You play poker by placing bets and assembling a hand. You play Monopoly by rolling dice, moving around the board, buying property, and collecting rent. You play a videogame by pressing buttons in certain sequences at the right moments.
This might be called the "interface", the way in which your actions as a player are translated into actions in the game.
RPGs have two main interfaces in general: the dice, and your own decisions. These are the two ways to determine what happens in the world: either you decide something happens, or you roll to see if it happens. Some RPG’s favor the rolling, some RPG’s favor the deciding, but most contain at least a bit of both in some measure.
Where a game decides to employ these two points of interface can have a massive effect on how well the game meets the goals the players have for it. It boils down to a core psychological concept: the idea of control.
Inalienable Liberty
Broadly speaking, we’ve all got free will. Except for the strict determinists in the audience, this should be fairly obvious. If you played D&D last weekend, it wasn’t me who made you do it. It also wasn’t anyone else. Even if someone was standing next to you with a gun to your head forcing you pretend to be a mightily-thewed barbarian, you still have a choice in that scenario (you can choose to get shot, at least).
That doesn’t mean the outside world exerts no force, of course. The fun you have playing D&D, your lack of other activities, the fact that you don’t want to get shot…all of these influence the decision you make. They provide context. The decision, however, cannot be anyone else’s. You must make the choice to play or not, and all the rest of the world can do is try to influence that choice.
This is, in part, is what is meant when the US Constitution declares that Liberty is an “inalienable” right, given to us upon our creation. You can’t separate a person from their ability to make a choice: having that free will is part of what defines us as people. Without it, we are mere automatons. Even in prison, in shackles, a person can make a choice about their actions. Indeed, robbing a person of that ability is considered one of the hallmarks of villainy, no better than murder and in some ways decidedly worse. Even if the person is alive, you’ve destroyed what makes them a person: their ability to make their own choices.
It's an assumption grounded in philosophical observation: we as players have free will.
Presumably, our characters do as well. They are meant to be characters, not automatons, not props, so as people (imaginary people), they also have this inalienable liberty. So when your barbarian chopped up that goblin in last night’s game, it was because your barbarian, as a character, chose to do that. You as the barbarian’s player also chose to have your character do that. Your choice in this instance was the same as the barbarian’s choice. We say then that you made an in-character choice: a choice you made as a player that was also a choice your character made. Your decision reinforced the character of the barbarian as a dude who hacks up goblins.
Making in-character decisions is the root of playing a role. It is first interface of RPG’s: decision-making.
I A Perfect Body, I Want A Perfect Soul
When we make decisions in-character, we have intimate control over our characters. We also make out-of-character decisions about our characters on a regular basis. For instance, your character last weekend may have been a barbarian. If you were playing 3e or 4e, that was probably a choice very made out-of-character: you intentionally created that character with that class. Your barbarian didn’t make the choice during play to become a barbarian, you didn’t make an in-character decision, you opted to apply the barbarian class to the character purely as a player. You opted to give them the stats and race and class they have.
You can create a barbarian in-character, of course. But if you’re trying to do this with in-character decision making, you’ll run up against some things that make no sense that the game still requires. People don’t generally determine how strong or intelligent they are, nor do they determine what species they belong to. You didn’t choose to be human, and you didn’t choose to have allergies, either. You may have decided to work out or study hard, but even then, you know things outside of your control influence it. Having ADHD might not make you dumb, but it can make it harder to be certain kinds of book smart, and there’s not a very big chance of you becoming the next rock star theoretical physicist with it. Your character is going to need stats, a race, a class, things that your character probably didn't choose for herself.
We run up against the first limit of that first interface here: there are things that a character cannot control that a player can. This experience of making out-of-character choices about your character rather than in-character choices as your character is something we’re going to call “dissociation:” doing things as a player that aren’t associated with the actions of your character.
Because most people aren’t fundamentalists, most gameplay is going to involve some dissociation. The level of dissociation of a given game, or even a given table, can vary. If you play 1e D&D, your character creation is less dissociated than if you play 3e (though there is still dissociation in 1e: you choose your race, and you choose your class from among those that you qualify for). It’s possible, though, to play 1e as more dissociated (choose your class from ANY class!), or 3e as less dissociated (ability requirements for classes!). The more often a player makes out-of-character choices, the more dissociation occurs in that player’s game.
