The Purpose of a Die Roll

What is the purpose of the roll of a die in a tabletop RPG? Or, in other words, when and why are you rolling?

It’s a weird question, I know. So weird in fact, that it may sound like a stupid question. But I think it’s something we should consider as game masters while running RPGs, rather than reflexively falling back on them when a situation might seem uncertain.

That’s the purpose of them, right? To figure out what might happen when there’s some uncertainty. Sure, I generally agree with that sentiment, but I would pose a slightly differently worded answer: 

The die roll should be employed when the consequences are mechanically impactful and narratively interesting.

As someone coming from 5th edition D&D as my primary game for years and is attempting to break into other RPGs, I have been fascinated and sometimes very confused as to why and how die rolls are employed elsewhere.

Like many people, I did not learn how to run Dungeons and Dragons by reading the rules. I learned them by watching, primarily, Critical Role and other actual play campaigns. After seeing when the GMs ask for rolls, I surmised that if anything comes up in the narrative where there are chances of failure, we roll dice to determine the outcome. For context, almost all my experience has been with 5e using the 2014 rules. Here’s what it says about how to employ ability checks in the game:

“The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.” PHB, pg. 174.

Okay, fair enough, plain and simple. But if there is failure, what happens now? That is something that I have been grinding against for years and only now had the language for it: THE NULL RESULT. The failure of a die roll meaning that NOTHING HAPPENS. However, I really never knew that I was having a problem with it. Other games I have read since then give you some advice on when there is a failure on a roll, but 5th Edition has none of it.

Enter TALES FROM THE LOOP, the first RPG I really got into outside of D&D. Published by Free League, it is a sort of retro sci-fi kids-on-bikes-solving-mysteries sort of game. In that game, any obstacle is called Trouble, and the Kids might overcome Trouble with some dice rolls. In their modified Year Zero engine, you roll a pool of D6’s equal to an Attribute and Skill. Any 6 that comes up on a die means that roll was a success. I only ran this for a few sessions, but at my table, there was a high chance of failure with those rolls. This is a mystery game! So what do I do when the Kids are searching an abandoned house for clues and the dice say they failed to progress to the next step of the mystery, what then?!

Well, there is a bit of text I overlooked when they talk about trouble that amounted to: A failed die roll should never mean a stop in the action. Okay, but how does that WORK? This was a much lighter, more narrative focused game than I was used to with D&D, and I had trouble wrapping my brain around this concept. There was very little assistance I found in the rules or in the Mysteries to support this guideline.

Fast forward a few years and now I’ve looked at lots of games, and learned how they employ die rolls. Blades in the Dark and the many games that are Forged in the Dark have a fantastic die roll system with Position, Effect, etc. It’s great game design, and so many games have stolen from it. I have not run or played BitD yet but I did run a session of Candela Obscura by Darrington Press which employed the same core dice mechanic, where the concept of a Mixed Success was introduced to me for the first time. A partial success; a way of getting what you want but maybe just the bare minimum OR there’s a cost or consequence to the action. Yeah, drama!

Prior to that I played a game of Monster of the Week and that system was way more narratively minded than I think any of us at the table were ready for, but that also had the concept of a mixed success. But because the game did not provide the framework for play and mechanics that the players were used to, we all sort of bounced off of it.

Enter DAGGERHEART. That game does not have three axes of a roll (Fail, Mixed Success, Success) but FOUR! It has Success with Hope, Success with Fear, Fail with Fear, and Fail with Hope! THIS is what I was looking for. In a lot of ways, I think Daggerheart is one of the best games out there to transition people that have been grinding up against the rules of D&D and wanted something more focused on the story than crunchy rules and numbers, but didn’t have the language for what they wanted. It’s a gateway to the games that put more of an emphasis on narrative than mechanics.

But how does it do this? And why did it change my thinking about die rolls? Through their use of metacurrencies. A roll with Hope generates a metacurrency for the character that rolled that can fuel their special abilities called Hope. A roll with Fear, on the other hand, generates a resource that the GM can spend to complicate scenes, power their monsters’ special abilities, and more. I realized early on that asking for too many rolls in a game like this would bloat the economy of Hope and Fear generation, because every roll swings the pendulum in favor of the heroes or the GM. On top of that, there is a big emphasis in Daggerheart on collaborative worldbuilding and storytelling. In other words, in a game like D&D where the DM might have an answer the player must roll to get, in Daggerheart you as the GM may not have the answer. That’s a good thing, to leave unanswered questions in this game! Rather than rolling to see what might happen, ask the player what the answer to the question of “what happens next?” Rather than the style of the GM, the game’s rules and style encourages collaborative worldbuilding and storytelling more than any mainstream fantasy TTRPG does in my experience. That question of “what happens next?” can be anything! The players can make up a piece of deep lore that is now canon, can create an NPC on the spot, and narrate what items they find in a secret treasure room!

