Remember that odd little three-part thesis I started about the nature of tabletop roleplaying gameplay, adventure, and challenge design? Well, this be the second part.

As I said last time, I’m going to bringing together a bunch of crap I’ve said in passing over the years into a sort of comprehensive approach to challenge and gameplay design. Consequently, I’m going to repeating things a few of you have probably heard. But, I’m going to unpacking the heck out of some stuff and I’m building toward something big here.

That said, I still don’t plan to explain the title. It’s an obscure reference to something that has nothing to do with what it is. You’ll have to wait for the third part. Unless I forget.

Anyway…

The Key You Have to Hide

A few weeks ago, I made a terrible remark in a public forum. It wasn’t the sort of thing most of you, my loyal, dedicated, and intelligent readers, would find objectionable, but the wider roleplaying game world really got their panties in a jimmy over it. One YouTube content creator even featured it in a video in which he made the very clever and intelligent counterargument: “The Angry GM is a stupid dummy-head.” I wish I was kidding.

The remark was this…

If your adventure includes a locked door, it better also have a key to that door. If you rely on your players to simply creative their way past it or if you rely on them to roll dice through it, you’re design is bad and you should feel bad. Your challenges must include gameplay solutions.

Now, my first essay in this miniseries was about why you can’t rely on your players to simply creative their way through a challenge. You can probably guess what this essay’s about. Especially given the title. You can probably also guess what’s coming in the third.

By the way, if any of you thickos still haven’t grokked it, this isn’t just about locks and keys. Locks and keys represent obstacles and the means to bypass those obstacles. I was stunned to discover how many mouthbreathers exist in the wider roleplaying gaming world who couldn’t see this as about anything other than locks and keys and even tried to argue that it’s unrealistic to think locks would always have keys. After all, people build locks without keys all the time. Who would even expect those to come in pairs?

I shit you not. I wish I was shitting you. I am not going to dignify any of that actual horsecrap with a response, but if I ever need to argue for a Game Mastering licensing board to prevent incompetent asshats from running games, that’s basically going to be my opening statement.

Anyway…

At the same time this debate was going on, there circulated a post about Naked Persuasion checks, which is a topic that absolutely never gets old, am I right? It’s funny because it’s basically the same thing as locks and keys, but no one gets it.

Naked Persuasion Is the Worst Persuasion

Stop me if you’ve heard one…

The Game Master says the guard refuses the party entry, so one of the players, let’s call him Asshat McDumbface, says, “I roll a Persuasion check,” and then immediate bounces a die across the table. There’s no proper action declaration. There’s not even a reference to what the character is saying or doing or their demeanor. It’s just a player throwing a die roll at a challenge to negate it, a naked die roll.

Of course, we here at my website know that’s just wrong. The player is playing wrong and, if the Game Master allows that crap, they’re running the game wrong. One does not merely call for a die roll; a player has to tell the Game Master what their character is trying to accomplish and how they’re trying to accomplish it. Then, the Game Master can call for a die roll if necessary.

We’ve also all heard the pissy little bullshit player responses, right? We’ve heard players say, “My character is more Charismatic than me, so I shouldn’t have to act out what I’m saying,” or “You can’t evaluate my character’s action based on my ability to roleplay,” or, “The rules say I can take the Influence action to make the guard let me in.”

It’s all specious, incorrect crap. Even that last one. Seriously. Check the literal first player-facing chapter of the current rules of one of the world’s roleplaying games. PHB (2024) 17-18 describes both the first-person acting and third-person describing methods of taking social actions and then gives an example of a proper, non-acted-out-but-still-properly-declared social action.

I offer that, by the way, so you can skip debating with your player on the nature of Charisma and what can and can’t be required players and skip right to slamming down the rulebook in front of them and saying, “Play right or get out.”

When even the quote-unquote professional roleplaying game designers at Wizards of the Coast can get this crap right, it shouldn’t even be a debate anymore.

But that ain’t my point here. My point is two-fold. First, I want you to see that there’s more to this than locks and keys. The lock-and-key is a stand-in for any challenge you put in your game: a locked door, a swollen river with a washed-out bridge, a guard on a door, whatever. The adventure design rules apply the same to all of them. You can’t put a locked door, a swollen river, or a guard on the door in your adventure without including an actual gameplay means by which the players can attempt to bypass the article.

My second point is actually the entire rest of this whole essay. It’s about the weird relationship between rolling dice and gameplay. Because, as I’ve said many times before and now intend to explain in excruciating detail with actual academic references…

Rolling dice isn’t gameplay.

