Rolling To Decide The Fiction

4 min read

The fiction should decide what happens in the game, not being overly constrained by the rules on the page.

Ian O’Rourke, www.fandonlife.net

The intent of this series was to describe tools, techniques and approaches that shift how you approach your game at the table from one of being actor-focused, to being author-focused. The reason being you’re likely to be a better author than you are an actor. As we’ve discussed the topics so far, the aim is for your game is to be more intentional around a dramatic story being the outcome.

It’s probably best we now discuss the issue of rolling to decide the fiction.

Rolling Less Dice

Dice are fun, right? These days you can have cases for them. Dice towers to roll them down. You can even get dice made of all sorts of rare and expensive materials that are so dense they leave dents in your gaming table. What’s not to like?

It’s not an explicit goal of a more author-focused approach to roll less dice but it can be one of the outcomes. There are two reasons for this.

The first one is an outcome of setting stakes. If you’re setting stakes and being conscious and mindful of why a roll is being made you increase the chance you’re not just rolling to resolve simple things like picking a lock but instead resolving something larger. Once you start doing this you roll less because sometimes there is nothing at stake, the door is nothing special, the character isn’t under any sort of stress so they just pick the lock.

The other reason is, by making the stakes not about picking the lock, you potentially resolve more with a single roll. The natural trajectory will be to resolve more with fewer rolls and this is a good thing.

The Scope of Rolls Increases

Let’s start with an example. The heroic swashbuckling rogue in your Dungeons and Dragons game needs to infiltrate a fortified homestead so they can steal a book from its library. What rolls does this involve? Stealth rolls to do the following unnoticed: get to the wall, over the wall, across the courtyard and through the complex to the library. Right?

Well, that’s one way, but unless you construct those rolls as some sort of ‘best out of challenge’ you’ve just radically increased the chance of failure. The D20 is brutal and the player has no way to moderate the outcome. 

If the stakes were set as ‘infiltrating the castle to get to the library’ and the outcome, if the player fails, is ‘noticed by the guards’ a number of things happen all at once: –

  1. You are rolling less dice as you’re rolling once
  2. You’re removing the double or quadruple jeopardy until failure issue
  3. You reduce the need of the players to keep rolling until they succeed
  4. You’re shifting to resolving the fiction not mechanical tasks
  5. Something interesting happens on failure or success

So, while you’re rolling less dice, which might seem like an unfortunate outcome, depending on how many times you want to roll your dice made from extrasolar materials, the outcomes inherent in 3-5 are very powerful in making your experience at the table a more intentional, dramatic story in which the dice provide that unknown element during conflicting situations and outcomes.

Fiction First As A Concept

Since we’re discussing ideas that are moving things at the table to consciously resolving the fiction, it’s useful to bring up the concept of fiction first. I’m not suggesting all games should run like this, but some do, so it’s more something to acknowledge, process and fold into your decisions as it’s useful.

Fiction first means you should always start with the fiction, then you should interpret and apply the right tools in the rules to decide the outcome of the fiction. You’re probably doing bits of this already or a lot of it. What you should certainly avoid is letting activities in the game being scoped, decided and framed through the lens of what’s possible in the rules. 

The fiction should decide what happens in the game, not being overly constrained by the rules on the page.

Like most things, it’s a spectrum. If you’re too far one way you might as well be in an improv with little rules, if you are too far the other way you might as well be playing a board game which has no fiction, or if it does it’s sort of overlayed over the top as a separate entity rather than being part of the game at all.

Different games sit at different points on this spectrum. A few examples of fiction first games would be Dungeon World, Fate Core and Scum and Villainy.  If I was to generalise what a fiction first game looked like, without boring you with specific rules, they tend to NOT tell you what exactly happens in the fiction through the rules, they leave that to those at the table. A game that is less fiction first is more prescriptive in the rules around what and how things happen as the rules tell you explicitly.

Since we started this series on the premise that trying to duplicate the actor-focused skills of Critical Role will only disappoint and an author focus could well be the answer it has to be asked where Dungeons and Dragons sits on this spectrum? Well, the answer is it jumps around a bit on it, but the game isn’t overly prescriptive and, when it is, it’s often possible to re-colour things in the fiction while leaving the rules intact.

A Summary So Far..

So far we’ve discussed how Critical Role can set expectations too high if you try and compete as an improv actor. We know this to be true as people talk about being intimidated by it on social media. In order to resolve this, it’s suggested you approach your game as an author instead, writing in the moment but still playing out the scene you’re just less reliant on the acting of it.

To support this we’ve discussed how you’re gaming needs to accept meta-gaming as not always bad, how setting stakes is key and how that is likely to result in you rolling less, scoping rolls differently and deciding the fiction rather than the outcome of simple, mechanical actions.

The next question you may be asking is how does author focused play impact the player characters? I believe it does as your character is far from a normal person, but a fundamentally different species. We’ll discuss that next.

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