I’ve talked about how “actor” and “director” perspectives can change the way a game is played, and these correspond roughly to a level of tolerance for dissociation: “actors” want to make their decisions in-character wherever possible, and “directors” have a higher tolerance for dissociated decision-making (and thus they employ it more often when it is a useful tool). This also features into a player’s emotional goals for the game: players interested in experiencing their character’s emotions are going to want fewer dissociated mechanics, and players interested in achieving a particular emotional response are going to be more tolerant of them as a method to get at that response. Again, the importance of both is reinforced: RPGs need gamemasters, so someone is going to have to be at least marginally more director-focused than actor-focused.
Now that we’ve introduced dissociated decision making, we have a game not unlike Amber Diceless, a game that is played entirely by making decisions. In that game, you build your core character stats with an auction between the players. Clearly, this is dissociated: a character in Amber with a higher Endurance hasn’t actually bid against other characters to become the toughest, but the player has.
You can clearly run a perfectly entertaining game with only those two types of decision-making as the interface. RPGs generally add one more interface, though. If in-character decision-making is the role-playing of an RPG, then rolling dice is the game of an RPG.
Roll Your Own
So there are points at which that our characters and our players can make a choice, and points at which only the players make choices, but in either case, there is the option of replacing a choice with a random roll, if you want. Frequently enough, we want.
All dice rolling may seem rather inherently dissociated (your character never rolls dice), but the truth is that it can also be intimately tethered to an in-character action, with the dice performing the role of “all external factors not already taken into account.” The dice can be seen rather than as a simple game mechanic, as a way of simplifying and representing the chaos of any given action. The dice, then, have a role to play in in-character action, too: they are the element of chance, the chaos in life, and the unpredictability of the moment. While none of us choose the species of our birth, we can represent this lack of choice by abdicating the decision to the dice, preserving our “actor” perspective and our sense of in-character action without violation. We as a player might roll some dice, but this isn’t so different from simply determining which of the already-existing potential characters our character may be. In areas where our characters cannot simply make choices, we roll dice to represent that loss of control.
All of this ties into an important issue regarding player freedom. If your perspective is that of an “actor,” then a roll of the dice represents something that your character has no direct control over. But, if your perspective is that of a “director,” the roll of the dice can represent much, much more.
With that in mind, we’re going to take a close look at one particular point of controversy in the D&D game: the 4e version of fireball. We’re going to unpack one of the ways in which it is controversial, one of the ways in which it splits the player base, and we’ll see how this thought process plays out at the table.
Ball of Fire, or Disco Inferno?
So, aside from its “cube” shape and fairly mediocre damage, fireball has not been one of the poster children for what 4e does differently than other e’s. The issue we’re looking at here is not its damage or its conformity to the grid, but rather how the decision gets made as to who gets hit and who doesn’t.
Ultimately, the effects of a 4e fireball and any other e’s fireball are fairly similar. There’s an explosion of fire, and some critters get burned. Depending on your e and your DM, maybe some objects in the area get burned, too. Agile creatures can avoid getting burned marginally better than others.
However, at the table, the process of using a fireball on a group of PC’s looks very different. In 4e, when a player has a character cast fireball, that player rolls the dice to see who is affected. In previous e's, when a player has a character cast fireball, the players of the affected characters roll the dice to see if their characters are affected.
It’s on this little difference that the notion of independent action can hang.
See, for those with an immersive “actor” perspective, it’s obvious that their characters would try to avoid the damage, and so they would make an in-character decision to dodge the damage. But in having the active character roll all the dice, 4e removes that decision point. Instead, the attacker’s attack roll dictates if the characters in the area dodge the fireball or not, and that puts everyone in the area of a fireball rather automatically into "director" perspective.