Rolling Dice Isn’t Gameplay

Well, crap…

I have this bad habit of making promises I can’t keep. But I usually don’t do it in the span of two paragraphs in a heading. I gotta be honest: I’m not sure I can explain why rolling dice isn’t gameplay in excruciating detail. The whole thing just kind of baffles me.

Look, I’m pretty good at analyzing, unpacking, and explaining in excruciating detail. That’s what keeps so many of you coming back. I know. I have all the e-mails and messages. My ego is huge and needs a lot a stroking, so I’ve compiled all the positive feedback I’ve ever received into this thing I call my stroke book.

Part of my ability to unpack this stuff is down to my analytical and critical nature, part of it’s down to my ability to see things with what’s called a beginner’s mind, and part of it’s down to my ability to understand how other people see things so I can figure out where the misunderstandings and miscommunications are coming from. But this fight, the one about how rolling dice isn’t gameplay, it just confuses the hell out of me.

I can’t understand how there’s even an argument. This ain’t an opinion, it’s just a fact. It’s practically definition. Rolling dice is something you often do while playing games, and many games incorporate dice as a gameplay element, but actual die-rolling, by itself, isn’t gameplay. It’s just generating a random number and, usually, comparing that to some fixed number. If all you’re doing is rolling dice to get a certain number, you’re not playing a game. I don’t know how to make that clear to people whose brains are too broken to get it.

It’s like trying to explain how mixing paint colors isn’t actually painting. It’s like trying to explain how grocery shopping isn’t cooking. You can see why someone might confuse the two, but when it comes down to actually explaining why one thing isn’t another thing that it isn’t, it’s hard to know where to start.

I think part of the problem is that people don’t know what gameplay actually is. Or that there even is a definition.

If Dice-Rolling Isn’t Gameplay, What Is?

So what actually is gameplay? Well, that’s tricky to answer. Not because there isn’t an answer, but because the answer isn’t quite what people think. See, gameplay isn’t a single activity, but rather, it’s a broad collection of different activities that create certain psychological responses in human brains. Consequently, you end up with descriptive definitions that are constantly being refined and tightened, and there’s a lot of space to quibble over details.

That’s why you can end up with broad-to-the-point-of-worthless definitions like Dino Dini’s, “Gameplay is interaction that entertains,” and Sid Meier’s, “Gameplay is a series of interesting choices,” floating around. But even those definitions actually do hint at an important common ground that shows up in the more refined definitions presented by folks like Rollings, Adams, Rouse, Juul, Salen, and Zimmerman. If you look all the various definitions, a clear descriptive pattern starts to emerge.

I’m not going to take you through the whole thing. You can check my work on your own if you think I’m somehow lying or incorrect in my conclusions. I’m just going to skip to the common denominator, because that’s the important bit…

Gameplay is players making choices within the constraints of the game system and the system’s responses affecting what the players can or should do next.

You can sit that next to the common-denominator definition of game that I also didn’t pull out of my ass, but arrived at in the same way by trusting the analysis of people way smarter than me and which forms the backbone of my approach to True Scenario Designery…

A game is an activity in which the players attempt to accomplish a goal by overcoming challenges while acting within the confines of a system of rules and mechanics.

Or, if you prefer…

A game has a goal, challenges, and rules.

The thing is, these definitions don’t matter much. Or rather, the arguments about what fits and what doesn’t don’t really matter. If you want to write your own adventures and encounters, you just have to know that you need a goal, challenges, and rules. If you want to run gameplay as a Game Master, you have to know gameplay is what happens when the players interact with the game by way of their choices and in responses to feedback from the game. Which, basically just means, “You describe the situation, the players choose the actions their characters take, you determine and describe the results, and the players act in response.”

We really don’t need to fight over the nitpicky details.

Defining gameplay beyond a basic, practical description has the same problem that that defining chair does. Ultimately, a chair is an object that’s defined by it’s purpose. Gameplay is an activity that’s defined by its affect on people. Thus, the word is actually a pretty big tent and a lot of things can fit in the tent. But the tent isn’t infinitely big. Everything can’t fit in the tent or else the tent itself becomes pointless. We can split hairs about what stuff that looks it belongs in the tent actually does, but when it comes to things that clearly, definitionally don’t fit in the tent, there’s no really argument to have.

Rolling dice isn’t, by itself, gameplay because there’s no choice and no interaction. Players just bounce plastic math rocks and see what numbers come up. They don’t decide anything, their choices don’t impact the outcome, so they’re not playing a game.

The missing element is choice.

But that’s where things get tricky.

