I’m gonna do something I haven’t done in a long time. I’m gonna ramble about a piddly little game mechanical design thing. Because that’s what’s in my head.

See, I’ve been working on a few little mechanical hacks for all y’all. I have this standalone thing I’m polishing up to do with haggling and bribing and other monetary social interactions. I’m also working on two bigger things: a better way to handle traps that no one’s asking for and a better way to do the wilderness that everyone is asking for. Again. Still.

The struggle, though, is that I’ve only got one tool to work with whenever I’m building things to help improve your experience with one of the world’s roleplaying games. You know the game I mean. It’s the one that the vast majority of you readers are still playing and running happily. I’m with you, by the way. Dungeons & Dragons is still as fine as ever, and it remains my go-to. I ain’t abandoning you, whatever my sarcasm suggests.

Anyway…

D&D only gives us hackers one tool to work with. There’s only one mechanic: the Ability Check. Which, by the way, I love. Dice mechanics need to be quick and easy and intuitive. However they might feel, they’re actually the least important part of any roleplaying game. I don’t want your dice pools, I won’t use your narrative dice with ten thousand symbols, and I don’t want to remember ten different degrees of success with names like ‘really good success,’ ‘near success,’ ‘whoops, you kind of failed,’ and ‘oh man, you totally screwed the cooshie.’

But enough Long, Rambling Introduction™. This short essay doesn’t deserve one. It’s just a little ramble about a perfectly adequate dice system that is actually perfectly adequate most of the time, but sometimes needs just a tiny, little tweak or two, and isn’t worth the overwrought, overdesigned solutions most people attempt.

Pass-Fail Dice Rolls Are Totally Fine… Until They’re Not

Today’s topic due to the jury is pass-fail dice mechanics. Dungeons & Dragons uses a pass-fail core mechanic and, knowing that, you probably don’t need me to explain any further. Even if you’ve never heard the term, pass-fail dice mechanic, you can figure it out from the context clues. Especially if you’re one of my readers. My readers are the least dumbassest gamers in all of gamedom.

Pass-fail comes down to this: do you want to take an action? Great, roll a die. Did you roll it good enough? If you did, you succeeded. If you didn’t, you didn’t succeeded. The end.

Folks love dumping on the humble pass-fail mechanic. Hell, I’ve said some nasty things in the past that sure sounded like I was dropping some turd on it. But, really, I think pass-fail mechanics are great for tabletop roleplaying games, and I absolutely love the d20 System. As far as I’m concerned, the d20 System is what germ theory was to medicine. It got us out of the dark ages. I know. I grew up in the dark ages. I had plenty of fun with my friends at the time, but games were complicated kludges of inconsistent and impossible-to-remember mechanics.

Both Basic Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons of various flavors had ten thousand little subsystems, no two of which were alike. Do you want to stab someone? Subtract their Armor Class from your THAC0 and roll a d20 to meet or exceed that number. Are you arm wrestling? Roll a d20 and try to get under your Strength score. That’s right. I said under. Maybe it was 3d6? Whatever. Oh, you want to sabotage a trap? You need your percentile dice. Is the door stuck? Looking for a secret door? Grab a six-sider and try to roll a one. Or a two if you’re an elf. Ambushed and testing surprise? Roll anything except a one on a d6. Or maybe a d10. I don’t frigging remember.

I know I say like I’ve got an endorsement deal and get a check every time, but dice rolling isn’t gameplay. It’s fun. It’s exciting. People like rolling dice. Dice add unpredictability and surprise fairly and impartially. They also make fun noises when they bounce across the table. But none of that makes dice rolling actual gameplay. So, let’s keep it simple and let’s not ask randomness to answer any more complicated a question than yes or no.

Missing Attacks Is Fine, Actually

People crap on pass-fail mechanics because, in the end, it’s just dicking with a plastic math rock to get either a yes or a no. You can’t get any depth out of that at all. Right?

Well, the short answer is, “No. That’s stupid. You’re stupid.” The longer answer is… well… it’s the rest of this essay. So keep reading.

Consider the poor, maligned stab attack. Or, really, any attack. Especially any melee attack.

Want to stab the nasty, savage, thieving little goblin with your sword? Roll a d20, add your attack modifier, compare the result to the goblin’s Armor Class, and either you hit and deal damage, or else you miss. No damage. Turn over. Moving on.

