Roll Less, Do More
Iāve been playing in a couple of 5e games lately, both fun games with great GMs, but they made me realize something: I donāt like rolling for so many things!
On some level, I knew this. Revolver eschews a lot of rolls, as do some of my favorite games like Into the Odd, but recent games have reminded me why I feel this way. Iāll be referencing 5e a lot since it's top of mind, but this applies to every d20 game I've played where rolls are called for a lot.
Rolling a lot Makes Characters Bad at Stuff Too Often
In one of the campaigns, I played a monk. Not my favorite class, but as I work on my own martial artist class, I wanted to try another gameās take on it. At level 1, Monk is pretty simple. you can punch things, you can hit things with a monk weapon and then punch things, thatās pretty much it. Importantly, the class is somewhat multi-stat dependent. It relies on being decent to good at all 3 of dexterity, constitution, and wisdom. No big deal, but it doesnāt leave you a lot of space to invest in intelligence and charisma. We sacrifice those stats to be real good at punching.
But hereās the thing. Investing as much as I can into punching on my half-elf monk leaves me with a + 5 to hit (17 dex + 2 proficiency). Against an enemy with 12 AC (The AC of thugs), which isnāt very good, I miss 30% of the time. Against an enemy with 15 AC, I miss 45% of the time. So Iām actually not that good at punching, there will be occasional fights where I miss most, or every attack and it's the only thing I do.
In the last session, I had unusually bad luck. I rolled a crit on my first attack and then proceeded to channel my inner storm trooper and have one attack roll above a 10 for the rest of the night, and when you roll like that on a level 1 monk (or any other martial) your turn is essentially nothing. D&D in general has a huge amount of turns that go as follows: āattack, oh I rolled low, guess thatās my turnā.
Of course, you can do things other than attack. You can try to shove an enemy, or grapple them, or knock a chandelier on them, or taunt them. But all of that also requires a roll. Partially due to my monk missing every attack, my party ended up in a pretty dire situation, with two of us down and the monster being between the healer and the downed party members.
I wasnāt going to kill the monster in one hit, so instead, I taunted the monster to come hit me. However, since I had to invest in a bunch of stats that werenāt charisma, my odds werenāt good here either. I initially failed the roll before my DM gave me advantage because she thought it was good roleplay. I succeeded with advantage, the monster smacked me into unconsciousness, and the healer saved the downed party members. After that, we managed to defeat the monster and finish the dungeon, job well done.
But hereās the problem: An accurate summary of my characterās contributions to the session would be that she bumbled around missing all of her attacks and then made a dramatic decision to taunt the monster that only worked because the DM decided to give me a break on the charisma roll. Kind of a disappointing first outing for a character, but if youāve played a lot of D&D you know this sort of thing happens all the time. Someone has a bad rolling day and their character is near useless for an entire session, to the point where they donāt want to take any more actions that require a roll. Very little the DM can do about it beyond just taking pity on the player, but that doesnāt feel great. Itās like playing basketball, and someone on the other teamās mom tells them to let you score.
Additionally, modified rolls like 5e has can push players towards an optimal action. I decided to taunt the monster in my last session because I thought it would be narratively cool, and if I ignore my charisma score, it would be tactically interesting. However, given my limited charisma, this method was unlikely to work, even if it was action that made sense. No matter what, punching is my characterās best solution to any problem, and this will only become more true as the game progresses. The fiction can present many interesting tactical options, but the mechanics push me towards making my two attacks and passing the turn.
You can see this really clearly with barbarians. Most barbarian characters feel like they should be intimidating enemies all the time. But they often donāt, because having to make a charisma roll means theyāll often fail. New players at my tables are often disappointed by this.
Lots of DMs try to fix this with homebrew, letting barbarians use strength instead of charisma to see if their intimidation works, but I have an alternative solution. What if you just donāt roll for it?
Things can Just Happen
When the barbarian brutally kills a bandit captain and shouts at the lone remaining bandit, a puny man who is ill-trained and just watched his much tougher employer get destroyed, I posit that the bandit should just be scared. We should roll only when there isnāt an obvious outcome. If thereās a group of bandits, I might have them each make a Mind check or a morale roll to avoid breaking rank, but even in that situation I would be rolling to determine the severity of the outcome, the bandits would be intimidated.
