Too Many Rolls

I've never been one for short-term campaigns.  Pick-up games that last a single session, for the most part, have never really interested me.  I'll make an exception every now and again, often just to see a new rules system in action, but in order to really grab my attention a game has to be able to have room to grow.  I enjoy watching my characters develop relationships, concoct plans, and grow in both personality and power.  I really love empire building, too.

There's a problem with this, though.  Most games have a breaking point where things just stop working well.  The rules just get so darn heavy that they really get in the way of the game itself.  For some games, this occurs very early on (Palladium, I'm looking at you), but I've yet to play a system that doesn't have this problem, excepting those games that side-step the issue by not having any sort of growth/experience mechanic at all.

3rd Edition D&D in its various incarnations tends to start feeling this problem when characters reach their early teens.  Things get really bogged down and combats start moving at a snail's pace, and if you continue progressing in levels the problems just keep getting worse.  The reasons for this are many, but one of the biggest is the fact that there are simply too many rolls involved in a single round of combat, and this is largely because most of the rolls are useless.

It starts with the initiative roll.  Most systems with combat have some sort of initiative mechanic (though lately I've seen a few that don't have any initiative rules, such as Marvel Heroic Roleplay, which I'm currently running), but when you stop and think about it what is this really for?  You roll initiative so you know when you get to take your action.  In most cases, taking an action is going to involve one or more rolls, so really you're rolling dice to determine when you get permission to roll some more dice.  Broken down like that, it's kind of silly.

Rolling for initiative breaks down the flow of play, too - even if you, like most groups I've played in, only bother rolling for initiative at the start of a combat rather than at the start of every round, it delays the actual meat of the combat while you're getting everyone's roll down and figuring out turn order.

You can sink multiple feats into this initiative roll.  Character concepts can be designed around getting as big a bonus on this as possible, trying to be the fastest gun (or sword, or bow, or whatever) in the West(eros).  But a bad roll makes those feats largely irrelevant, at least for that combat.

But it doesn't end with initiative.  When your turn comes around in the initiative order, you usually end up making some sort of roll to see if your action goes off successfully, an attack being the most basic and most often-used example.  But an attack may or may not strike, and even if it does it doesn't mean you struck well.  Hell, you could roll a critical, which involves another roll to confirm that yes you really did roll a critical, only to roll poorly on damage.  A lot of exciting build up just for a big disappointment.  So really, the important roll is not the one you make to attack, but the one you make to deal damage.

All these rolls are being made to see if you get permission to make the rolls that actually affect things, the ones that you actually care about.  At low levels, this isn't a particularly big deal...  But when you start getting characters who get four or five attacks every time their turn comes around, and who are powerful enough that they need to be challenged by multiple creatures with four or five attacks themselves, then all this rolling starts to become a problem.  This was one of the things that really killed 3rd Edition D&D for me.

Burning Wheel was a hugely influential game on my approach to roleplaying games, whether playing or designing, for a number of reasons.  The reason relevant to this rant is this:  When you make a roll in Burning Wheel, it always matters.  There are no extraneous rolls, and (almost) no rolls-that-you-make-in-order-to-get-permission-to-make-another-roll.  While designing Mistwardens, I've been trying to keep this design strategy in mind.  Every roll should matter, and when you roll well, it should have a significant, measurable effect on gameplay.

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Wrote 1,350 words today.