more tenuous. And then comes the sound, the holy clatter of many dice bouncing against table and each other.

But I disagree that with a single dice, d20 or d100 (which I count as a single dice), that you know the result instantly. I don’t think you always do. All systems have modifiers that need to be applied, or advantage/disadvantage systems where you pick the best/worst. Sure, if you see a high number, you know you’ve probably succeeded. But in the case of rolling many dice, if you see many sixes or tens (depending on d6 or d10 system), and few ones, you also have a good ‘gut reaction’ for success or failure before you need to do the maths.

To summarise I have loss of momentum (good term) with single dice rolling, because of the “having to do maths” step, in the same way as with ‘picking through’ multiple dice. 

Z:

I haven't seen that. I see a 17 or 20 pop up and it's like YEAH!!! at least half the time. With dice pools, all you can say to balance that is you know you have a good chance if you're rolling lots of dice--but if the system works like that then all you've done is kill the tension before the roll.

D:

So killing the tension before a roll, because you’re holding multiple die, is a good criticism. Although I have seen someone roll six 1s on 6d6 (a chance of 1 in 7776), in general more dice tends to peak the distribution of outcomes to mediocrity, with most rules being not great, but not terrible either. This is alleviated a bit with exploding dice (where the maximum result on dice can lead to more dice being rolled), similar to a critical on a d20. 

But, I don’t think that having a more peaked distribution of outcomes (as opposed to the flat distribution of a d20 or d100) is a bad thing. Player characters are normally exceptional individuals, capable of doing things *under stress* (which is normally when a dice roll is required) that most ordinary people would stand little or no chance to achieve even in the best of days. So I’m arguing that even a mediocre outcome for a PC is still some near-world class result. And a critical should feel superhuman, and happen much less often than a 1 in 20 chance.

I think it also enhances the story if you know the players are more likely to get through the challenges they’re facing, albeit by the skins of their teeth. In D&D a PC can roll a couple of ones in succession, and massively derail the story.

Z:

I have no strong opinion on the probability curves—different games probably require different ones.

It’s all just about that one second of “holy fuck!” i won! i lost! 

That’s why in Demon City i like using the normal Rider-Waite tarot deck, soon as you see those cards flip up you know what they are.

D:

I am appreciative of other randomisation systems. Castle Falkenstein was a favourite of mine, though it’s definitely not the same.

In terms of that one second of “holy fuck”, I agree it’s satisfying to see a gamble pay off with a high-roll. It’s why Vegas exists, after all! But, in D&D we try to weight the outcome in our favour using stat and proficiency bonuses, magic items, buffs and advantage. So even if we roll a 9 or 10, we are still likely to succeed. I like games with multiple dice because this weighting is building your dice pool to guarantee an outcome with a large margin for success, and it means holding more dice in your hand. And an amazing roll (six 10s on 6d10 for example) is less likely than a natural 20, and so feels more special.

Z:

I guess it boils down to:

I can say, to my players, taking their bonuses into account "you need a 14 or better" and then...14!" yay!!!

On handfuls of dice, we all sit counting. Or waiting while the player counts.

D:

One of things I really like with a system is margin. It’s not just whether you succeeded or failed, but how much by, or how close you got. This allows for ’succeed at cost’  and ’succeed with additional bonus’. D&D is very binary, and this allows for quick “yay” or “nay”, and carry on with the next problem. But if margin is something you care about, and it feeds into the story, then doing the math becomes important. Yes, this may slow things down slightly, but if that’s part of the game, then it’s not such a big issue.

Z:

Two things:

D&D combat is a partial-success system. You hit or don't but THEN you do a certain amount of damage (you don't just win/lose, kill or don't kill). You often expend x number of resources in either case.

This does not technically have anything to do with how many dice you roll. You can roll on or two dice and have a degrees of success system (obvious example: FASERIP) and you can roll a handfull and have a pass/fail (like in Threshold Numberof Successes systems).

D:

These are both valid points.

1. D&D combat is the only time it’s a partial success system. I would argue this is a hold-over from it’s war-gaming roots, where you would roll to see how many units died in an engagement. And I feel that rolling to hit, and then rolling for damage, can create a slowing down of momentum in the same way you described, because it’s two sets of maths that you need to do, rather than one.

2. I agree that you can have a one or two dice system with margin. Modern Call of Cthulhu (5th edition) does that, I believe. And yes, multiple dice systems can be pass/fail, though to be honest I dislike it when they do that. I feel that there are opportunities for something truly spectacular to happen with multiple dice all coming up max, or with exploding dice, that just aren’t there with a D20 roll of 20.

Z:

1. Whether or not this argument has merit, it has nothing to do with rolling handfuls of dice or not.

2. Ok, so multiple dice all coming up max and exploding dice are also exciting. I would say about as equally exciting as a crucial natural 20 or a crucial natural 1 if the math of the game is done right. How often this happens is up to the game design and outside the remit of this conversation. BUT I would say a 1 or 2 die system has the advantage of instant legibility in most of those in-between results. "You need a 16 or better, it's a crucial roll, if not, your friend dies...16!" That's harder with multiple dice.

2a. While exploding dice then add a new exciting possibility, our conversation is just about handfuls of dice period and technically any kind of die mechanic can have exploding dice. So the cool things about exploding dice are outside the remit of the conversation.

D:

"Whether or not this argument has merit, it has nothing to do with rolling handfuls of dice or not."

I’m not sure that’s true. You were suggesting that the advantage of rolling a single dice is that it does not slow down the action, but rather maintains the momentum, and I was presenting a counter argument whereby rolling to hit and *then* rolling for damage can be equally disruptive. 

"BUT I would say a 1 or 2 die system has the advantage of instant legibility in most of those in-between results. "You need a 16 or better, it's a crucial roll, if not, your friend dies...16!" That's harder with multiple dice."

I still disagree, to some extent. I feel that you can achieve instant legibility with multiple dice-rolling systems, if you know the system well.

We might be reaching the limit of what we can get out of reasoned debate here. I would be willing to concede the point for novices, people new to gaming, who just know that they need to roll high on the d20 to do well. In that case, a single roll can maintain the momentum as you put it. But I’m not sure that argument holds for experienced players.

Z:

But you still have a high chance to get an immediately transparent, legible, result in several vital situations, including to-hit in those situations where to-hit will definitely matter and saving throws.

"I would be willing to concede the point for novices, people new to gaming, who just know that they need to roll high on the d20 to do well. In that case, a single roll can maintain the momentum as you put it. But I’m not sure that argument holds for experienced players."

Fair enough.

Anything else to say?

D:

No, think it’s all good. 

Thanks for this. Was fun!

Z: 

Any time!

---

If you have something worth disagreeing about and want to be in the Disagree-a-thon, put it in the comments.

New toy! The Evil City-State Generator
is now available in The Store