Fabled lands dice needed1/28/2024 ![]() Bran Stark’s life might not have been nearly so interesting if he’d taken the stairs. In non-interactive stories, the perception of coincidence is often the jumping-off point for adventure. Usually it’s a fate worse than that (for the character), but something much more satisfying (for the player). In M A R Barker’s Adventures on Tekumel gamebooks, unlucky dice rolls rarely spell death. Think of the final showdown in movies like Galaxy Quest, Kung Fu Panda, or Jack the Giant Slayer. That’s because the author is aware that the flipside of an unlucky death – achieving victory by a sheer fluke – is equally unsatisfying. There’s an item or clever tactic that you have to use. Incidentally, notice that the big climactic fights in gamebooks are almost never left to the dice. Suddenly, the jewel of power is starting to look like paste. In that case I won, but only by cheating. And I’m not happy because I now have to go back and start again – or ignore the bad dice rolls, which is equally unsatisfying as it breaks the spell of immersion. From the gamebook author’s point of view, that makes a very unsatisfying and anti-dramatic story – I climbed the wizard’s tower, snuck past the spider-god, swiped the jewel of power, evaded the poisoned traps, but then got killed in an unlucky fight with a mugger on the way back to my inn. The risk here is that I might get unlucky and die, and that’s in nobody’s interest. Just have to grit my teeth, roll the dice and see how it turns out. That single orc or militiaman might kill me, especially if I’m already wounded from an earlier fight. The only function of randomness here, it would seem, is to increase the sense of threat. I have to take the quest I’m given and stay on the rails that the author has provided. I can’t just stick a pin in the map and say I’m sailing off to explore the uncharted wastes. ![]() Yes, but… in the case of a gamebook, there’s no question about who wears the authorial pants. In the shared storytelling experience that is role-playing, dice are the court of appeal that stops one person from taking over the whole narrative. That’s what stops role-playing games from getting as arbitrary and unfair as the points system at Hogwarts. And it won’t be the autocratic authorial whim of the umpire that decides if I succeed or fail, it’ll be the dice, referenced against the skills listed on my character sheet. The umpire (GM if you must) can’t just say, “You’re taken prisoner,” because I can resist arrest, hide, grab a chandelier chain and swing over the guards’ heads – or try, at least. Much more than a means of showing that the unexpected can occur, and thus ramping up tension, dice are democratic. Paradox? Schizophrenia? No, it’s the possibility of dice that I think is essential. Yet I prefer those game sessions where dice are never rolled. Sometimes you hear a click and it’s: “Misfire! Kill the son of a bitch.” (Which, incidentally, I would never have credited if I hadn’t played Avalon Hill’s Gunslinger.) Sometimes a level 1 civilian throws a roof tile and it kills the level 12 general. ![]() Because sometimes the Athenians force the Spartans uphill. And why use dice there? Because sometimes the unexpected happens. ![]() Okay, but why are there dice in role-playing games? Because RPGs grew out of tabletop wargaming. So the whole idea there is to replicate the experience of a face-to-face role-playing game, and dice are just part of that. The purpose of books like Death Test by Steve Jackson (the US one) seems to have been to help newbies get the hang of TFT if they didn’t have a group of fellow players. So let’s rewind to the mid-1970s, and the Fantasy Trip solo series which is probably what rules-heavy gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy evolved from. Actually, we need to go a step further back, because dice were not a feature of the first really popular gamebook series, Choose Your Own Adventure. You could start by asking why dice rolls were ever part of gamebooks in the first place.
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