12. Rolling the Dice
I’m not going to spend much time in this piece gushing about how good “roll a bunch of dice and just find the highest one” is as a resolution mechanic. But it’s really good, okay. It’s really good!
Whoof. Okay. Rolling the Dice. This is an interesting one, and it’s specifically interesting off the back of yesterday’s conversation about what system is and why it’s important.
Dice tend to serve the roll of “chance” in the language of modern roleplaying games, the interjection of luck-based mechanic when “risk” is present. That’s what the books tend to TELL us dice are for, but I actually think it’s a lot more simple than that.
“ When a PC attempts an action that’s dangerous or troublesome, you make an action roll to find out how it goes. Action rolls and their effects and consequences drive most of the game”
Blades assures us that the reason it wants dice to be thrown are to create partial success. Your character will tend to succeed at a cost. In this section Harper writes “Blades in the Dark is a game about underdog characters who are in over their heads. The dice mechanic reinforces this by making partial success crop up again and again. This is a good thing! Trouble is where the fun of the game happens” (p7). This assertion that the reason we roll dice is to generate consequences doesn’t hold with me though. These characters are inherently complicated and we could very easily just be asked to create consequences for them. In fact, there are whole games and genres that revolve around players investing in the complicated nature of their character.
I think there’s two things that are really provided by the use of dice in Blades in the Dark:
Firstly, the Clicky-Clacks. The tangible nature of rolling the bones. The exciting moment of anticipation and action. This is why Hybrid-Casual and Hypercasual games are designing the way they are in the mobile space: People love to interact. The nature of building a dice pool, and then throwing them just feels like the player is taking action.
This is, I think, closer to the use of dice as ritual as we see it in Swords Without Master (Ravachol, 2014), which is available in Worlds WIihout Master Issue 3. The nature of taking up dice is saying “this negotiation is over”.
Secondly, the hard 6. It’s very telling that Blades in the Dark constantly leaves that 6 open for Getting What you Want With No (immediate) Consequences. I have previous said that Blades is a game about ambition, but today one of my favourite game designers instead described it as a game about greed. And gee. Gee I just really love that change in framing.
The hard Six is purely there to provide the player with an easy way out. It puts on the table a chance to be the underdog and still get out unscathed. And it’s a lie, a trick, a trap. It exists to look appealing and to psychologically manipulate players into performing behaviour that makes the game better against their own (surface level) interests. If the game is about greed, then the fact that all of this negotation of consequence might all be just arbitrary is the big red jewel that makes the monkey salivate.