The problem, say the dump-takers, is that a missed attack “changes nothing.” If success leads to progress, failure should lead to defeat. That makes sense. But a missed attack is just a failure leading nowhere. That sounds logical, but only if you ignore literally everything else about how the game works.

First, when nothing changes in the players’ favor, combat is moving toward defeat. Hypothetically, if you hit the goblin every time, it’ll be dead in three rounds. Or whatever. Let’s just say three rounds. That means the goblin will get three chances to stab you back. If one of your attacks misses, now the goblin lives for four rounds. That gives it four chances to deal damage. All else being equal, the more you miss, the more damage you take, the more you slide toward defeat. Missing does move toward failure, but it’s a slow boil.

I’d argue that’s what you want here. Missed attacks feel bad enough already; I don’t want them to speed the journey to Total Party Kill. If I add extra consequences to a missed attack, missing becomes more punishing, and a few too many misses can have a disastrous impact.

The other problem, say the dump-takers, attacking my other flank on realizing my logic on this front is unassailable, that a missed attack is just a wasted turn. A character who missed basically just lost their turn. They did nothing. They’re useless for one-fifth of all the turns they get to take that fight.

But that just isn’t true because D&D, and other similarly tactical roleplaying games, have positioning and zone of control mechanics. At least in melee. To even make a melee attack, you have to expose yourself to one. You can’t stab a goblin if you’re not in nipple-tweaking range. You can’t make an attack without taking attacks unless you’re a pussy archer kiting goblins around the battlefield; real gamers fight in melee.

A few notes before I continue. First, D&D is a tactical roleplaying game, not a strategic roleplaying game. Which is good. We want tactics, not strategy. You want strategic play? Go play old-school D&D. By yourself. Second, pussy is not a gendered insult. It’s short for pusillanimous. It means cowardly. Read a book. Third, you pussy little kiting bitches wouldn’t last five minutes without a tank screening you for half the fight, so shut your holes.

Moving on…

Being able to make a melee attack also gives you control over your opponents. Hit or miss, when you can stab the goblin, it’s stuck next to you. If it moves or takes a non-melee action, you get to make a whole extra attack when it isn’t even your turn. Alternatively, it can move safely away, but it has to give up an action to do so. By choosing to be in melee, you’re either depriving a foe of a chance to do damage or, at least, forcing it to damage the person who can tank damage best. So, even if your attacks miss, you’re changing the combat every round you engage a foe. Your contribution just isn’t obvious or exciting, and it doesn’t involve any fun dice clattering.

Admittedly, missing does cost a turn. Or rather, if you miss, it feels like you wasted your turn doing nothing. I get that. But the real problem here isn’t actually the miss. It’s not the pass-fail attack rule. The problem is very specific to modern, complex roleplaying game systems whose melee mechanics are quick and boring, while every other system is overcomplicated and flashy.

If you’re a stabbity-stabber, your turn took one minute of play time to resolve. You charged, rolled your attack, missed, and you were done. Now what do you have to look forward to? Probably fifteen minutes of listening to the mouthbreathing spellcaster player reading paragraphs of spell descriptions to himself before he finally settles on an action. It ain’t the dice mechanic ruining your day, it’s that Dungeon Masters can’t pace combat for shit and Dungeons & Dragons isn’t doing them any favors in that regard.

That’s why, by the way, the most common fix for the whole pass-or-miss melee thing doesn’t really improve anything. Everyone always tries to fix the problem by letting melee attacks do damage even on a miss, right? A little consolation prize. “Good try, champ. Have a smidge of damage.” Yeah, that sure makes the interminable wait for the next one-minute turn feel so much better.

If you imagine a world in which everyone’s turn is equally long, everything is pass-fail, combat turns are brief, and keep the zones of control and opportunity attacks, pass-fail melee attacks are fine. In fact, they’re perfect. They keep shit moving. Attack, roll, resolve, done. Next round.

Failure Consequences Ain’t the Only Solution

Of course, I’m just using pass-fail melee as an illustrative example. Extend the dump-taker argument to a common, general complaint, and it comes down to this: if failure doesn’t change anything, the roll is a waste. Therefore, a negative outcome should have a negative impact. It can’t just be, “Nothing happened; what do you try now?”