4e’s logic in this seems to be that attackers should always roll to hit against a defender’s static defenses. There’s probably reasons for that logic (perhaps “elegance?”), but, because of it's dissociation, it's clearly not an in-character reason. From the perspective of an “actor” playing a target of that spell, they were just told they dodged an effect. They didn’t make the decision, they didn’t roll any dice, but their character avoided the effect all the same. This is suddenly a violation of that in-character perspective: the player who shot the fireball determined if you dodged. Someone else dictated your actions. It doesn't feel like you dodged, as a player. It feels like the spellcaster missed.
Someone with a higher tolerance for dissociation might not care, and might even consider it better because of the other things it brings to the table (perhaps "elegance?"). However, someone with a low tolerance for dissociation, who seeks their fun via their character, with an "actor" perspective, will have at least a minor problem with that. It might not ruin the night, or the game, but it's not a desirable effect: it's not getting at the goals that this player has for their night of gaming.
The 4e fireball feels, from an actor perspective, more like a barrage of individual flames, aimed at targets, that the caster is firing, rather than a single explosion that simply fills the room that the defenders must avoid. Less of a single ball of fire, and more of a fiery laser show.
The fix is mathematically and thematically fairly insignificant: simply change the 4e attack roll to a static number, turn the 4e static defense into a bonus, and you have, essentially, the 3e saving throw system back, so that potential victims of the spell can actively avoid the ball of fire.
This change seems minor to those who don't experience the problem, but that's often the case in game design. Game design is probably 90% psychology. Even if it doesn’t look like anything has really changed, that little fix (perhaps applied system-wide to area effects) could make a huge difference in the acceptance and feel of the game in play for many players. Simply swapping the die roll from the attacker to the defender makes the effect feel more like it's a ball of fire that the defenders are dodging, rather than a series of heat rays that the caster is targeting.
Clearly, this extends out to other effects (such as forced movement) and interfaces with a few other topics, which we will no doubt discuss at some future point. For now, I’m mostly interested in how you feel about when you want to make dice rolls: when you roll the dice, is there some intention or action associated with that chaos? Or are dice for you entirely abstract, entirely in the realm of dissocaited meta-game? In other words, does it matter to you if someone else rolls to determine if you dodge an attack, or would you like your "active" defenses to be something that you roll? Let me know in the comments!
This might be called the "interface", the way in which your actions as a player are translated into actions in the game.
RPGs have two main interfaces in general: the dice, and your own decisions. These are the two ways to determine what happens in the world: either you decide something happens, or you roll to see if it happens. Some RPG’s favor the rolling, some RPG’s favor the deciding, but most contain at least a bit of both in some measure.
Where a game decides to employ these two points of interface can have a massive effect on how well the game meets the goals the players have for it. It boils down to a core psychological concept: the idea of control.
Inalienable Liberty
Broadly speaking, we’ve all got free will. Except for the strict determinists in the audience, this should be fairly obvious. If you played D&D last weekend, it wasn’t me who made you do it. It also wasn’t anyone else. Even if someone was standing next to you with a gun to your head forcing you pretend to be a mightily-thewed barbarian, you still have a choice in that scenario (you can choose to get shot, at least).
That doesn’t mean the outside world exerts no force, of course. The fun you have playing D&D, your lack of other activities, the fact that you don’t want to get shot…all of these influence the decision you make. They provide context. The decision, however, cannot be anyone else’s. You must make the choice to play or not, and all the rest of the world can do is try to influence that choice.
This is, in part, is what is meant when the US Constitution declares that Liberty is an “inalienable” right, given to us upon our creation. You can’t separate a person from their ability to make a choice: having that free will is part of what defines us as people. Without it, we are mere automatons. Even in prison, in shackles, a person can make a choice about their actions. Indeed, robbing a person of that ability is considered one of the hallmarks of villainy, no better than murder and in some ways decidedly worse. Even if the person is alive, you’ve destroyed what makes them a person: their ability to make their own choices.
It's an assumption grounded in philosophical observation: we as players have free will.
