Alea Iacta Est

The one said that brains were worth more than luck because he that lived by his brain did things in an orderly fashion and even if he lost that he was not to blame in this because he did what suited him. The other said that luck was worth more than brains because if his fortune was to lose or to win, no matter how much brains he might have, he could not avoid it. Scholars of Alfonso X of Castile, Libro de los juegos

Dice. What would you do, in a roleplaying game context, without them?

Probably play a diceless game¹. But this isn’t that kind of game - we have dice - in fact, a dice “pool”, meaning we roll multiple dice.

This is the first of three (2, 3) posts² on the core dice mechanics of The Death of Arthur - where they came from, what options I toyed with, and why I felt the options I picked could work.

What are you rolling for?

Different rpgs have different roles for their rolls - different expectations on how often you will be rolling, what the kinds of results can be, etc. - which influences what you want out of dice system.

For example, in D&D style games combat is a series of rounds theoretically covering a few seconds (the exact interpretation has varied by game from 6 to 60), and what you’re achieving with the roll is whether you chip away more damage. This is very granular. Other games may have the same battle defined by a single roll.

I’m not looking for a blow-for-blow resolution system in The Death of Arthur, though I’m not so fully committed to forcing the big “question” of the roll to always be big. I’m wary of putting too much weight on how many rolls were made in a game - since sometimes it is easy to just break a problem into small pieces to see where the story is going, even if some of them end up a little trivial.

Still, not everything needs to be rolled for. Some actions are impossible while others are trivial. Even non-trivial actions can be simple enough if there’s no pressure or drama to failing. The dice come out when:

• There’s a chance to fail.
• There’s a chance to succeed.
• There’s some danger or consequence to failing.

For example, say you’re trying to ride a horse.

For most characters³, how to ride a horse really isn’t in question. It’s not even something that can be marked on the character sheet, because pretty much any character will know it. If that’s all there is to the situation, there’s no stakes involved in failure. The differences between one character’s horse ride and another’s is not meaningful⁴.

Now, say you were trying to ride your horse really fast - perhaps you need to deliver an urgent message, racing ahead of an enemy army, or maybe you’re just trying to win a race or impress a crush. Now we have stakes. You’re still probably going to succeed at being-on-the-horse⁵ - but the difference of getting there on time or not matters.

If you succeed, that means you get there fast enough to get your message through, or to beat your opponent, or to make that good impression.

If you fail, you’ve pushed yourself for nothing - the enemy’s already there, you aren’t crowned a winner, you look unimpressive.

And there’s also a chance of a result somewhere in between - where you do get the result you want, but you’ve cost yourself something - perhaps you got there in time, but pulled a muscle in the process, or didn’t have a chance to eat - making you exhausted and weak. You’ve gotten your original goal, but now may need to handle your new issue before it becomes a bigger problem.

The first part of rolling the dice is always figuring out the above first - with the player and GM discussing the possible intents and outcomes to figure out when the action is something the player’s willing to take a risk for. Only then do you roll.

The die is cast

Roll a die. Specifically, a six-sided die⁶ - or “d6” (here, if you don’t have one handy you can use random.org). What did you roll?

If you rolled a 6, congratulations - you are Victorious and have achieved what you wanted with no meaningful drawback. This can often⁷ mean you get Fame, which is a topic for a later post⁸.

If you rolled a 4 or 5, slightly less congratulations - you Struggle and your success⁹ comes with a cost. This can mean you may get both Fame (for the success) and Doubt (for the trouble) - Doubt is also a topic for that later post.

If you rolled a 1, 2 or 3, alas, it is a Disaster. You face failure, plain and simple - typically paying a cost similar to in a struggle, but without the sweet to go with the bitter. And yes, you’d often get Doubt.

So far, it’s a pretty straightforward mechanic.

Roll	Effect	Probability
1,2,3	Disaster	50%
4,5	Struggle	33%
6	Victory	17%

or looking at it another way

Result	Probability
I succeed in some way	50%
I meet some trouble	88%

Those odds aren’t terrible for you - it’s a coin flip that you’ll get what you wanted, after all - but they’re definitely not in your favor. For that, we need to talk about the pool.

Assembling the Dice

You will usually be rolling more than one die; up to six¹⁰ - which we assemble from a couple sources:

• 1 from your Reputation¹¹, if one is relevant.
• 1-3 from your Skill, if one is relevant. This gives a four point¹² gradation of experience and training.
• Up to 2 from Advantage. These can be free from situational conditions, or from a grab-bag of other sources - but can’t go beyond giving 2 dice¹³.

So someone with one die is just scraping by¹⁴, someone with 6 dice is doing the kind of thing that comes naturally to them, with something they’re a master at, and with all the cards in their favor.

