I will add more information on the structure of these solos in a subsequent post, but the important part is that I needed to have some crucial choices to be done, and their successes measured. And instead of playing multiple rounds of combat, I wanted to test abilities and skills.
And I needed these rolls to be simple and enjoyable, for both me and the player.
The problem with the current ability/skill/save rolls
You roll a d20.
If the result is higher than some difficulty, then you succeeded. Else, you fail.
The End.
That is the most boring, frustrating thing ever. Because it's binary. If you get a high result, then you can imagine the action was a tremendous success. Or not. Because again, the roll is a simple, binary success/fail test, as shown by the graph below:
Of course, you can add some nuance to the process. For example: If you get a result 5 points higher than the difficulty, then this is a tremendous success. Or if you get a result 5 points lower... You get the point.
But again, it's one dice roll, and it's instantaneous.
My Solution
In this scene, Nolan, the mage apprentice player character, as well as Jenna and Dalamar, have been arrested in Solanthus because of a magic battle and a fireball thrown in the middle of a market. The three apprentices needed to convince the knights of Solamnia that they were the good guys, and that the other purple-robed wizards were the one sowing destruction around them. I asked my player to attempt a Persuasion (Charisma) Roll, with a DC of 10... but I asked him to roll two dices, and tell me how many successes he had, then looked at my scene description:
- 0 successes: The group failed to convince the knights, and remain under arrest
- 1 success: The group succeeded in convincing the knight they are innocents, and are freed
- 2 successes: Not only the group succeeded in proving their innocence, but they also convinced the knights the purple-robed renegades were a danger to the population: The knights gave the group an escort of 3 knights to help them in their quest.
Did you see what I did, here?
By rolling multiple dices, I did many things indeed.
Failure/Success becomes a scale, instead of a coin toss
Instead of having a binary failure/success, I have multiple steps in-between.
Of course, I can have it by by looking at the difference between the result, and the DC, but it's math-y and I find it less intuitive.
With my method, I decide how many separate steps I want to define, and then ask the player to roll as much dices as this number of steps, minus one. In the example above, I had three steps (critical success, success, failure), so I told the player to roll 2 dices.
The bonus is that the more dices you use, the more steps you have, and also the more the average steps are likely to occur:
- With 2d20 and a DC 10, you essentially have 20% chances of a failure, 50% of success, and 30% of critical success.
- With 3d20 and a DC 10, you essentially have 9% of critical failure, 33% failure, 41% of success, and 17% of critical success.
- With 4d20 and a DC 10, you essentially have 4% of critical failure, 20% failure, 37% of barely success, 30% of success, and 9% of critical success.
- etc.
(Of course, changing the DC will tweak/bend/warp the probabilities toward success or failure.)
Bad Luck is less impacting
I introduced an overall bell-curve randomization. Which means that the "average" is much more likely than the extreme. This is important because the more dices rolled in one session, the more opportunities for all kind of successes and failures. This reduces the impact of streaks of bad rolls in the overall session. Less player/gamemaster frustration.
This is an objective effect that can't be denied.
But there's another effect, that is more psychological: By rolling multiple dices, the player does accept the result more easily: Indeed, if all the dices failed, then the player naturally accepts this is some kind of critical failure. In the other end of the spectrum, you have a critical success you, as a gamemaster, can easily jump unto to describe the extraordinary success by the character.
This is a subjective effect, but I've seen it in action (sometimes, the player rolls the dices one after the other, to enjoy the gradual unveiling of the result of the roll!), so...
This is actually the main reason I adopted this alternative dice roll.
You can even tweak the roll further
One thing I introduced in the solos was the usage of Inspiration: Each time a player rolled a natural 20, I gave them Inspiration, which essentially gave them the possibility of re-rolling one dice.
The fact Inspiration does not stack influenced the player to use that Inspiration as soon as possible (but not too soon).
And you can even use that natural 20 to give the player the satisfaction of a critical success, similar to Matt Mercer's "How do you want to do this?", which I mainly used to describe players critical successes in a way they didn't imagine possible, and yet, made their characters appear amazingly cool.
Of course, if there are natural 20 + awesome critical success description, you can also add a natural 1 critical failure. In this, I'm usually lenient, rarely giving something more than a malus to the next roll, unless I find a particularly satisfying narrative to describe this critical failure.
It's like combat, but for non-combat situation
Indeed, combat is a succession of d20 rolls. In a 4-rounds combat, you can expect a player to do 4 attack rolls, and usually, they will do an average number of successes.
