Catch Your Hare

One comment I’ve had, about Play Unsafe, is that it doesn’t really mention the structure of roleplaying games. For example, you roll dice in RPGs: how does that affect the techniques in Play Unsafe?

So, dice. Let’s talk about dice.

Dice are fun. I like rolling dice. They make things exciting and unpredictable. When I roll to see if I leap a chasm, I’m not sure whether I’ll succeed or fail. And that’s fun.

Dice are sometimes boring. Recently, I played a game where we were stuck in a boat, miles from shore. Attempting to row, I rolled against my Rowing skill, and failed drastically. Everyone else then had to roll against their Rowing skill, until someone succeeded. It was dull.

So, think about dice like this. They’re fun because they stop you planning ahead. And they’re fun only if they stop you planning ahead.

Dice are fun because you don’t know what will happen when you roll them. Will you pick the lock or get caught by guards? You don’t know until you roll the dice. If you knew, before you rolled, whether you’d succeed, it’d be dull.

But dice are dull when their result doesn’t matter: when you’ve preplanned what will eventually happen. In the example, above, it was clear that the boat would get rowed: so the individual rolls against our Rowing skills were tedious.

Similarly, we’ve all been in combats when a monster just wouldn’t die. You roll dice. You miss. You roll again. You do 1 damage. You know the monster will die, eventually, but you must keep rolling until it does. It’s dull.

When you roll dice, use them as a tool to stop you planning ahead. Use them to throw your plans into confusion. To do this, ensure something will change as a result of the die roll.

One final, interesting thing.

In the old days, characters were randomly generated. You’d roll for your Strength, Dexterity and so on. These days, random character generation is out of vogue: most games include rules for assigning points, rather than rolling.

But, when I assign points, my characters often turn out the same: for me, they’re charismatic and sneaky, but useless in a fight.

So here’s a suggestion. Try randomly generating your characters, like we did in the old days. It’ll force you to play a type of character you weren’t expecting to play. It’ll break you out of your comfort zone. It’ll stop your character being exactly like your last character.

Try it. We’re playing Paranoia, tonight, and we’ll randomly generate characters. (The players don’t know this, yet, but I’m the GM, and when you GM Paranoia, you can do what you want.)