This is what Daggerheart has to say about when to roll:

“Any move where success would be trivial or failure would be boring automatically succeeds, but any move that’s difficult to accomplish or risky to attempt triggers an action roll.” pg. 36 of Daggerheart’s SRD.

It also has this addendum later:

“In Daggerheart, every time you roll the dice, the scene changes in some way. There is no such thing as a roll where “nothing happens,” because the fiction constantly evolves based on the successes and failures of the characters.” pg. 36 of Daggerheart’s SRD.

This was a concept I understood but wasn’t able to apply really until I saw how Hope and Fear generation worked. Success with Fear means that you get what you want, but there is a cost or consequence. Failure with Hope means that you aren’t able to set out what you accomplish, but things don’t go quite as bad as they could have. In many other games, a “mixed success” would include results that could read as Success with Fear or Failure with Hope, but Daggerheart puts more clarity on the specifics of how the narrative resolves. It gives the consequences of the Action Roll much more texture and nuance.

This specificity of an outcome of a roll that lies outside of a binary pass/fail AND Daggerheart’s emphasis that anything trivial, impossible, or boring needs no roll drastically changed my approach to when to ask for a roll.

So that’s the end, right? WRONG. I worded my idea for when to ask for a roll very specifically, because I did not mention failure in my idea for when to ask for a die roll. Only consequences. Enter DRAW STEEL, MCDM’s Heroic Tactical Cinematic Fantasy RPG. Their core die mechanic is the Power Roll, which is 2d10 + a characteristic, with three tiers of outcome, much like Powered by the Apocalypse Games: Tier 1 (11 or less) is the least impactful result, Tier 2 (12-16) is middling, and Tier 3 (17 and higher) is the most impactful result. Their system for Tests in Draw Steel (analogous to D20 Fantasy RPG’s Ability Checks) requires the Director to set a difficulty for the test: Easy, Medium, Hard. Here are the results for the difficulty of tests:

Easy Test:
<11: You succeed with a consequence.
12-16: You succeed.
17+: You succeed with a reward.

Medium Test:
<11: You fail.
12-16: You succeed with a consequence.
17+: You succeed.

Hard Test:
<11: You fail with a consequence.
12-16: You fail.
17+: You succeed.

Draw Steel sort of uses a Success/Failure Hope/Fear matrix with different language. They say in the section on tests that any task that might be trivial, no roll is required. They also say that a failure never means a roadblock in the adventure. If a hero fails a test, there should always be another way to accomplish that task. They may have forgotten the piece of lore they need to progress, but some NPC or a library around here sure has the answer! They didn’t detect the secret door in this room, but maybe a puzzle they can access later will lead to the same secret room!

The idea that stuck with me the most are the results for an easy test. Those outcomes made me realize you can have the PCs roll for some task even when failure is not on the line. But there SHOULD be some kind of consequences for a low roll. Here’s an example if a hero is attempting to make it to the other end of a trapped hallway: 

Evade the Traps: Agility Test
<11: The hero makes it to the end of the hallway, but they set off several traps in the process. They take 1d6 damage.
12-16: The hero makes it to the end of the trapped hallway without triggering any traps.
17: The hero makes it to the end of the trapped hallway adroitly and can disable the trap mechanism. No other hero needs to make tests to cross the hallway.

No matter what, the hero makes it to the other side. That’s not what the die roll is trying to figure out, it’s what state the hero is in when they make it to the end.

Odds are, by sheer statistics, that you are playing or running D20 fantasy games, probably D&D. So how do we apply this mechanic over there? I think you just need to change the numbers and language. We use the same example, but now, rather than there simply being a pass/fail state, we check and see how high the roll is when they roll. In the Draw Steel example, this was an Agility test, but let’s say this is a Dexterity (Acrobatics) Ability Check. Here’s what it might look like:

DC 10: The hero makes it to the end of the hallway, but they set off several traps in the process. They take 1d6 damage.
DC 15: The hero makes it to the end of the trapped hallway without triggering any traps.
DC 20: The hero makes it to the end of the trapped hallway adroitly and can disable the trap mechanism.

