The random number generation in RPGs is one of my favorite aspects of the experience. I love seeing impossible odds being beat, and having to deal with the ramifications in the fiction of the game. Roll20 is particularly good for this; the numbers are much more random than those generated by cheap plastic polyhedral dice. It also makes it much easier for me as a DM to roll everything in the open. Rather than having a screen to roll behind, I have to add a command to make secret rolls. So I just don’t do it. All attack rolls, damage rolls, random encounter chances etc. are rolled in the open. The dice do not lie! The only thing I will roll secretly are monster HP, I tend to use my own monsters so my players don’t always know the magnitude of the threat they face, rolling HD in front of them rather defeats the point of this.
Last session we played our homebrew D&D game, set in the weird-fantasy post apocalypse of Shulim. It had been quite some time since our last game in this setting, and I opened the table to allow the players to tell me what their characters had been doing for the past month, intending to build adventure vignettes from their input. One of the characters, a warrior named Ibash had gone off to marry a psychic blue woman named Smiling Lizard and live amongst a remote desert tribe of blue men. Ibash’s player decided he wasn’t quite ready to retire the character, and Ibash left his woman to return to the party in the city of Sanctuary. Standing in his way was the chieftain of the tribe, a blue warrior named The August Overking. Of course a melee ensued. Here is what happened:
A roll of a 20 is always a hit, but for a “critical” we roll again, another 20 results in a d100 roll on the infamous Arduin Grimoire Critical Chart. Over the past year of play, we have rolled on this chart several times, 1 in 400 is going to happen eventually. Twice the players themselves have suffered the results of the crit chart; interestingly I rolled the same damage result twice against players (a severed Achilles tendon.) What Ibash’s player rolled here is rather improbable; two 20’s on d20’s followed by a 100 on a d100. The poor August Overking suffered the following: 100.) Head Entire head pulped and splattered over wide area, irrevocable death
So, a success in a set piece battle for the player. The ramifications of the random numbers were not that significant in this circumstance, simply the amazing odds. Of course, in this combat as in all combats Ibash could have been slain. I don’t fudge the dice, ever. To do so would be to cheapen the influence of the randomness, and the randomness makes interesting things happen! There was no foregone conclusion in this battle. Ibash did have a reasonable chance of success against the August Overking , they both being 5th level Fighting-Men with decent equipment, but he also could have been slain. Character death is usually a significant ramification of random number generation, but as the DM I do control the strength of the player’s opponents as well as the responsibility of signaling to the players that a foe may be more powerful than them. Characters can die from unlucky rolls, this is part of the game, but more often than not character death is the result of poor decision making or simply the unwillingness to run away. In this combat, Ibash faced a worthy opponent that was capable of killing him, but not an overwhelming foe. The combat could have gone either way, but it didn’t. It resulted in Ibash “pulping” the August Overkings head with his stone yeti greatsword and handily achieving his objective in the fiction of the game because of random number generation, because of pure chance and hitting impossible odds. Had he not hit the impossible odds however, there was a pretty good chance that the outcome in the fiction would have been the same.
On the other end of random numbers in RPGS is catastrophic failure. Dealing with the ramifications of failure is always more interesting intellectually and creatively than dealing with success. After the characters vignettes, we returned to the “present” with the party preparing to take off into space aboard an ancient spaceship they salvaged from a swamp and spent several adventures acquiring the means of repairing. The players run two characters each, and nearly all of them packed into the ship. Once they left the atmosphere and beheld the glory of the glittering universe stretching out before them, I asked Azax the party’s wizard and captain of the ship to roll a 3% chance of the spacecraft catastrophically imploding. The ship had major external skin damage that was repaired using the armored plates of the giant chintick beetle. 3% seemed a reasonable if not overly generous chance for failure to me. All eyes on the dice, Azax dutifully rolled a 1.
I literally fell out of my chair. Was I facing my first TPK in 23 years of DMing? A few minutes passed, during which the table was a riot of laughter, disbelief and apprehension. This is what letting the dice fall where they may is all about. After the initial shock, I resisted the temptation to allow them all to die in the cold vacuum of space. (This is not a reflection of me being an “adversarial” DM, the opportunity to start fresh is just always appealing to me.) I asked the players if they thought they might have had a minute to take an action between the hull breach and the catastrophic implosion. They thought yes, and they all got an action. Axax the wizard cast Rope Trick almost all the characters climb in and Jenthar the Thief is the last character to climb the rope into the relative safety of a pocket dimension (for which there is no room for him). His player uses his other character, Mephisto the Cleric to blast him with Take Me to the Other Side of Terror from Space Age Sorcery (http://hereticwerks.blogspot.com/2013/03/space-age-sorcery-updated-version-15.html) Typically this spell only allows the caster to travel 1d20 light years across time and space but since the caster was contained in a pocket dimension it moved the entire pocket and thus the entire party. Well, almost the entire party. Jenthar was slain with Mephisto’s bolt of hellish lightning, and Belgretor the diminutive gigolo’s player had to leave right before this happened and specifically noted that he was passed out in the back of the ship. When the ships hull ruptured, Blegretor Gladomain was not in the pocket dimension. Next game he will get a save versus the vacuum of space.
So the ship that I made stats for, the planet that we detailed and explored, hell the entire sector of space all gone with a single die roll. The party is moved 1d20 light years, across either space or time. We roll 1d20 and 1d2, and indicating 14 light years across space. Suddenly, I have to adjust the entire campaign and generate a whole new setting. The ramifications of a single dice roll fundamentally changed the entire game in an unexpected way.
All because of one random number
God I love D&D.
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