by Andrew Gronosky
Gamemaster’s Duct Tape is a series of short articles on quick fixes for common problems at the tabletop RPG table. It’s based on the author’s 40+ years experience as a forever gamemaster.
The Problem: Players fail a key dice roll and their progress in the adventure is blocked. The players may realize this, and start looking for reasons to re-roll the dice, such as letting someone else try. The narrative flow is broken and replaced by bargaining and/or bickering over who gets the next re-roll.
The Solution: Players don’t have to roll dice for every task. You can just declare that they succeed. Very often, that’s the best way to get gameplay out of a rut. Just provide a narrative justification for why the character is able to succeed. “All right, with your 16 Strength, you’re able to force that door open eventually” or “That’s such a good argument, the baron is convinced and agrees to hire you.”
In my 40+ years as a GM, I have never once heard a player complain because I let their character succeed without a dice roll. I have had players announce they wanted their character to fail, usually because failure would be highly amusing.
As a gamemaster, the dice are your tools. It behooves you to give some thought to how and when you want to use them. The Fate™ RPG has a piece of advice that changed the way I think about dice rolls forever. “Roll the dice when succeeding or failing at the action could each contribute something interesting to the game.” (Balsera Leonard and Kurt Komoda. Fate : Core System. Evil Hat Productions 2013. Page 187.)
It seems a lot of GMs presume rolling dice is a necessary part of gameplay—that the player’s choice of action is only successful if it’s confirmed by a dice roll. Taking this to an extreme would be absurd: do you want the player to roll dice every time their character tries to cross a street?
The GM is always making decisions about when dice are needed and when they’re not. I’m just suggesting that you think of dice as failure generators rather than success generators, and use them in situations where you want a chance of introducing failure. You’ll never need to fudge dice rolls if you make intentional decisions about when to roll dice in the first place.
The duct tape solution is simply to let the PC’s action succeed without a dice roll whenever it makes sense or when failure would get you stuck.