The logic underlying that is actually sound, but the conclusion is too narrow, and the combat thing proves it. A missed melee attack doesn’t change anything, but that doesn’t mean it has no impact. The whole melee attack transaction is kind of like this…

You pay one action. For that one action, you get to lock down an opponent and maintain a zone of control. You also get a chance to damage the opponent with the attack itself. You can argue that the lockdown and zone of control thing doesn’t count as part of the melee transaction, but if you’re not making a melee attack, standing next to an opponent is just stupid. It’s just inviting damage. But you can view the attack part of the melee transaction as a part of the package you can exchange for something else. For example, you can pay one action to lock down an opponent, maintain a zone of control, and also boost your Armor Class by Dodging or whatever the hell it’s called.

What’s that you said? No one ever does that? You’re right. But that’s not actually because it’s a tactically and numerically bad choice. In fact, there are many situations in which standing next to an opponent and locking them down while also just dodging is the better choice. If your pussy allies can outdamage you at range and you just want to lock down a very powerful, high-damage opponent long enough for them to finish it off, you’re better off trying to keep your hit points intact than helping the damage race. But it’s not exciting, it’s not glamorous, and you don’t get to clatter the dice. So people don’t do it.

But that’s beside my point. My point is that failure outcomes beyond a simple “… but the future refused to change” aren’t the only way. Failure can carry consequences, but you can also make pass-fail mechanics meaningful by attaching costs to the actions. Every attack you make costs you one action. Even if failure doesn’t change anything, you have to pay the cost.

Theoretically, actions like searching for traps and secret doors carry a cost. That shit’s time-consuming, right? In theory, anyway. You don’t search every inch of every hallway in every dungeon for traps because you’ll be doing that forever. But, oops, we have a problem, don’t we? Game time isn’t very valuable in modern D&D, is it? There’s not much tied to spending time, and most Game Masters don’t bother tracking every minute the players spend on everything.

In the old days, we used to keep careful track of time using game turns, and every so often, wandering monsters and random encounters would show up. That spirit led me to invent the old Tension Pool system that, by the way, you can expect a new and exciting version of in the near future. One with more accurate timekeeping that’s specifically good for wilderness and town play.

But let me offer a really crazy-sounding alternative to any game mechanic when it comes to time-consuming things. This isn’t me being sarcastic or bombastic to make a point. This is a thing I seriously do. When my players make a search check, I don’t resolve it quick. I describe the hell out of the search. The more they keep searching and re-searching the same place, the more I make them feel the time-consuming nature of that kind of search. Meanwhile, when my players only search smart and limit their searches to single objects or for single things, I make it much quicker.

My players get bored of broad, generic, blanket searches because I make them boring.

That’s a cost.

Which brings me back to my point. Pass-fail mechanics don’t need failure consequences to be good. You can also make them work by making the actions costly somehow.

But there are yet other ways…

But Is That a Chance You’re Willing to Take?

Let’s look at searching. And let’s imagine a slightly different world of traps.

How does trapsearchery play out right now? It’s like this…

The party enters a room and suspects there might be a trap. First, you, the Game Master, do the Passive Perception thing to see if anyone spots signs of hidden danger. Or you roll Spot checks. Whatever. Assuming the rules don’t throw the players a warning, they face a choice. They can either search the room for traps or they can just blunder in and start exploring the room, right? They can start examining the bookcase, opening the desk drawers, and so on. If they choose to search, there’s a pass-fail roll. If they pass, they find the trap and can respond. But if they fail…

If they fail, nothing. They just move on to blundering and poking and prodding.

Looking at it that simple way, there’s no reason not to search for traps. Success might reveal the trap, and failure leaves you no worse off than if you had just started blundering around. Searching just lets you make an extra, bonus roll to see if the room is safe before you stick your face in it. Why wouldn’t you?

Because searching costs something, right? Didn’t I just say that a couple of paragraphs up? Yes. Thank you for paying attention. That is a solution. If searching is costly, you won’t search every room and every inch of every dungeon. You’ll instead search smart. You’ll search only where you think the traps are mostly to be. You’ll think about the environment, pay attention, listen for clues in the narration, and all that other actual, good gameplay crap.

But forget cost. I’ve moved on to a different point.

