news: 2025-10-27

The Story that the Dice Tell

Last month, while I was talking about how Daggerheart’s mechanics help shape narratives at the table, I kept thinking back to my own history with tabletop role-playing games. Over the decades that I’ve both played in and run various TTRPGs, I’ve had a few experiences that have shaped my views on both what makes for an enjoyable experience at the table and also what makes for a positive memory after the game. They’ve also been key reminders that the dice – and by extension, the game mechanics – exist to help us shape the story that we’ve come together to tell.

The first happened right as Dungeons&Dragons 4th Edition came out, and a friend of mine at the time had picked up the rules to see how it compared to the previous. They’d been thinking about setting up a campaign, all of the people they’d tapped to play felt engaged and had creative ideas for characters, and we were eager to try something new. The launch of a new edition of D&D, a steadfast companion through many eras of all our gaming lives, seemed like an auspicious sign.

Two of the five players had never been in a game before, so they had no prior experiences to challenge and were looking forward to learning; the other three of us and the taleweaver had plenty of experience with 2nd and 3rd Edition, and with TTRPGs in general. However, where prior editions of D&D could comfortably operate within the theater of the mind, 4th Edition practically mandated a map and miniatures.

This was new territory for some of us. I hadn’t used miniatures since my Battletech days in high school. I’d also played Cyberpunk back while Friday Night Firefight was still an independent offering in the boxed set. We had access to high-quality rules for miniatures-based combat, but my friends and I had largely dispensed with it in favor of simply talking through what happened and then rolling dice to determine who lived and who needed to call Trauma Team. Now the miniatures and maps were integrated into the rules at such a level that we seemed to risk ignoring them at our peril.

The four of us with experience felt that before we tried to teach newcomers, we should at least playtest the rules. So, the three of us put together some prototype characters, the taleweaver built a simple encounter – four dire rats in a cave – and over the next three hours we dutifully attempted to rules-as-written our way through the grueling TPK we predicted an hour into the fight when my druid’s honey badger familiar latched onto one of the rats and blocked our path. At the end of the evening, combat remained unresolved, but with its outcome clearly predestined: the cleric, dead; the druid, unconscious; the badger, alive but bleeding, still in the fighter’s way.

By that point, the taleweaver had resolved not only not to use D&D4e for our campaign, but to not host the campaign at all. The experience had been so demoralizing – not just for us as players but for them as the one trying in vain to keep our spirits lifted through the slog – that it had – for the moment – dampened the creative spark that had encouraged them to gather their friends and tell stories together.

Now, before I go any further, let’s pause here and unpack a few things. I am not saying “D&D4e is a bad game.” I am not saying “D&D3e is a better game than 4e.” I am not saying “my friends and I are bad at combat tactics,” though I wouldn’t have much to defend myself against that charge. I’m not even going to argue that D&D4e was a bad fit for our group! I personally don’t care for it – I don’t like how constrained character builds feel to me – but I think if we’d all paused when the badger sunk his fangs into that dire rat’s leg and really looked at what was happening in that moment, both on-table and above, we would’ve figure out a better solution than waiting to die.

Specifically, I want to shine a light in on something I said before: we were trying to rules-as-written our way through the experience. I’m not sure I’ve made it through a session, much less an entire campaign, without a player asking to do something off-book. House rules exist for a reason. Perhaps my druid could’ve “unsummoned” the badger for a round. Perhaps I could’ve tried an animal handling check to break the frenzy. Perhaps the fighter could’ve tried physically grappling the badger and pulling it off the dire rat. I’m sure we had options. And yet, because we’d told ourselves this was only a playtest of the mechanics, we approached it – all of us, players and taleweaver alike – like we only had the options written on the pages. Nobody had any documented solutions, so none of us knew what to do.

Above table, the taleweaver set up an encounter with no on-ramps – no easy ways for an external party to lend assistance – and no off-ramps – no easy ways for us to disengage from the scenario. When the cleric failed their second death save and we began to collectively suspect we weren’t coming home, we knew something had gone wrong, but in that moment none of us could say that had this been a live campaign the taleweaver would have, no doubt, done something story-related in that moment to radically shift the balance of the encounter and reset everybody’s good mood. Perhaps another party of adventurers finds the cave. Perhaps we uncover a cache of healing potions from a previous ill-fated encounter, or even a filth-crusted holy symbol of the Temple of Vermin we could destroy that would disempower the rats. Perhaps in a truly desperate move, a nearby mining operation could cause a tunnel collapse that kills half our foes. Sure, any one of those might have felt like a deux ex machina, but I assure you any of those would’ve been preferable to a level-one team wipe. That defeat was so thorough it killed the taleweaver’s desire to play.