And players love to roll dices!
So I actually imported a combat-style mechanics into ability/save/skill rolls.
It already exists in D&D5, anyway...
You probably already encountered a version of such rolls. One of my players met a medusa, and the medusa has the following petrification attack, which I summarized as:
The medusa can force a creature to make a DC 14 Constitution saving throw. If the saving throw fails by 5 or more, the creature is instantly petrified. Otherwise, a creature that fails the save begins to turn to stone and is restrained. The restrained creature must repeat the saving throw at the end of its next turn, becoming petrified on a failure or ending the effect on a success.
Yeah, it's two dices rolled for one effect.
(Note: Rolling one dice after the other, instead of two at the same time, might have different result if the second roll depends on the first roll result, as in the Medusa petrification, above)
... and this is how it went:
This roll was awesome because the character failed his first saving throw, and I described how his priest of mishakal, Verath, was now feeling restrained, the color of his skin being drained, to be replaced with a stony grey... and I asked him to roll again, and he rolled a... natural 20!
When he did that, I went overboard with the scene, describing how not only he refused to die as a statue as many did before him, he actually challenged the medusa to do better, staring her right in the eyes. The medusa was so furious she doubled down... and failed to petrify him (he succeeded the save, after all). Furthermore, as she was distracted by this mortal challenging her power (natural 20 effect), she let her guard down, and the guards used that time to position themselves, and fire arrows at her, wounding her, and forcing her to flee.
Verath, the priest of Mishakal, thus impressed both the knights of solamnia escort, and even Crysania (pre-Legends) who was, until then, quite unpressed by the young priest she believed was trying to flirt with her (natural ones in social rolls tend to give the wrong impression...).
The more you ask for dices to be rolled, the more natural 20s will appear, and the more you'll be able to give the player the satisfaction of a critical success, sometimes of epic proportions.
Of course, if natural 20s have a critical effect, natural 1s can, too. Don't ask me what (almost) happened when the same priest of Mishakal rolled a natural 1 in a Medicine roll to help a pregnant woman give birth to her baby...
;-)
Another example:
One character was infiltrating post-War-of-the-Lance Sanction. She knew her way around, having been a double agent for years. And she knew that, to go further, and get anywhere near the Temple of Luerkisis, she needed papers. So she spend some time in a inn, waiting for a suitable victim.
So I asked the player to roll Investigation (Intelligence), DC 12:
- 0 success: The character found no one, and actually stayed too much in one position, and got detected by guards looking for intruders...
- 1 success: The character found a suitable officer, and started stalking him waiting for the right occasion...
- 2 success: The character found a suitable officer, and started stalking her, waiting for the right occasion, but the officer was apparently on a mission of her own...
The player rolled 2 successes, followed the suspicious officer, and discovered she was a spy for the red dragon highlord. This information came handy, a few hours later, then the player character got caught and was able to bargain her life with Kitiara herself, by revealing the information.
Not everything needs to be over-the-top
Despite the two examples above, not all dices were either critical successes or critical failures. Most multi-dice rolls were in the expected "average" range. So a difficult roll was usually barely succeeded, if not simply failed, and an easy roll was usually successful.
And this is good, because you can expect your adventure to follow the most probable, average course, and then profit from the surprising results to branch out and give player an exceptional scene to play (be it a critical failure, or a critical success).
Conclusion
By rolling multiple dices instead of one, you can:
- reduce players frustration when unlucky
- have a multi-step outcome, instead of a binary failure/success one
- make dice rolls more awesome, and thus make the action outcome more awesome
- plug in additional options (like inspiration, and critical-roll related descriptions)
I did five solos, using these multi-dice rolls, and I've yet to hear of any negative comment about them.
Of course, not all tests need multi-dice rolls. But multi-dice rolls actually help make some important rolls really feel important, and you can use the separate steps to have very different consequences.
But keep in mind they need significant work for the game master, as you need to come up with different steps, potentially leading to vastly different outcomes.
P.S.:
I first learned of this multiple success rolls when playing Vampire: The Masquerade, and I loved it. Porting it to D&D5 was natural for me, and my players.
I don't know if the designers of the Storyteller System came up with this by themselves, or got inspired by another similar game mechanics from another system, but kudos to the ones who brought this to role-playing games.
P.P.S.:
Yes, I did write an HTML/JS/CSS app to display me the curves, as shown in the screenshots above. The thing is not perfect, but it will help me design my next multi-rolls for my players.
😁
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