Blog book club #8: On the Oracular Power of Dice

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Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “On the Oracular Power of Dice" from 2008 by James Maliszewski (Grognardia).

Next week we’ll discuss “How Dragonlance Ruined Everything" which is also from 2008 and also by James. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

James gives two reasons why randomness is an important part of old school gaming: that rolling dice is exciting and fun, and that dice remove control from both players and referee, creating an unexpected, unplanned series of events.

“The ‘story’ arises from the synthesis of design, randomness, and reaction; it isn’t something you can set out to create”.

One way I use dice is as an OSR-expression of Apocalypse World’s principle: “Sometimes, disclaim decision making”. Vincent Baker writes:

In order to play to find out what happens, you’ll need to pass decision-making off sometimes. Whenever something comes up that you’d prefer not to decide by personal whim and will, don’t. (AW 1E)

For OSR, probably replace “personal will & whim” with “personal understanding of the fictional situation”: it is often clear to the referee from their conception of an NPC or the world what will happen next. As soon as it’s not clear, I “disclaim responsibility” - I don’t decide by fiat, I roll. Now, obviously when I roll I am determining what options are possible. So actually I am still quite creatively engaged; still I am no longer the sole arbiter of “what happens next”.

Also, frequently I tell the players what I’m doing: “heads: the burning bridge breaks and you fall, tails: it lasts another round”. This gives the players a chance to argue with my understanding before we’ve got as far as consequences, which can make the discussion less charged (“but hang on, did you forget you said the bridge had steel chains?”).

It also flows into “rulings not rules” - if this situation keeps coming up we can move from me rolling on a list of improvised options that makes sense to me, to a new ruling: whenever there is a burning bridge there is a 50/50 chance it collapses every round. Which is then even less difficult decision-making for me next time: not only can I roll the dice, we have an established ruling for how to do it.

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Oh, and do read the comments on Grognardia’s post - discussions of those who played in Gygax’s original group.

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I generally present pre-gens to new players or when running a one shot for a new system. It helps get us into the game faster. But one thing that is lost is the joy of randomly rolling a character and sticking with them.

Even though I randomly generate the pre-gens, the player gets to choose a character that fits their preconceived notions of who they want to play. Having no agenda in character creation can actually instead lead to far more interesting outcomes during play.

In old school games, my players at least tend to always play their characters as themselves anyways, so the roleplaying choices become more unique and interesting when they have a random assortment of tools and stats to work with.

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I’m a big proponent of Letting the Dice Decide things for me. Too much Fiat/Bias tends to produce a bit of monotony over time or at the very least keeps things less surprising for me as a Referee. Part of what I enjoy about these games are the unforeseen situations they can produce that we have to work through.

There’s another facet as well, and that has more to do with the mind’s ability to draw disparate connections from seemingly unrelated things. Random Results sometimes produce things that might lack a coherent relationship on first glance, but with enough minds working through this, I sometimes find that by serendipity we end up arriving at an explanation that is far more compelling than something we may have been able to cut from the whole cloth. Quilting together those scraps together produces something much more memorable than just buying a pre-made blanket.

The novelty that randomizers inject into these games is important for the style of Play that I enjoy. Most of my Prep after all consists of just populating Random Tables :slight_smile: but I suppose in a way, I’ve already given the entries at least an iota of thought in terms of how they might “Play Out” should the result materialize in Play. But when a result shows up months/years after I did this initial wool-gathering, it’s still going to take me by Surprise.

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Although I think the one point that we roll dice to remove some power from players/GM holds up well enough, I’m glad that there is now a more nuanced understanding of where randomness is deployed in play. This blog post is in conversation with 4th edition D&D, so clearly this is in reaction to the hypder-detailed character customization process and carefully structured combat encounters of that edition. All fair enough. But there is also an understanding that sometimes its better to preserve player agency and not roll dice to resolve situations. e.g. We use conversation for determining if characters find and disarm traps, find secret doors, or determine how conversations go instead of turning the game into a series of skill/perception checks to see how things go.

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For me this concept - accepting randomness and using it as a sort of engine for the game is a fairly core concept … but … in the post-OSR it’s also one of those things that has become a maxim. I tend to find OSR maxims corrosive, because they become absolutes. More randomness in “high trad” 90’s/00’s game design is good. More randomness in a 2020’s “OSR” game or adventure is too often a way to remove structure and eventually produces something with only vague random gestures and implications instead of mechanics or a setting.

