Videogames and Dice Rolls

Random numbers are an important part in many games, electronic or otherwise. In videogames, their role is most prominent in RPG's, where they are used to determine the outcome of battles. Here, I'd like to take a look at how dice have been used in gaming, and how their usage affected the way different games feel to play.

And how can we talk about RPG's without first talking about the most influential RPG of them all: Dungeons & Dragons. The creators of D&D realised something very important when designing this game: rolling dice and calculating the results takes time. And since people don't like to waste time, they had to make sure that every dice roll was important. This is why there is a dice roll to determine whether you even hit the enemy, on top of a roll to determine the damage you deal. That first roll has everyone at the table on the edge of their seats; a natural 20 could save the players from a tight spot, while a natural 1 could doom even the most well-prepared adventurers.

But what happens when dice rolls can be processed instantly? Good examples of this are the classic Bioware games, which are all based on the D&D rules. In these games the outcomes of dice rolls can be calculated in an instant, and so the rolls happen at a very fast pace. This results in an emphasis on the combat encounter as a whole, rather than the individual dice rolls. However, the importance of those individual rolls still remains, and the game no longer pauses after every role. Because of this, where you once had time to think about the result of your roll and if you should pursue a different strategy, you're now immediately thrown into the next roll, with you just sitting back and feeling like you don't have much control over the situation.

The obvious solution to this problem is to put less weight on the dice rolls, and more on the player's overall strategy. For instance, Final Fantasy accomplishes this by putting the emphasis on resource management throughout the dungeon. Sure, you can spam ultima to win the current fight without effort, but that will drain your MP at a really fast pace, leaving you unable to use this attack when you really need it during a difficult boss. The game becomes about balancing your damage output between insufficient to survive and overkill.

But what if you want those individual dice rolls to matter? Well, as the XCOM games have proven, there's nothing stopping you from artificially making a single dice roll last long. The chance of hitting your target is clearly displayed, but you don't actually know the result of your shot until after the shooting animation has completed. Combine this with a system that emphasises planning and gives you plenty of time after every single action to reasses your strategy, and you have a gameplay system that feel very similar to the physical rolling of dice from D&D.

My point here isn't that one of these games is better than another, but that developers need to be very careful about why a system works before they try to imitate it. If they don't, they might end up with something that does the exact opposite of what they intended.