Stupid Choices Don’t Count

So, there’s this door, right? It’s locked. Your character has this skill, right? It’s called Lockpicking. That skill allows you to roll a die to open a locked door without a key.

Is trying to Lockpicking a locked door actually a choice?

In the most technical sense, you can argue it’s a choice, but in the context of gameplay, which is based on its psychological impact, is it really a choice?

Let’s assume you’re playing one of the world’s roleplaying games. It doesn’t actually matter which edition, here, because lockpicking has basically worked the same since it was introduced in Supplement I: Greyhawk back in 1975. It’s just a naked die roll to open a locked door without a key. Das ist alles. Sure, the dice you rolled in 1975 were different as were the rules for determining the odds of success and some details have changed about whether or not you can retry a failed attempt from edition to edition, but none of that affects the fact that it’s just a naked die roll.

Well, one thing kinda matters. I’ll get back to that later. Unless I forget.

By the rules-as-written alone, without any extra input from the specific adventure, trying to Lockpicking a locked door is trivial. It costs nothing, it risks nothing, and failure leaves you no worse off than you were before the attempt. There is literally no good reason not to try to Lockpicking every lock you come across.

While it’s technically a choice, it’s not a choice anyone with half a brain would choose not to make. It’s just a free chance to bypass a lock based on a random number.

You can argue that’s evidence that the skill or the game mechanics are badly designed, but that’s a fight for another day and a different series. Especially because this ain’t just about keys and locks.

Consider, for example, the various flavors of searching for things like traps and secret doors. Or, more interestingly, let’s consider Naked Persuasion.

The Philosophical Argument About Naked Persuasion

So, there’s this NPC between you and your goal, right? They won’t let you have the goal. Your character has this skill, right? It’s called Persuasion. That skill allows you to roll a die to make an NPC do what you want.

Is trying to Persuasion the NPC actually a choice?

In the general case, following the rules-as-written, no: trying to Persuasion an NPC isn’t actually a choice. It either works or it doesn’t, it risks nothing, and it costs nothing. There is no reason not to try to Persuasion every NPC you come across.

Remember that arguments about mechanical design are for another day, but I will admit the Persuasion is a little hazier here because it has been handled in various ways through the years. But I want to stay firmly in the realm of conceptual discussion about what constitutes actual gameplay here.

What’s interesting, though, is that Game Masters are a little more intuitive about this than they are about locks and keys. Game Masters resist players making naked Persuasion rolls. They know it ain’t right. They just don’t always know why it ain’t right. Except now you do. A Persuasion check without a proper action declaration isn’t gameplay. It’s just lockpicking people instead of doors. That’s precisely why Dungeons & Dragons designers were smart enough to make it clear that you can’t just roll naked Persuasion checks in the first twenty pages of the current edition.

The reason why it’s okay for doors and not people is that social interaction is considered a core gameplay mode. Bypassing locked doors is incidental. It’s a minor part of the game. But, again, that’s a discussion for another time.

As a side note, there’s a whole bunch of corollaries to this that Game Masters do regularly screw up, down, and sideways. For example, if you don’t modify the odds of success based on the player’s described approach to the social action, that ain’t gameplay. It’s just a naked die roll with extra steps. Also, if you allow a social interaction to succeed or fail automatically without considering the character’s skills and attributes, that ain’t gameplay.

The definitional nature of gameplay as a concept demands that social interactions be resolved as follows…

The player decides what the character says and how they say it; the character’s skills and attributes determine how well they say and do it.

Any other means of resolving social actions is as wrong as the player demanding to naked Persuasion the guard. Factually and axiomatically.

Does Destructive Entry Change the Answer?

Let’s get back to Lockpicking. Unlike Persuasion, it’s not really possible to demand the players make choices about Lockpicking, is it? A player can describe a particular social approach, they can choose what to say, they can choose a tone and a demeanor, and those things can and should affect the outcome, but Lockpicking just doesn’t work like that. Lockpicking is just how you get past locks you don’t have keys for; it’s just a thing your character can attempt.

But Lockpicking is just one of the two common ways to open a locked door without a key, isn’t it? You can also try Doorbreaking. That option has also existed since the very earliest days of one of the world’s roleplaying games. Again, the details have changed, but conceptually, it’s still exactly the same. Door locked? Stuck? Barred? Roll a die roll? Did you roll enough? The door is opened, huzzah and forsooth!

Does adding Doorbreaking make Lockpicking a choice? No. Because they’re both still trivial actions, naked die rolls, and they’re not exclusive. You can try to pick the lock and then, if you fail, you can try to break down the door. You’d be stupid not to try both.