This applies to a lot of situations. If the fighter wants to kick down a normal door. They can just do it. They might have to deal with the consequences, such as the loud noise alerting critters in the dungeon to their presence, or a returning resident knowing someone has broken into their home.
If someone wants to pick a mundane lock, it might take them a while, but they can just do it.
I even apply this to attack rolls. I have characters roll for damage, but they donāt roll to hit.
I run my games this way for two reasons.
First, characters are supposed to be good at what they do. By rolling less you can avoid sessions where the expert at punching canāt punch anything, or where the fighter is stymied by a wooden door.
Second, a lot of rolls have one outcome that is way more interesting than the other. The two biggest culprits of this are perception and open lock checks.
How often is it actually interesting for someone to fail a lock-picking check? In my experience, depending on the DM, one of two things happens. Either the rogue just tries again, in which case the roll was a waste of our time, or we kick down the door/smash the chest, or we just leave the chest behind. In all these variations, it's more interesting if we just open the lock, and it doesnāt make the thief look like a chump when they canāt get through a mundane lock.
Perception checks are the same way, and I think this is the reason traps have a bad reputation in versions of D&D that lean heavily on perception rolls. If you fail your perception check, you walk right into the trap and take damage. Thereās no interaction or interesting player choice here. Lame, boring even!
Succeeding on the perception check is more interesting, because when you notice the trap, thereās interaction to be had. You can try to disarm the trap, or look for a way around it, or find a way to activate the trap without harming yourself. I would rather that be the gameplay of every trap in my game, instead of hiding the interaction with the trap behind a perception check. Characters should mostly just see the things that you want them to interact with.
High roll frequency is actually the reason why I usually play casters in D&D 5e and not martials. Casters have a much wider variety of options that just do the thing they are supposed to. When you cast knock, the door opens; when you cast invisibility, you turn invisible. Even a lot of the damaging spells only allow targets to make a save for half damage. Casters surrender much less agency to the whims of the dice, which is why they have fewer sessions where they donāt do anything or where their character looks incompetent, and having fewer rolls doesnāt make them feel boring.
When Do I Roll?
So if I have such an axe to grind against rolling, why do I keep it at all? Itās again for two main reasons.
One is that sometimes an outcome isnāt obvious. While I might let the fighter automatically kick down the door in most situations, sometimes, there are extenuating circumstances. Trying to kick down a door while the chamber you are in fills with water, for example. In this case, the question isnāt ācan the fighter kick the door down?ā itās ācan they do it before they drown?ā. My answer to the first question is an unequivocal yes, but I donāt know the answer to the second one, and both possible outcomes are dramatic and interesting. I want players to feel confident that if they come up with a brilliant plan that should obviously work, the dice arenāt going to decide the plan fails because their characters canāt consistently perform mildly challenging tasks at skills they are good at. Variance and opportunity for failure should instead come from imperfect plans, risky plans, poor conditions, or imperfect information.
The second reason I still have plenty of rolls in my system is that I do want some variance in my game. Both because variance adds drama, and also because variance is very human. If you had two people fight 50 times, even if one was a slightly better fighter than the other you wouldnāt expect the slightly better fighter to win all 50 times. Thatās why I roll for damage but not attacks, I never want turns where characters do absolutely nothing, but not every turn has to be equally good.
As a bonus, doing fewer rolls, and only interesting ones results in every roll being more exciting!
I also use a lot of rolls to determine what is happening in the game world. Most of my hexes have a table I roll on to determine whatās going on there when the players arrive. I determine whether an encounter occurs while traveling and what that encounter is via a random table. I don't think this causes any of the same issues frequent player rolling can, and it also adds surprising elements that keep the game fun for me as GM. I recently rolled a mothman encounter for my party just as they left an illicit moonshine lab, and it made me so excited!
Randomness is not bad, itās often very good, but when designing a system or considering calling for a roll it's useful to think about whether adding randomness to an interaction makes the game more fun. āRoll to hit, oh I got a 2, I guess Iām doneā is the worst turn in D&D and I want it to happen as little as possible.