Random tables are themselves a worthy subject of design and theory - they are a tool, just like other mechanics, design forms, or ways of adding fictional context (“fluff”) to games. There’s things they are good at and things they are less good at. As OSR ideas become more generally accepted and applied random tables and dice increasingly become less of a useful oracle and more a mad god - too often filling in blanks in the game, setting, or adventure with absurdity, unworked ideas, or vague gestures toward content.

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I think I broke myself by making my own system which is both diceless and unpredictable. The reason for this is that when a player fails it tells you why. There’s a narrative through-line which takes the roleplay and tells you what went wrong with it.

Now when I roll dice I just find it lacks meaning. All I had to do was roll better! What’s that got to do with the roleplay element?

Old school is interesting because it expects rolling to be avoidable as long as you’re planning properly. But at some point, because situations are made to be difficult, you’ll have to roll. The game is about negotiating the circumstances and situation to minimise risk for when you’ve got to roll.

But I utilise the natural unpredictability of people to turn the wiggly part into the test!

Rolling on oracle tables is the better form of randomness. It’s more akin to worldbuilding than determining success or failure.

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I think the tables begin to lose utility when we try to make random tables that aren’t associated with the actual context of use. I think of all of the encounter tables in 1e MM2. Even with tables broken down by terrain and climate, those tables are of limited use in a specific setting because they don’t reflect the actual reality in that place. Some entries are unlikely to be rolled due to overall rarity of the beastie, while in the specific area of the setting, they’re much more likely to be encountered.

Perhaps simply providing blatant reminders that there are no One Size tables for most any purpose would help ameliorate this problem. Sections in the books of tables that walk a GM through designing tables specifically for their settings and regions within.

Though that works against the tables being offered to decrease the work load for the GM by providing ready-made tables. I think there’s a balancing act in the production of, and use of, tables in that regard–“here’s something you may find useful and here’s how to create your own when you have time.”

I also think separating tables into Spark Tables, for sparking ideas, and Utility Tables, for actual use in play, would go a long way to curb some of the “random gestures” vagueness we run across.

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I think there’s some value to having a “generic” wandering monster table just because sometimes the players throw you a curveball, but I think a better way to break them up is not by biomes but by themes. “This is a random encounter table for an idyllic fae forest and this is a random encounter table for a corrupted forest and this is a random encounter table for a lawless forest where the Empire adjoins the Accursed Wastes” would be a lot more useful than “here is everything that could possibly be encountered in a forest.”

I think there might also be some value to a completely generic table:

  1. Named NPC from Faction A with bodyguards
  2. Foraging party from Faction A, 50% returning with supplies
  3. Single major vermin
  4. Guard patrol from Faction A
  5. Faction A noncombatants
  6. Group of minor vermin
  7. Scout from Faction B
  8. War party from Faction A, 50% returning with (1-3) wounds (4-5) prisoner (6) both
  9. Rival adventuring party
  10. War party from Faction B
  11. Escaping prisoner (1-3 faction B, 4-5 faction A malcontent, 6 adventurer)

Then the GM could plug in actual entries depending on dungeon population and level; in the Goblin Shallows minor vermin might be rats and on the 10th dungeon level with the hellgate they might be hellhounds. But it gives a starting point beyond the tyranny of the blank page.

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This is true … up to a point. My own take is that the general tables for treasure and random encounters in OD&D are essential (as are those in B/X and even AD&D to a degree) because they give a basis for things like “When do we fight goblins?” and “How much treasure do goblins have?” Without them the game becomes more opaque at least at first. While it’s of course more interesting to manage everything with bespoke design it’s really hard to get started that way, and in OD&D at least there’s a really strong DIY strain running through the game (and has to be - it offer no module or reasonable sample dungeon to run). So general tables do serve a purpose, but I also find the ones in the AD&D DMG especially try to fill too much of the setting and do it poorly.

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Yes, exactly. Using the generic encounter tables in the back of MM2 will suffice in play, certainly. Once one gets the time to create tables for the specific regions in a setting, then the generic tables aren’t needed. And of the two types, the latter is the better, based on a measure of specificity to the setting used.

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Relevant to this discussion: If you’re not familiar with Blog of Forlon Encystment, I recommend their recent series of posts looking at AD&D topically and pulling out the world-building implications of taking Gygax’s assorted tables and explanations at face value. e.g.

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