“Only make the players roll when the results are interesting.”
I try to take that advice to heart, but I also take it one step further – I figure my players should only roll when failure would be interesting.
And while, on the surface, that sounds like perfectly reasonable advice to me, when I stop and think about it there is one big problem that always trips me up in the heat of a good session – how do I know when the roll will be interesting?
Well, a couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of recording a podcast with Ang and Carl about stakes – GnomeCast Episode 198: How Do You Like Your Stakes? – and while we were talking about things like player agency, respecting the power of backstories, and how to offer meaningful choices, it all clicked for me.
Interesting rolls are rolls that – if failed – raise the stakes!
Worry About Failures, Not Successes
Consider this scenario: your court wizard is trying to figure out how an elusive phantom thief has stolen the queen’s diamond from a locked vault, seemingly without a trace. You ask them to make a knowledge check. You’ve planned for what happens if they succeed – you’ve figured out the clues that will put them on the trail and allow them to capture the culprit.
But, really, in the moment of that roll, you shouldn’t worry about what happens if they succeed. After all, you already know what’s going on with the thief. Why they’re stealing royal gems. How they’re pulling off their heists. Presumably, you figured all that out during your session prep.
What you should worry about is what happens if they fail, because if the answer to that question is “nothing,” well then the stakes of the scenario are gonna die right then and there and start stinking up the session like microwaved fish.
Every chance you give the players to fail – in other words, every time you ask them to roll the dice – should be a chance to make the story more interesting by way of the consequences of their failures.
It’s consequences, after all, that propels most stories in new and interesting directions. It’s what the game books mean when they say “fail forward.”
If a failed roll results in nothing happening, then we’ve halted all forward momentum and entered a kind of stasis (and as any Mage: The Ascension player out there knows, stasis = badness).
Failing forward, though, keeps us tumbling down the hill to our inevitable conclusion and (hopefully) a big finish.
Easy concept to grasp.
Difficult concept to pull off.
The trick, though, lies in knowing your stakes.
Medium Rare
There are two kinds of (sometimes overlapping) stakes I try to focus on in the moment when I’m running a game: situational stakes and personal stakes.
SITUATIONAL STAKES are the ticking clocks counting down during the course of your encounter, session, or campaign. The bombs are about to go off. The villagers are about to be sacrificed. The jewels are about to be stolen by that phantom thief. Situational stakes typically apply to the entire party of adventurers and are closely tied to the main plot of the story. “Will the detectives catch the serial killer before he takes his next victim?” That’s a situational stake.
But situational stakes don’t have to be big things. In fact, the stakes in any given moment of an encounter are probably much smaller (if no less important). For example: picking the lock on your cell before the guard gets back from his lunch break, or maybe lying to your boss about why you’re always falling asleep in meetings (so he doesn’t find out you’re moonlighting as a masked vigilante).
PERSONAL STAKES are similar to situational stakes (and depending on the story, they’re likely to overlap), but personal stakes are less focused on the over-arching plot and more focused on the characters, their backstories, and their personal motivations.
Failing to catch every Pokémon. Disappointed your ancestors. Flubbing your prom-posal and getting laughed at by half the school. These are all personal stakes. Do they make a difference in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. Do they make a difference in the lives of your characters? You bet your ass they do!
(One could argue that the closer the Venn diagram of Situational and Personal stakes is to a circle, the better your story is, but YMMV. For more ways you can make this happen, check out this article.)
Going Up
So, now that we know our stakes, how do we raise them? This is where we have to get mean because you’ve got to identify ways in which the situation can get worse. Twist those screws. Make their lives harder.
– Maybe that manifests in more physical danger to their characters. A monster shows up; more monsters show up; a meteor shows up, and it’s falling straight at them.
– Time pressure is another good way to turn up the heat. The proverbial bomb ticks closer to zero.
– Don’t forget about emotional damage! This reminds you of the time you disappointed your father right before he died in that wildebeest stampede.
Back to the Dice
This brings us back to the original question – when do you ask for a roll from your players? The answer is, as we’ve been discussing, “when it raises the stakes if they fail.”
Now we know what it means to do that. We ask ourselves what important aspect of the story could be enhanced with a failed roll, and if the answer is “nothing,” then don’t call for a roll!
In systems that have skill lists, it’s tempting to have your players roll their skills for everything. After all, they invested those points during character creation. They might as well get use out of them, right? If they dumped a lot of points into investigation, and you just hand out the clues, then it kind of feels like they wasted their points on the ability to find those clues.
But if the roll’s not important, it’s okay to just let them succeed based on their previous experience and expertise in the subject matter. Let them be competent and succeed without effort. It’s a great way to make them feel like the heroes of the story, after all.
In Practice
So, let’s go back to that knowledge check example. Since you’ve already prepared your notes, you already know what happens in the event of a success.
You’ve determined the roll is important because if the wizard investigator doesn’t figure out how the phantom thief pulled off the heist, the thief will strike again and steal a priceless artifact this time. You also know, thanks to the character’s background, that the wizard learned everything they know about forensic magic from their ex-girlfriend, who runs her own detective agency.
So now you have options for raising the stakes in an interesting way, and instead of a “no, you can’t figure that out” on a failure, you could raise the personal stakes by saying, “The magic resonance is familiar, but the only person you know who could decipher the meaning is your ex-girlfriend.”
Or, you could raise the situational stakes and say something like, “You figure out how the thief did it, but it takes you the whole day, and by the time you realize they’re using the Magic Boots of Wall Walking, they’ve already snatched the next diamond.”
It’ll take practice to get into the habit of asking for rolls this way (lord knows I haven’t perfected my technique yet) but as you fail, I guarantee, you’ll be failing forward.