You only count the highest die - judging your result as above. So…

	1d6	2d6	3d6	4d6	5d6	6d6
Probability of a Victory	17%	31%	42%	52%	60%	66%
Probability of a Struggle	33%	44%	45%	42%	37%	32%
Probability of a Disaster	50%	25%	13%	6%	3%	2%

or, once again:

	1d6	2d6	3d6	4d6	5d6	6d6
I succeed in some way	50%	75%	87%	94%	97%	98%
I meet some trouble	88%	69%	58%	48%	40%	34%

Even the smallest amount of advantage starts to give pretty good odds, with 4 dice (any kind of reputation and skill plus either picking a good skill even for a mid-experience character and having something else to boost, or pushing advantage hard¹⁵) already pretty much guaranteed a success - though the likelihood of a complication of some sort decreases at a slower rate¹⁶.

You now know the basics of playing Blades in the Dark or similar dice pool games with a 1-3 / 4-5 / 6 split. But there’s another rule in play.

Cut

Not all things you’re trying to do are made equal. Some things are harder to achieve than others - and for this we introduce Cut¹⁷. Instead of adjusting the target you’re trying to hit, as many games do¹⁸ we adjust the dice.

• The task is very hard? +1 Cut
• The character’s strategy to handling the issue is unusual or questionable? +1 Cut
• The character’s gambling on a harder approach¹⁹? +1 Cut
• The character has some injury, or similar impairment to what they’re trying to do? +1 Cut
• The situation or environment is going to make things difficult? +1 Cut

And instead of adjusting the dice ahead of the roll, we’re following the example of The Wildsea and removing dice after²⁰. Specifically, the challenge of a roll is indicated by the dice you remove - starting with the highest dice.

Penalties [removing the dice ahead of the roll] are easier to math out for players and GM at the table, but they ultimately result in fewer dice being rolled. And people tend to really enjoy rolling dice.
Cut is a little more dramatic, a little more cruel. It lets players roll the same number of dice, but by targeting high results after a roll it removes the chance of high-band successes and tends to bring outcomes further down the table. It’s a bit gritty, but it’s also dramatic - a player knows they were this close to an excellent result, and can bring that into their description of what goes wrong. The Wild Words SRD

For example if the challenge of a roll was 2, and you had 4 dice that rolled 3, 4, 4, 6 - you’d cut that down to 3, 4 and instead of getting that victory you’d be left with a struggle.

The effect is pretty strong, even at low amounts of cut. Looking at the probability of either kind of success from before, we can see how quickly this additional challenge robs you²¹

	1d6	2d6	3d6	4d6	5d6	6d6
Cut 0	50%	75%	87%	94%	97%	98%
Cut 1	—	25%	50%	69%	81%	90%
Cut 2	—	—	13%	31%	50%	66%
Cut 3	—	—	—	6%	19%	34%
Cut 4	—	—	—	—	3%	11%

Similarly, we can look at the probability of trouble - which if anything is more stark.

Here I’ll use — to mark the same places as before - these have 100% chance of failure and no chance of success, so they’re not particularly interesting scenarios. There are other cases where there’s still effectively¹⁹ 100% chance of trouble, but there’s still some distinction between struggling through and total failure.

	1d6	2d6	3d6	4d6	5d6	6d6
Cut 0	88%	69%	58%	48%	40%	34%
Cut 1	—	97%	93%	87%	80%	74%
Cut 2	—	—	100%	98%	97%	94%
Cut 3	—	—	—	100%	100%	99%
Cut 4	—	—	—	—	100%	100%

Dealing with any kind of challenging task makes some kind of trouble very likely - cutting only 2 makes it practically inevitable. Cutting 3 dice means even the most skilled characters will be struggling significantly - anything above that is pure desperation to attempt²².

At this point you’ve basically learned the dice system of The Wildsea and other Told By Wild Words games²³.

In Summary

When a character is taking an action that needs a roll, we’ve got a system based on their ability to make the roll (how many dice they’ll get in their pool), the challenge of it (how many dice will get cut) and the possible outcomes (what will they achieve on a success and what’s at stake in a disaster or struggle).

So, you’re rushing on horseback to alert your friends about an ambush. You’re young and have a reputation for being Spry - so you think you’ll simply try to outrace your enemy by sheer energy and willpower²⁴. Your wilderness skills of The Hills and the Dells aren’t great - only 1 die - but you’ll be depending on them. You have enough of a head start and you’re willing to invoke a Motif²⁵ for your competent horse, so the GM agrees you’ve got 2 dice of advantage.

Four dice total. Unfortunately, your enemies know the terrain quite well, better than you - and the wound you got when they attacked you is still festering. You’ll face 2 Cut on this roll.