Presumably, our characters do as well. They are meant to be characters, not automatons, not props, so as people (imaginary people), they also have this inalienable liberty. So when your barbarian chopped up that goblin in last night’s game, it was because your barbarian, as a character, chose to do that. You as the barbarian’s player also chose to have your character do that. Your choice in this instance was the same as the barbarian’s choice. We say then that you made an in-character choice: a choice you made as a player that was also a choice your character made. Your decision reinforced the character of the barbarian as a dude who hacks up goblins.
Making in-character decisions is the root of playing a role. It is first interface of RPG’s: decision-making.
I A Perfect Body, I Want A Perfect Soul
When we make decisions in-character, we have intimate control over our characters. We also make out-of-character decisions about our characters on a regular basis. For instance, your character last weekend may have been a barbarian. If you were playing 3e or 4e, that was probably a choice very made out-of-character: you intentionally created that character with that class. Your barbarian didn’t make the choice during play to become a barbarian, you didn’t make an in-character decision, you opted to apply the barbarian class to the character purely as a player. You opted to give them the stats and race and class they have.
You can create a barbarian in-character, of course. But if you’re trying to do this with in-character decision making, you’ll run up against some things that make no sense that the game still requires. People don’t generally determine how strong or intelligent they are, nor do they determine what species they belong to. You didn’t choose to be human, and you didn’t choose to have allergies, either. You may have decided to work out or study hard, but even then, you know things outside of your control influence it. Having ADHD might not make you dumb, but it can make it harder to be certain kinds of book smart, and there’s not a very big chance of you becoming the next rock star theoretical physicist with it. Your character is going to need stats, a race, a class, things that your character probably didn't choose for herself.
We run up against the first limit of that first interface here: there are things that a character cannot control that a player can. This experience of making out-of-character choices about your character rather than in-character choices as your character is something we’re going to call “dissociation:” doing things as a player that aren’t associated with the actions of your character.
Because most people aren’t fundamentalists, most gameplay is going to involve some dissociation. The level of dissociation of a given game, or even a given table, can vary. If you play 1e D&D, your character creation is less dissociated than if you play 3e (though there is still dissociation in 1e: you choose your race, and you choose your class from among those that you qualify for). It’s possible, though, to play 1e as more dissociated (choose your class from ANY class!), or 3e as less dissociated (ability requirements for classes!). The more often a player makes out-of-character choices, the more dissociation occurs in that player’s game.
I’ve talked about how “actor” and “director” perspectives can change the way a game is played, and these correspond roughly to a level of tolerance for dissociation: “actors” want to make their decisions in-character wherever possible, and “directors” have a higher tolerance for dissociated decision-making (and thus they employ it more often when it is a useful tool). This also features into a player’s emotional goals for the game: players interested in experiencing their character’s emotions are going to want fewer dissociated mechanics, and players interested in achieving a particular emotional response are going to be more tolerant of them as a method to get at that response. Again, the importance of both is reinforced: RPGs need gamemasters, so someone is going to have to be at least marginally more director-focused than actor-focused.
Now that we’ve introduced dissociated decision making, we have a game not unlike Amber Diceless, a game that is played entirely by making decisions. In that game, you build your core character stats with an auction between the players. Clearly, this is dissociated: a character in Amber with a higher Endurance hasn’t actually bid against other characters to become the toughest, but the player has.
You can clearly run a perfectly entertaining game with only those two types of decision-making as the interface. RPGs generally add one more interface, though. If in-character decision-making is the role-playing of an RPG, then rolling dice is the game of an RPG.
Roll Your Own
So there are points at which that our characters and our players can make a choice, and points at which only the players make choices, but in either case, there is the option of replacing a choice with a random roll, if you want. Frequently enough, we want.
All dice rolling may seem rather inherently dissociated (your character never rolls dice), but the truth is that it can also be intimately tethered to an in-character action, with the dice performing the role of “all external factors not already taken into account.” The dice can be seen rather than as a simple game mechanic, as a way of simplifying and representing the chaos of any given action. The dice, then, have a role to play in in-character action, too: they are the element of chance, the chaos in life, and the unpredictability of the moment. While none of us choose the species of our birth, we can represent this lack of choice by abdicating the decision to the dice, preserving our “actor” perspective and our sense of in-character action without violation. We as a player might roll some dice, but this isn’t so different from simply determining which of the already-existing potential characters our character may be. In areas where our characters cannot simply make choices, we roll dice to represent that loss of control.
