I don't think dice do much beyond being a hard-to-argue-with fidget toy for the socially awkward. Who wants to argue with a little plastic cube? Also, they're seemingly good enough at distancing a player from perhaps a hard to approach subject. I've said as much before. I guess i figured I'd spell it out here, for whatever reason? They're an unassuming buy-in.
I really like this framing. There are some situations were a lot of rolls happen in quick succession (like a traditional rpg combat) and in those lots of binary hit/miss results are ok because it is the aggregate of all of them which tell the story. There are other games, typically more lightweight rules ones, where a single roll can be consequential and that’s where your insights particularly apply.
PbtA games are examples which can suffer from the GM (or the designer!) not making the choices interesting. At their best, it is a lot like your last example, but I still see too many run as “6-? That’s a fail”
This is maybe a little abstract, but I think that what dice are supposed to do is irreversibly transform the situation -- rather than staying in hypothetical land where lots of things MIGHT happen you go to a new game-state where some particular, concrete thing DID happen. It underscore the agency of whatever you did that led to needing to roll the dice, and then puts you in a different (maybe only slightly different) situation where you can now make decisions/exercise agency in a new way. Since going from the possible state of "any one of these die faces could come up" to the actual state of "this particular die face DID come up" it helps feel like a fair "no take backs" point in the game -- you can't reverse time to before you rolled the dice once you already saw the result, you need to move forward from here. I think that's why die results that don't really transform anything (you failed to pick the lock, do you want to try again?) feel unsatisfying.
I don't think dice do much beyond being a hard-to-argue-with fidget toy for the socially awkward. Who wants to argue with a little plastic cube? Also, they're seemingly good enough at distancing a player from perhaps a hard to approach subject. I've said as much before. I guess i figured I'd spell it out here, for whatever reason? They're an unassuming buy-in.
I really like this framing. There are some situations were a lot of rolls happen in quick succession (like a traditional rpg combat) and in those lots of binary hit/miss results are ok because it is the aggregate of all of them which tell the story. There are other games, typically more lightweight rules ones, where a single roll can be consequential and that’s where your insights particularly apply.
PbtA games are examples which can suffer from the GM (or the designer!) not making the choices interesting. At their best, it is a lot like your last example, but I still see too many run as “6-? That’s a fail”
It’s certainly thought provoking stuff.
This is maybe a little abstract, but I think that what dice are supposed to do is irreversibly transform the situation -- rather than staying in hypothetical land where lots of things MIGHT happen you go to a new game-state where some particular, concrete thing DID happen. It underscore the agency of whatever you did that led to needing to roll the dice, and then puts you in a different (maybe only slightly different) situation where you can now make decisions/exercise agency in a new way. Since going from the possible state of "any one of these die faces could come up" to the actual state of "this particular die face DID come up" it helps feel like a fair "no take backs" point in the game -- you can't reverse time to before you rolled the dice once you already saw the result, you need to move forward from here. I think that's why die results that don't really transform anything (you failed to pick the lock, do you want to try again?) feel unsatisfying.