So now, rather than a binary pass/fail, the state of the hero when crossing the hallway depends on how high they roll, just like in DS. You can expand this matrix of results further by having 4 outcomes instead of three, and base those results on the four outcomes of Daggerheart.

Delta Green has some mechanics I really like where an agent can automatically succeed if their skill is of a certain rating or higher (a D100 system). You can apply this to D&D or Draw Steel by requiring a hero to have a certain skill, and if they do, only that hero can roll. Or simply having the skill lets them automatically succeed, and anyone that doesn’t have the skill needs to roll.

In my last D&D campaign, I realized I had gotten into a bad habit of asking for a roll that I hoped or thought the heroes would succeed on, just because it was fun to roll and that’s what you do in an RPG! But sometimes, they would roll horribly low and I would be sitting there thinking of some way to spin that failure into the adventure continuing, because I still did not internalize this lesson: Let there always be another path forward if a roll is a failure. It never means nothing happens. In my head, that roll was the path to the adventure continuing, so what did that natural one mean?

Don’t quote me on this because I can’t remember where or when, but I believe it was James Introcaso who responded to a question on a livestream once about a GM asking for a roll, and then deciding after the result was given that it was “good enough” and succeeded. He seemed to be baffled by that, and said he always thought of a DC before the roll. I was not the chatter who posed the question, but I was also that GM. I fell into that bad habit of thinking whatever result a player gave me was “good enough” and succeeded, even when it was under 10. Nowadays, I try to think about the situation way more before asking for a die roll: Who is making it? What skills do they have? And most importantly, What are the consequences of this roll? Are they narrative or mechanical consequences, or both? How does this roll up the stakes, increase the drama? I decide what the difficulty is, what could happen if they don’t succeed, if there are consequences or rewards, then ask for a roll. If there is no drama there, no roll necessary!

In a recent session I ran of Draw Steel, a player asked to check for traps. I narrated how they scanned a staircase and felt pretty confident that nothing lay in waiting for them. The staircase was not trapped, so a roll would have changed nothing. In this case, I believe the adventure is the adventure. There are other GMs out there that might change the circumstances of the situation because the players asked something, and I do that sometimes, but if there is no threat in a location and the players are looking for a threat, no roll necessary.

In another session, a player asked to see if they thought a character was lying. I asked for a roll, and then realized after the roll (I can’t remember what the result was) that there was no meaningful impact based on a success or a failure, so I simply told them what they thought was the case because they had the Read Person skill: The character was indeed lying.

A while back I ran a session of MORK BORG and played through Rotblack Sludge. It was great fun, but I began to notice my issue of asking for too many rolls in a pitch black dungeon crawler like MORK BORG. My players came up with some really, really clever ideas, but I was too used to reflexively asking for rolls to determine success or failure. Since then, especially in games like dungeon crawlers, if an idea is sound enough logically, without any interference from the rules, then no roll is required: it just works. This is some advice also in the Draw Steel rules under tests. Since Then, I have put this into practice, and here’s an example that happened most recently in another Draw Steel session.

A hero triggered a fire spewing trap. They rolled poorly to avoid it, and it dealt 7 fire damage. Another hero, a fire elementalist, just leveled up and gained some fire immunity. The worst damage the trap could do was 7, and the hero had 7 fire immunity, and asked if they could just brute force through the damage and pull the lever inside of a trapped sarcophagus. I thought it was a great idea, using a hero’s ability to push past the heat that any other hero would have flinched at to solve the puzzle, and thus, no damage dealt, no roll required.

Looking back at Tales from the Loop, I think I’m way more prepared to run it now that I’m a more experienced game master with more systems under my belt, and have internalized these lessons that a failed roll means the story doesn’t stop moving. I actually think that in some cases, maybe a lot of cases in Tales from the Loop, a “failed roll” actually would read closer to a mixed success in other games: the Kids get what they want, but it’s the bare minimum, or there are consequences and costs! And if there are no chances of any of that, who needs a roll anyways?

I wanted to write this to mostly put my own thoughts in order about how I have been employing dice rolls, and how that practice of mine has evolved and matured over time as I have understood more RPGs and the purpose of uncertainty in a narrative. You may be reading this and already understand all of these things and put them into practice. However, if you are like me, who has been game mastering for over 10 years now but never challenged my assumptions on why we were rolling dice, I hope this may inform the way you run games.

Thanks for reading, I hope this was enlightening in some way.

Until next time!