Get there in time and you’ll have heroically warned your friends. Not only will they have the time to prepare, but you’ll earn more Fame for your horse’s fleetness. You risk making that wound worse and tiring yourself out more before the fight (gaining Doubt) - which will be worse still if it’s all for naught and you have to help out too late and too tired.

Roll²⁶. How did you fare?

In the next post, we’ll dive deeper into what one of those results - the Doubt and failure side of things - could mean, as well as an additional consideration: Doom

Footnotes

1. Whether that’s games with no random elements, or that use cards, spinners - or semi-random things like Jenga towers, etc. ↩

2. I’m still learning how to write reasonably sized posts - especially as I discovered myself coming up with more ideas on the actual mechanics as I wrote them. These are still to intertwined to post them sequentially, but I’ve at least split them for readability. ↩

3. That is, in this period and especially among the social classes expected. ↩

4. Sure, there will be small differences between riders from skill or chance - but you’ll both get to the same destination at the end of the day. ↩

5. Though perhaps the danger comes from the reckless corner-cutting you’re going to be doing and falling off is in the cards. ↩

6. This is probably the only one we’re using… though I repeatedly have ideas for a d8. You’ll want at least 6 of these in two colors, which we’ll get to in the next post/ ↩

7. The exact mechanical reward or penalty depends on the action and context. Sometimes the narrative benefit or loss alone sets the consequences enough - sometimes there’s specific things at stake of similar value. If it’s at all unclear what kind of stakes you’re talking about before the roll, the table should discuss - it’s not a secret, and the player may decide based on what the actual results of the roll could be. ↩

8. For the moment it suffices that Fame is something you want, and Doubt is something you don’t want. You’re trying to get Fame to spend it, and keep your Doubt under control - and there’s other ways to gain or lose both. ↩

9. Because it is still that! You still achieve that goal. ↩

10. I might have a few exceptional cases to break this and get 7 dice for special rules - but it’s at least a mostly solid rule. ↩

11. Another “topic of another post”, but you can think of this as an Attribute (Strength, Dex, Con…) in a D&D like game, or perhaps more like an Approach from Fate Accelerated - with maybe a dash of Cortex’s Distinctions. You’ll usually have one that is usable, but it might color the way you’re solving the problem and sometimes it’s a decision to go against your strengths to solve a problem in a way uncharacteristic of the character but fitting for the situation. ↩

12. Because you can also have 0, if you are a total novice to the thing. ↩

13. As a law of diminishing returns - 100 small advantages is not 100 times as good as one. ↩

14. You can also have 0 dice if literally nothing applies. You automatically fail. There’s all sorts of fun ways to give you something to roll in this case - The Wildsea has you roll a d6 but you can no longer have a Victory (a 6 still counts as a Struggle), for instance… but I’ve just found them all fiddly and complicated to explain, especially ones that don’t have a weird edge case where you’d want to cut your dice down. So I just let you fail here. ↩

15. i.e. the kind of roll the party is going to get when they’re trying hard, even if the character’s not amazing yet. ↩

16. Even a Gawaine in all his glory (aka 6 dice) has a 1 in 3 chance of some kind of complication to work out, which seems okay, given how these stories go - and without advantage the best knight (i.e. 1 Reputation + 3 Skill) still has about a 50/50. ↩

17. This is the name The Wildsea uses, which… I’m not sold on. It’s functional, and I’m not going to replace the name just “to be thematic” or unique (plenty of games make that mistake). However, it’s not so obvious or ubiquitous to need to be called “cut”. ↩

18. Including some games with dice pools like this (Burning Wheel, at least), though it’s often seen as fiddly,. and at least for my purposes here I agree with that. ↩

19. Within a fraction of a percent. ↩ ↩²

20. To be clear, you know the challenge - the number of dice you will have to cut - before choosing to roll. It’s not about making that uncertain or surprising. ↩

21. And we can also see the second effect: Cut immediately removes anyone who doesn’t more dice than the cut value - it’s just not worth rolling. That will get some nuance later, but it is a notable consequence of this design. A character who has only 1 die has no chance of dealing with anything with any challenge, 2 dice only lets you handle the minimal challenge, etc. ↩

22. In fact, you probably should just cut the player off at this point. It’s “dramatic” for sure, but the math has really flattened out any meaning. ↩

23. You’re missing Twists, but they’re orthogonal to these probabilities of success and failure. ↩

24. If you knew the land better you might try to be Cunning or Subtle, and for a long chase might consider being Stalwart to the endurance issues of a long run. ↩

25. More on those in a later post. ↩

26. If you don’t have 4 dice available - perhaps harder than getting the single die at the beginning of the post - you can go here. Remember to account for Cut! ↩