“Dice of Destiny” was one of my earliest professional sales. Written in late 1999, it was published in Pyramid on June 16th, 2000. It proved remarkably popular and, until I wrote “D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations” and “The Three Clue Rule“, was the single piece of writing for which I received the most feedback from readers. In fact, enough people told me that they specifically re-upped their subscription to Pyramid on the basis of that article that I am absolutely positive that the $170 Steve Jackson Games paid me for it was money well-spent.
Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – Qualities
Part 3 – Examples of Application
Part 4 – Adaptation
Reading the article from a distance of eleven years, I am forced to occasionally twinge at particularly awkward bits of writing. I have, however, resisted the urge to rewrite it. With the exception of noting that Feng Shui is now available from Atlas Games (when the article was written, Feng Shui was a recent smash success that had driven its original publisher out of business because they were reportedly losing money on every copy sold), the article remains unchanged.
I’m also struck, however, by how misleading the published works of an author can be. “Dice of Destiny”, for example, clearly demonstrates my early appreciation of the fact that roleplaying games are improv structures (among other things). It would seem to be totally of a piece with my recent musings on wandering monsters as a mode of procedural content generation.
But if you had actually asked Justin the Younger about wandering monsters, he would have scoffed at the crudities of a primitive and bygone age. Wandering monsters made their way back into my game when I started using them to model “living complexes” that were too large for me to track every individual NPC group in real time, and it was only from there that I eventually realized that a properly constructed wandering monster table is a great improv structure.
In a further bout of irony, it was only a few months after this article was published that the 3rd Edition of D&D was published. Dice pool systems had dominated my gaming during the late ’90s, but for the past decade D&D has taken their place. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve actually GMed even so much as a single session of a dice pool system since this article was published. (Although I’m sure something will probably occur to me as soon as I hit the “publish” button.)
Perhaps because of that, one of the things that particularly caught my eye on this read-thru was the idea of using die qualities while generating ability scores to give you some idea of what a score really means. It really is incredibly easy to just pluck out keywords from the description of ability scores and assign them as qualities. To that end, here’s a quick table you can use when generating D&D characters.
Wouldn’t you really need a fourth adjective for each to make it work with the standard ability generation method of best 3 of 4 rolls?
On an unrelated note, would you like to tell us your opinion on pathfinder? My friends and i have moved from 3.5 to pf, and found it to be everything we ever wanted. Some of the broken stuff have been retconned and grappling and other things have been expertly put in their place. But, i would realy like to read a comment, even an article about it. Looking forward to it as i would to anything you post.
I just wanted to point out that the main reason that wandering monsters have such issues is in the way that the wandering monster encounters themselves have been treated over the years.
However, this was actually solved some time ago – in the original Dragonlance Modules, they replaced wandering monster encounters with wandering story elements – essentially encounters that were fully defined, but not keyed to any specific location, so they could turn up at any point, making them useful when dealing with journeys. This was best used when the PC were travelling from Pax Tharkas to the Gates of Thorbardin with the refugees.
Yet, despite this, many still see wandering monsters as just that, and thus don’t use any sort of random event based system, because they feel it is primitive and limiting, although the only thing that is limited about it is their own preconceptions of what wandering monster encounters are supposed to be.
I thought I’d share this, even though it’s only a side-tangent of this article…
Regarding Wisdom and common sense.
One of my pet peeves has always been this definition of Wisdom. I feel it demeans and misinterprets what Wisdom actually is, and is derived from a lack of a better definition.
Wisdom is not common sense. By definition, wisdom must be uncommon; otherwise we would all be wise. It is the ability to teach yourself, or to learn from things that are not actively trying to teach you. For example, a wise Bard might learn from his mistakes, or a wise Druid might consider a tree to be a great teacher. It is the ability to see similar principles where others see disorder or nothing at all.
If we define Wisdom as common sense, we limit it to the base of 10 WIS. Any score beyond 10 would become uncommon and therefore wise.
If you think that common sense is common, your world must be a happier place than mine…
But perhaps a better way to put it would be the quality of acting rationally on the basis of available information. The information is available to everyone, but those with high are more likely to use that information well. Reference EGG’s aside in the 1st edition DMG: “An example of the use of wisdom can be given by noting that while the intelligent character will know that smoking is harmful to him, he may well lack the wisdom to stop (this writer may well fall into this category).”
From the same paragraph (p. 15): “Wisdom … subsumes the categories of willpower, judgement, wile, enlightenment, and intuitiveness.”
I loved this article! Lots of fun ideas to add variety to how one sees an action going down.
A thought: for a single-die mechanic – one can always just roll a few dice on the side with have no impact other than determining which quality had the most impact.
So, on a success with the single-die, the side roll had the Power die come up highest = describe the success with Power as the determining factor. Or, on a failure with single-die, the side roll had the Finnesse die come up lowest = describe the failure with Finnesse as the determining factor.
This would also work for the die pool mechanics – the fluctuating # of dice doesn’t matter, you just have the side roll with the quality dice.
Of course, one needn’t limit the description to the single die that had the most impact – one can, as in your examples, narrate based on all the qualities represented, perhaps making 3-4 a ‘normal’ degree and those below or above that as worth mentioning.