Dungeons & Dragons: The Fine Line Between Choice and Chance

Dungeoneering

When it comes to player choice in a pen and paper RPG such as Dungeons & Dragons(DnD), it's quite a different beast. In some ways, the player has much more choice, and in others less. Instead of an artificial intelligence deciding the constraints of the situation, there is a Dungeon Master, or DM for short, who imagines the settings, characters, and monsters that you and your friends will interact with. The main aspect that differentiates DnD from computer based RPGs is the fact the the DM comes up with the story-line and encounters, but unlike in a video game, these are still mutable points. Depending on the choices of the players and the success of those choices, the story can be changed in an infinite number of ways (up to the discretion of the DM), instead of the finite number of branches which exist in a game such as Mass Effect; these games can give a fair illusion of many choices, but a well thought out DnD campaign can truly provide that.

Roll of the Dice

 DnD approaches choice using a roll of the dice. For just about every action a player can take, there is dice roll called a difficulty check. In order for your character to succeed in their action, they need to meet or exceed this number, which is chosen by the DM, and if you roll a natural 20 (a pure 20 on a twenty-sided die without adding any modifiers) than you are particularly successful at that action. As you can probably tell, deciding what to do in a game of DnD can go a myriad of different ways, as opposed to choosing choice 1 or choice 2 in a video game. Left up to the discretion of the DM, you can do "okay", "great", "not quite", or "botch" (rolling a 1 on the twenty-sided die), or any other rating of performance in between, with infinitely different results. Of course there are guidelines for the DM to follow, but routinely bending rules is one of the ways DnD retains its fun over the years. Choice is tightly wound with chance in DnD, which in many ways makes it mirror reality, where luck is much of the time a deciding factor of success in our lives. Too bad we don't actually get to battle dragons.


Resources

Crowking, R. (2011, May 31). C is for choices, context, and consequence (part I). In Raven Crowking's Nest. Retrieved April 16, 2014, from http://ravencrowking.blogspot.com/2011/05/c-is-for-choices-context-and.html