XP Rolls

Back in my teens, late 70s, my older brother Brett got into D&D. Suddenly, the stoner kid who’d crank up “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” whenever it came on the radio to annoy my conservative grandmother who raised us was lugging around all these books, notebooks, binders and fucked-up weirdo dice. No, this isn’t a tale of redemption; just acknowledgment that the hobby was big enough to draw more than the pocket protector and glasses nerd stereotype of the day.

Brett would pore through the books, studying them, scribbling notes in the margins. On weekends, he’d go spend all day in a little cinder block building on the other side of town, then come home with his spiral-bound notebook full of more notes on his dice rolls and character stats and gold and XP points. NASA-level material there.

But while I loved looking at the art in the books and reading character descriptions, when he tried to teach me to play my eyes glazed over as we got to dice. Worse, as a self-described smart kid, the idea that dice could dictate whether my wisdom or intelligence were enough to solve a problem were downright triggering:

“I investigate for traps.”

“You rolled a 2. You don’t see any traps.”

“I open the door.”

“The door is a mimic and as you reach out, he bites off your arm. You slowly bleed out while your party laughs at your stupidity. They kill the mimic and your final moments are seeing them divvy up the stuff in your pack.”

Fuck. This. Game.

Now, I recognize that luck plays a big role in personal success in this world. While some of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, has been debunked, it provides a pretty good overview of how outsized success stories like Bill Gates (pre-Epstein), Steve Jobs (pre-Lisa), and others owe a huge debt to luck and privilege, and not just some mystical connection to a muse or generational talent. Per Gladwell, success “…is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.”

But my life oozing out of me based on the roll of the dice when I was careful and thoughtful enough to investigate for traps was a big middle finger to my sense of self, even for my little blorbo character I’d invested time into creating. Why even bother if random dice rolls were all that mattered?

That’s why I silently cheered when I skimmed the story recently of how Brennan Lee Mulligan bypassed a dice roll recently in Critical Role’s latest campaign, deciding that one of the players had done such a killer job describing their action that of course they’d succeed.

He gets it, I nodded.

And as I’ve played more, I realize that’s one of the things I like about games like Pirate Borg, where the game master Harbourmaster guidance in the starter adventure, Trapped in the Tropics, focuses on having fun more than becoming a statistician or accountant:

And guidance for new players backs that up to focus on creating a fun scenario and story using your imagination more than dice:

There are other “story” games like Microscope or Wanderhome that skip the dice rolls entirely. I’ve only played Microscope once and one day hope to play Wanderhome. I like the idea of diceless story games, but also confess that there are times I feel brain freeze. Like when I tried standup comedy, I found that I could work the material, try it out, then refine it over time. When I tried improv comedy, on the other hand, my innate perfectionism would inevitably lead to choking. It was both exhilirating and exhausting.

But the more I’ve played different games and with different groups over the last year, the more I like a game that rewards the table telling a good story and making each other laugh and doesn’t rely on rolling a Nat 20 to see the fucking mimic.

*****

Two blog posts in one week? Yep – I jumped on the Randomness blogwagon the other day with my first attempt at making tables. Now this trip down nostalgia lane. What I lack in quality, I make up in volume!

While I don’t expect much engagement from the handful of people who read this, if there’s a game you think I should try, let me know.