Say you suspect there’s a trap in the middle of the room. Now, let’s imagine you and your allies have no way to search for traps. What might you do instead? Is the party just going to pile into the room and start blundering, poking, and prodding? Hell no. You’re going to tell the big, dumb warrior to stomp into the middle of the room and see if any spikes shoot out of the floor. That’s why you bring a tank. The tank can take a hit that no one else can. So when you think there’s an unknown danger lurking, the tank takes point.

Now, let’s look at trapsearching again, and let’s imagine we run it properly. What does that mean? It means you can’t do it by standing in a doorway scanning around with your eyeballs. You have to enter the room. You have to poke and prod and wander. You do it slowly and carefully, of course, because you want to notice any sign of a trap before you do the thing that triggers it, but now you’re in the kill zone. If the trap is triggered by simply entering the kill zone, you’re going to find it one way or the other. Either you’ll spot the trigger before you step on it, or you’ll be pulling spears out of your ass shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, as a rogue, you don’t take spring-loaded spears to the ass as well as tanks do.

Now, don’t misread this as, “Failure should trigger the trap.” That’s a fair read, and it’s also a fair mechanic, but not because pass-fail mechanics need failure consequences to count. What’s really going on here is that the risk profile of the situation changed. By choosing to search for traps, you lost the chance to send the person best equipped to survive into the kill zone over someone squishier.

Oddly, by the way, this highlights a problem no one ever noticed about D&Dv3 and OG Pathfinder by extension. See, those systems gave rogues all these bonuses to make them really good at taking traps in the face. They got things like Trap Sense and Evasion. The logic is sound, but that meant that the rogue was always the person you wanted stomping around when traps were nigh. Rogues need to be more fragile in the face of traps than tanks, so there’s a real tradeoff in who you put in the kill zone.

But I digress…

Meaningfully Binary Die Rolls

In the end, when we’re stuck with pass-fail dice mechanics, there are three ways to make them meaningful. You can add costs, risks, or consequences. Either you give something up to make the roll, your risk profile changes as a result of making the roll, or failing on the roll kicks you in the dick. But note, also, you don’t have to pick one lane. Hit-or-miss melee doubles up on the meaningful mechanics. You have to spend an action, and you have to put yourself in harm’s way. Ranged attacks used to do two of the three, but modern D&D broke that, so all the video gamers could do that kiting bullshit that should be impossible. You can run the math on that to figure out what I mean. In theory, searching should do the same. It should be costly because it’s boring and time-consuming, and it should change the risk profile by putting delicate characters into dangerous places.

None of these means you have to throw the binary baby out with the bathwater to make a good D&D hack. Pass-fail mechanics are fine. They’re good even. They’re fast-paced, intuitive, and exciting. They’re a great fit for action-based tabletop roleplaying games for humans with dice. Even if you drop one of the three meaningful mechanical tools, you can still do a lot. Even if you follow D&D’s lead and never attach a harm or setback to a failed roll, you can still work with costs and risks to make great hacks.

You can even sneak harms and setbacks in without attaching them to the die roll. As I noted above, you don’t need an explicit rule that says, “Failing to find a trap sets it off.” Instead, you just need to be explicit about what searching entails and note that searching for many traps — though not all, and that’s okay — and note that searching for many traps puts you in a position to set them off if you don’t find them.

Of course, I’ll have more to say about traps in a few weeks. Meanwhile, though, I’m gonna finish up this little Bribing and Haggling thing. Expect me to play with costs, risks, and disguised consequences.

But also, meanwhile, I know lots of you write your own mini-mechanics. Lots of you either build your own hacks or create one-off mechanics to make encounters, scenes, and challenges work in your homebrew adventures. I also know lots of you have noticed the whole pass-fail thing in D&D sometimes seems thin on meaningfulness because D&D doesn’t do much with mechanical costs, risks, and consequences, and because a lot are emergent properties of D&D’s complex systems. It’s also easy to drop a lot of D&D’s perceived problems, like its challenging pacing, at the feet of the pass-fail dice mechanic. All of that leads to overhacking and kludgey, overcomplicated solutions.

It don’t need to be like that. A dash of meaning is all it takes, and sometimes, all you need is to change your presentation at the table to get that.

Remember, a good hack adds as little as possible to the existing system.