Table Top versus Video Games: Part 1 - The Dice

This might be a bit deep for a first plan, but I posted this up on our website, theoreticalgames.com, a few minutes ago and thought I'd share. Let me know what you think!

Our upcoming game is pulling very heavily on a tabletop game we created back in the early to mid-90's. The original game had all the pre-requisites, dice, hex maps, and character information sheets-a-plenty. It was a great game, that was designed to be easy to pick up and learn and yet fun to play for battle after battle. It was a logical choice to make it into our first commercial video game, but we knew that making a fun table top game into a fun video game was going to require more than just having a great rule set. We needed to capture what made the tabletop game... well... fun.

So if I were to ask you just casually, "How important is actually rolling the dice to you?" what would your gut response be? Our team all agreed it doesn't really matter, and that appears to be a fairly common response as most tabletop conversions downplay, or remove the dice altogether. So, for our game, we quickly pushed the dice rolls behind the proverbial curtain and pretended like they didn't exist. It just works and that's all the player really cares about anyway, right? Right, but there's a catch.

I've always gone out of my way to play video games that had some sort of connection to my tabletop gaming youth. From Baldur's Gate to Risk and many games in between, and almost all of them were enjoyable, and sometimes even fun, but they never captured the joy I had of playing the game as a kid. What did they not do as well as their tabletop equivalent? It's a very hard question that I don't think has one single answer (Hence the multi-part nature of this post), but I think the role (no pun intended) of the dice is one critical failure of many of them.

The first thing that the die roll gives the player is a sense of control. It may sound completely counter intuitive, as the nature of it's design is to ALWAYS provide a random result. But every D&D adventure I had in my parent's basement involved the players shouting a rather specific number at their die and usually other players or the DM shouting a rather different and often times lower number in response. Why would we have such a universal reaction to a die roll if we didn't somehow delude ourselves in thinking that we could control it? Now, I don't know about anyone else, but every computer controlled die roll, whether it's visible to me or is happening behind the scenes has just as universally failed to make me feel like I was in control. I'm not advocating that game designers should start having users shake their mice or blow on the screen in order to simulate the sensations, but game designers do need to take seriously the question of how they make their users feel in control of the result of what is otherwise a random event, even if they aren't. Some games attempt this by providing Rock, Paper, Scissor type mini-games to mask the randomness of the game and provide some sort of input from the users, and while it's recognizing the problem, it's certainly not the ideal solution. In Baldur's Gate, for example, almost all the people I know who played the game, set the options to pause at each stage of combat, not because we could do better than the computer, or it improved our chances of success, we just wanted some human involvement instead of a sterile simulation of combat. Were we in any more control than we were before? No, but we felt like we were.

The other big advantage that tabletop games have in regards to die rolls is the physical nature of the act itself. I certainly don't have clinical or laboratory proof, but from my personal experience I can tell you that the act of throwing the dice, the anticipation of the result, and the victory dances that followed, involved some serious adrenaline and endorphin rushes. The result of those chemical injections into my blood stream was not only an addiction to the game, but also an emotional connection to the characters and armies I controlled. As I would make my last ditch rush into Australia, after crushing defeats across the globe, and as my brother inevitably took Asian and prepared for the invasion from Siam into Indonesia, we knew what the outcome would be. But when he declared his attack and I picked up my dice, none of it mattered, the game didn't matter... all I wanted my little Pacific Islander armies to do was DEFEND! And I would shout our rallying cry, "DEFEND! DEFEND!" while I rolled the dice, and I would hold my breathe in tense anticipation, and I would mourn the loss of another two armies as my brother would flick them across the board. I still think fondly of those games, more so than any of the subsequent video game battles we've waged since.

For our video game to have any kind of chance for success, we must capture the physical, exhilarating seconds of combat resolution, we must allow the player to make those emotional connections to their characters and we must make them feel in control of the outcome.
-Andrew