All of this ties into an important issue regarding player freedom. If your perspective is that of an “actor,” then a roll of the dice represents something that your character has no direct control over. But, if your perspective is that of a “director,” the roll of the dice can represent much, much more.
With that in mind, we’re going to take a close look at one particular point of controversy in the D&D game: the 4e version of fireball. We’re going to unpack one of the ways in which it is controversial, one of the ways in which it splits the player base, and we’ll see how this thought process plays out at the table.
Ball of Fire, or Disco Inferno?
So, aside from its “cube” shape and fairly mediocre damage, fireball has not been one of the poster children for what 4e does differently than other e’s. The issue we’re looking at here is not its damage or its conformity to the grid, but rather how the decision gets made as to who gets hit and who doesn’t.
Ultimately, the effects of a 4e fireball and any other e’s fireball are fairly similar. There’s an explosion of fire, and some critters get burned. Depending on your e and your DM, maybe some objects in the area get burned, too. Agile creatures can avoid getting burned marginally better than others.
However, at the table, the process of using a fireball on a group of PC’s looks very different. In 4e, when a player has a character cast fireball, that player rolls the dice to see who is affected. In previous e's, when a player has a character cast fireball, the players of the affected characters roll the dice to see if their characters are affected.
It’s on this little difference that the notion of independent action can hang.
See, for those with an immersive “actor” perspective, it’s obvious that their characters would try to avoid the damage, and so they would make an in-character decision to dodge the damage. But in having the active character roll all the dice, 4e removes that decision point. Instead, the attacker’s attack roll dictates if the characters in the area dodge the fireball or not, and that puts everyone in the area of a fireball rather automatically into "director" perspective.
4e’s logic in this seems to be that attackers should always roll to hit against a defender’s static defenses. There’s probably reasons for that logic (perhaps “elegance?”), but, because of it's dissociation, it's clearly not an in-character reason. From the perspective of an “actor” playing a target of that spell, they were just told they dodged an effect. They didn’t make the decision, they didn’t roll any dice, but their character avoided the effect all the same. This is suddenly a violation of that in-character perspective: the player who shot the fireball determined if you dodged. Someone else dictated your actions. It doesn't feel like you dodged, as a player. It feels like the spellcaster missed.
Someone with a higher tolerance for dissociation might not care, and might even consider it better because of the other things it brings to the table (perhaps "elegance?"). However, someone with a low tolerance for dissociation, who seeks their fun via their character, with an "actor" perspective, will have at least a minor problem with that. It might not ruin the night, or the game, but it's not a desirable effect: it's not getting at the goals that this player has for their night of gaming.
The 4e fireball feels, from an actor perspective, more like a barrage of individual flames, aimed at targets, that the caster is firing, rather than a single explosion that simply fills the room that the defenders must avoid. Less of a single ball of fire, and more of a fiery laser show.
The fix is mathematically and thematically fairly insignificant: simply change the 4e attack roll to a static number, turn the 4e static defense into a bonus, and you have, essentially, the 3e saving throw system back, so that potential victims of the spell can actively avoid the ball of fire.
This change seems minor to those who don't experience the problem, but that's often the case in game design. Game design is probably 90% psychology. Even if it doesn’t look like anything has really changed, that little fix (perhaps applied system-wide to area effects) could make a huge difference in the acceptance and feel of the game in play for many players. Simply swapping the die roll from the attacker to the defender makes the effect feel more like it's a ball of fire that the defenders are dodging, rather than a series of heat rays that the caster is targeting.
Clearly, this extends out to other effects (such as forced movement) and interfaces with a few other topics, which we will no doubt discuss at some future point. For now, I’m mostly interested in how you feel about when you want to make dice rolls: when you roll the dice, is there some intention or action associated with that chaos? Or are dice for you entirely abstract, entirely in the realm of dissocaited meta-game? In other words, does it matter to you if someone else rolls to determine if you dodge an attack, or would you like your "active" defenses to be something that you roll? Let me know in the comments!