In the general case. I know some people are going to bring up all sorts of things that could affect the decision like noise and wandering monsters and we can talk about how strongly various editions did or did not advise Game Masters to use those things and what the core rules-as-written actually say, but that still ain’t today’s topic.

Even if Doorbreaking and Lockpicking were somehow exclusive, even if attempting one meant you could never try the other, would that make it gameplay? Well, here we have another technically yes, but no situation. Because every playgroup would handle that choice exactly the same way. Everyone would consider their Doorbreaking and Lockpicking modifiers and whoever had the highest raw number would use whatever skill or ability was best.

You see the pattern, right? A choice that literally everyone makes the same way isn’t actually choice. Which means it isn’t gameplay.

There’s More At Stake Than Philosophy

So, that wraps up this essay, right? I’ve successfully and correctly proven that relying on players to succeed on naked die rolls is bad design because there’s no gameplay to it. You can’t ever have a challenge that’s simply demands the players successfully roll to Lockpicking or Doorbreaking the locked door. But I’m not actually done. First, because the argument isn’t complete and second, because naked die rolls exist and something’s got to be done with them.

The problem with a challenge to successfully succeed on a naked die roll is actually that the players have nothing to do with the outcome. If they can’t get through the door, it’s not because of the choices they made, but rather because the coldly impartial plastic math rock said no. The players couldn’t have done anything different. There is no choice a reasonable player could have made differently to affect the outcome. There is also no recourse. There’s nothing the players can do next. The challenge is just over. The players lost that fight and they had nothing to do with it.

Which is why naked die rolls and open-ended creativity challenges have some of the same problems. Both look like gameplay, but once you educate yourself and see what’s going on under the hood, you realize the players don’t have a say in the outcome. It’s not just that they have no recourse, they can’t even just accept the loss and move on.

It is okay for the players to fail to overcome a challenge. It’s okay if there’s a door they never get through. It’s okay if they fail to win an adventure. Losing is part of gameplay. But the players have to have a fair chance to win. If they had made different decisions, the outcome should have been different. And this ain’t just a feeling thing. That has to be true.

That’s why games must be about gameplay; the players have to earn the outcome they deserve.

Won’t Someone Think of the Naked Die Rolls

Now my argument is complete, but before I tell you to come back next week or whenever for the final part of this series, let me acknowledge that the problem of naked die rolls is never going away. There are reasons why they keep cropping up in roleplaying games of every kind, especially in certain kinds of situations. It’s sort of related, philosophically, to that Hacking Problem thing I once wrote about, but there’s other factors too.

You see, some clever folks did respond to my terrible locks-and-keys in adventure design post by asking me what to do with Lockpicking? Did I suggest that you just not let players try to Lockpicking any door that I designed for them to bypass by a more gameplay kind of way.

My answer was a firm, sweary negative. I don’t truck with old-school, arbitrary, Gygaxian bullshit design where the elf isn’t allowed to search for this secret door because, “Screw you; that’s why.” If there’s a lock and a character has the Lockpicking skill, you can’t just refuse to let the character try to Lockpicking the lock because you don’t want them getting through the lock the wrong way.

Naked dice rolls exist. They even have a proper place in adventure design. So do open-ended creativity challenges. That will be the whole point of the third essay. I’m not trying to replace open-ended creativity or naked dice rolls, I’m trying to add a third thing called actual gameplay as an option for people who can’t open-ended creativity past a challenge and who don’t have the right skills or the good luck to make naked rolls.

For now, though, let me tell you that properly handling naked die rolls comes down to two things.

First, if there is any way to demand a proper action declaration in which the approach impacts the outcome somehow, do that. Don’t ever let your players roll naked Persuasion rolls and modify their roll based on their approach. Ask for specifics when it comes to Searching for things and Investigating scenes. I’ll have a lot to say about those specific topics in a future article, actually.

Second, when it comes to things like Doorbreaking and Lockpicking and even Hacking, think of them like opportunities for players to get lucky and bypass minor challenges. Yeah, there’s a key to this door guarded by a beast in the next room, but if you brought the right skill and make a good roll, you can open the door without the key, you lucky duck. Sure, the information you need can be gleaned by gathering the three files from the three different rooms, but if you successfully Hacking the computer in the office, you can get everything you need in one go.

Which, by the way, actually does highlight one key difference between the modern D&D approach and the old-school Pick Locks thief skill and Open Doors roll. The odds of success on the old-school rolls were pretty low. They naturally became a bonus chance to luckily bypass an obstacle and people expected them to fail more often than they succeeded.

Maybe you should think about that when you set your Difficulty Classes.