Of course, the person running this hadn’t put that level of thought into the encounter because this was only supposed to be a mechanics playtest. How bad could four dire rats in a cave be? While not as bad as a few kobolds, “four dire rats in a cave” was still an even-matched threat against the party. A few bad rolls here and a few good rolls there turned what could’ve been a winnable battle into a painful defeat. If a taleweaver doesn’t intend for a particular encounter to be the end of the campaign, then they ought to have at least some idea for what do if – when – the random number generators end up being too random for anyone’s liking.

This is not, I must stress, an invitation to cheat: neither on behalf of the players, nor against them. Rather, I invite everyone to consider what paths exist once we cease to confine ourselves to the play space of the mechanics and remember our shared goal of telling stories together. In the one campaign I’m currently playing and not weaving, one of the other player’s characters is a Grave-domain cleric in service to our world’s goddess of death. At one point, right before a fight we’d been anticipating for several sessions, said player turned to the taleweaver and said, voice a little shaky, “I’m worried we won’t survive this fight, and the campaign’s not nearly close to done.”

The taleweaver, without missing a beat, said “Janora serves the Queen of Night. Do you think the Lady of Veils is going to lose track of one of her most devoted disciples, one she’s been closely monitoring for the last year, especially if you and your friends suddenly manifest in her court?” We ended up not discovering whether our souls would end up bound to her service while we quested to be re-embodied, however that happened. However, that campaign still isn’t over yet, and I know of at least two mid-boss encounters ahead of us, one of which guards an artifact we know only as the Ender.

There’s time yet, is what I’m saying.

But even in live games, sometimes the dice tell a story that people don’t enjoy, one that cries out for a level of narrative and even social support. Some years ago, my spouse and I had joined a D&D5e campaign, and the icebreaker scenario had been to escort a group of diplomats to a military outpost to negotiate aid to a nearby encampment in exchange for an end to the raiding. Diplomacy failed – possibly because of our intervention – and we all rolled for initiative.

At the outset, we were given two goals: a combat goal of defeating the raiding party, and a non-combat goal of getting the gate down to stop their ability to enter the fortress. Immediately, my spouse – dedicated to complicating the lives of taleweavers everywhere by seeking non-combat-oriented solutions whenever possible – volunteered to run for the portcullis controls, and the rest of us agreed. We all understood that, if successful, it would instantly end the fight… at the cost of us being numerically disadvantaged on the battlefield until then. No matter, we thought. The rest of us could hold out for a few rounds while one of us went to activate the defenses.

I’m sure that my spouse envisioned the gate controls as perhaps a puzzle to be solved, or a Dexterity-based challenge involving Slight of Hand to untie ropes or pick a lock anchoring a chain. No, the taleweaver had written a heavy chain on a rusted crank that would have to be lowered through sheer effort: a Strength test. And having spent two rounds getting to the controls only to discover they were beyond her character’s abilities, my spouse now faced a dilemma: spend two rounds racing back to the party, all for naught; or step up to the challenge and hope.

And here is where the dice told their story. For the next three rounds of combat, as the rest of the party steadily lost ground against the raiders, my spouse tried three times to move that crank and could not roll above a six, which with a Strength of 10 and no proficiency in Athletics would not beat a DC10 skill check, much less the DC15 the taleweaver would later say they’d originally chosen for the task. It was much like the scene in Big Trouble in Little China in which Jack Burton falls on his back with a knife in his bootstrap to take out one of the guards… and then spends the rest of the fight struggling to get out from under the guard’s impossibly heavy dead body. Except, it wasn’t funny, and we weren’t laughing about it.

D&D5e’s encounter system is pretty well tuned, and the taleweaver at the table had professional experience. Removing one player from the fight put the party at an action economy disadvantage that we knew would eventually overwhelm us, but we assumed we’d be able to outlast the deficit long enough for my spouse’s character to succeed in their mission. None of us knew what they’d find on while exploring the non-combat option, only that we knew it existed, and that it was worth exploring as an alternative to killing a bunch of hungry raiders.

However, once we’d committed to it, we were stuck; Even just two rounds of being down one target relative to our foes had left us bloodied. Three more rounds, even with good rolls, had put multiple PCs close to death in the opening combat of a campaign we’d agreed in our Session Zero should try to make PC death meaningful. And yet, with each each failed check, the odds of anyone’s survival grew dimmer, and my spouse began to feel the weight of everyone anxiously awaiting whether this would be the turn we lived.

