getting the most from your dice

As the dragon bears down on you with open jaws, you have only one chance of survival -- you throw your Orb of Retribution straight at him. If you are successful, it will explode in the dragon's throat, killing him instantly. If you fail, you will be devoured. Roll the dice...

Every gamer has been here. Whether you are attempting to survive a dragon or hoping not to land on Boardwalk. These are the 'stand up' rolls. The ones that make you dance around and recite various incantations before throwing the dice. The game mechanics that build up to this point are varied, and the stakes need to be high, but I want to explore something particular about these rolls: the best way for a game designer to deliver that tension-releasing moment to get the highest volume cheers and groans.

Whether these types of high-stakes resolutions are done by rolling dice, flipping a card, or drawing something from a bag, I think there are two important ingredients to consider: transparency and immediacy.

Transparency: 

This is the most obvious one: the mechanics of the system must be transparent to the players. They need to understand what results they might get and what their chances are for getting them. If, in my opening example, the player is told that she needs to roll the dice to defeat the dragon, but the game-master has a secret result table that will need to be consulted to determine what happens, the player feels frustrated because they cannot "try" for a certain result (I say "try" in quotes here because, let's face it, they player cannot affect the dice, but that's certainly not how it feels when she throws them). In summary, don't have players roll dice if they don't know what numbers they want to get.

Immediacy:

This one is more subtle, and is more commonly neglected. To get those cheers and groans, the result should be immediately understood. If the player fighting the dragon has to pile on modifiers to figure out whether the roll was successful, it squelches the moment. I designed a role-playing system in which the attacker and defender each rolled a die and compared them. A bad idea. Each player knew they wanted to roll a high number, but they did not have a threshold in mind (a number that they were trying to beat). Better to figure out ahead of time, complete with all modifiers, what number a player needs to beat, and to let the roll resolve the tension immediately. If a player ever asks, "so, did I make it?", after they roll the dice, then you know that your game design needs tweaking.

As icing on the cake, immediacy can be enhanced even further by sticking to another rule when choosing designs for your dice: qualitative icons for qualitative results. It is the final step that seems to push the immediacy factor straight past the thinking portion of a player's brain and into their reward centre. Putting it simply, pictures on dice (or cards, or tokens) are better than numbers if you are generating a qualitative (not quantitative) result. If the player fighting the dragon knows that she needs to roll a 12 or higher using 3 six-sided dice, she can quickly add up the pips to see if she got it. If, however, she rolls 3 dice, each of which has a "hit" symbol, which will either appear or not, she immediately knows whether or not she was successful. Furthermore, this seems more powerful when a player has a literal vision of what they are hoping to see (graphic icons work well for this, though hoping for a specific number (like a "6") also qualifies). Slot machines come to mind as the most successful exploiters of this concept. It just seems much more satisfying when you can visualise exactly what symbol you need in the final column, and you wait impatiently for it to appear as you mutter, "Oh, please... oh please...".