For three rounds, my spouse asked, in increasingly strained-but-still-polite tones, for any means of increasing their odds of success, but the taleweaver simply shook their head, looking pained at having been caught without a plan. Then we all held our breath while my spouse picked up their d20, and we all let out a collective groan as once again the rusty crank refused to budge. Above table, people began apologizing for having “made the poor decision” to endorse the non-combat plan.

And that, unfortunately, was the moment things fell apart. My spouse said, “I’m sorry, I’m not having a good time. Please finish combat without me and let me know when I should come back.” And then before anyone else could speak, my spouse stood up, excused themself, and stepped into the other room. I stood a moment later and followed in support. A minute or two later, the taleweaver came out and announced that they were ending the session early, as nobody left felt comfortable finishing combat without us. That campaign, as well, never made it to session two, but neither my spouse nor I felt particularly disappointed by it.

When folks started vocally second-guessing our choices at the table because of how the dice went, my spouse went from feeling not just annoyed at the unlucky streak – bad rolls can happen to anyone – but unsupported by the other players. We had collectively chosen to take a risk, but because of how the dice were rolling, we weren’t getting the reward we wanted for taking it. In response, some of the players began to retroactively withdraw their support for the decision we had collectively made. That, in turn, put my spouse into a bind: continue to hope for good luck and suffer the complaints of players already upset by the perceived waste, or burn two more rounds trying to get back knowing it would be too little too late. With five combat turns spent and no visible progress to show for it, they had precious few options that felt comfortable.

Remember, the taleweaver had already decided, behind the screen, to lower the difficulty from 15 to 10 to even the odds. In a sense, they were already “cheating in our favor.” This isn’t even about rules-as-written versus rules-as-intended because there was no ambiguity to what happened. This is about the fact that at some point, some people stopped having fun with the game. We had collectively agreed in our Session Zero that we wanted PC deaths to “feel meaningful.” My understanding of that is that players have some say over when and how their characters pass, not necessarily that they get to dictate the terms of their departure from the world, but that heroes had tools for avoiding deaths when the time wasn’t right. Session one didn’t feel to anyone at the table like the right time for anybody to die.

And just so I’ve said it, I know there are players for whom that kind of play is fun, and I do not wish to rob them of their joy. There are people for whom that degree of simulationismis an absolute delight. They thrill in knowing their characters might die of food poisoning, or tetanus, or starvation in the course of a campaign. I’m sure there are people who enjoy tracking encumbrance and counting the arrows in their quivers, too. To be fair, I can understand the attraction at an intellectual level. Every time I try to tell a story from that mindset, though, I just end up like a story about how my seventh-level fighter suddenly dropped out of the narrative because we stopped at a coastal inn for dinner and she ate some bad mackerel and expired wouldn’t really be compelling, outside of perhaps a dadaist critique of the adventuring lifestyle.

So what could’ve fixed this? Again, I must stress, this isn’t about foot-niblicking the die. Nor is this about whether D&D is the right game for people looking for non-violent solutions to problems. This is about the power to look beyond the dice and to consider all the tools at one’s disposal. Three times, “can I get some help on this roll” could’ve been met with any number of responses, ranging from “there’s somebody there who can give you the Help action” to “you’ve loosened it enough working at this for three rounds that you can roll with advantage” to just having another guard in the tower with a better Strength score respond to their cries for assistance. By the third turn, I think the taleweaver could have just declared that enough time had been spent working the chain loose and nobody would’ve been upset. There was no reason for characters to die just because one of the Sacred Icosahedra refused to cooperate.

But instead, folks stuck to their cold equations and we collectively decided that, because the dice tell a story, whether we lived or died depended on one player rolling above a ten before the taleweaver successfully did so enough times that the rest of us bled out from the rain of raiders’ arrows that fell on us from the sky that grim and harrowed day. Three times the die rolled less than ten, and so the rest of us faced death together… at least until my spouse showed they had learned the real lesson of the cave full of dire rats. They recognized that they weren’t having fun, and they they pulled the ripcord before things got any worse.

My spouse understood, and helped me understand in that moment, that the point of a TTRPG is to have fun telling stories together. I love rolling polyhedra as much as the next person, and I know few joys like “sending kids to camp” – lending dice to another player for a big roll – and seeing them do well. That said, if I want the joy of rolling a lot of dice, I can play Farkle or Yahtzee. If I absolutely have to have rules more complex than that, I could try to talk some friends into playing Risk 2210 or Titan. But when I want to play a role-playing game, whether it’s around a table or sitting in front of a computer, for me it’s about the role-playing. It’s about the story-telling. And most importantly, it’s about having fun in the company of friends. My spouse wasn’t having fun, so they stopped playing.

The dice don’t tell the story. The dice help us understand and create the kinds of stories we want to tell.