So there’s your heroic PC, standing, blade barred, with a dragon rising in front of her, smoke curling from the foul beast’s mouth.
And there she is deep below the surface of the earth, torch held high, examining a door’s elaborate lock.
And there she is trying to root out which of the courtesans in the noble’s collection is the succubus, and which is just the mortal schemer.
And there she is darting down a narrow alleyway to head off the villain she’s pursuing as he cuts through the main square.
And all of these things are adventuresome, dangerous activities that put her at risk of death and destruction if she is not skilled, and if she is not cautious, and if she is not smart.
As a player, you help her through these adventures by making choices for her, and by rolling dice to determine if she succeeds. These are the basic mechanics in most RPG’s: choices, and die rolls. This is how you determine what your character does.
Between the two mechanics, only one offers a potential for failure, or for an interesting, unexpected result: the die roll. Choices may be made more frequently, but they lack the tension and surprise of a roll. If you choose to take a particular path in a dungeon, for instance, you are signing up to experience the consequences of that action. There’s no questioning the outcome: because you went Right, you find the treasure. Because you went Left, you find the Dragon.
This is true whenever you make a choice about what your character does or is. If you chose to hate goblins or if you chose to suspect the redheaded courtesan or if you chose to insert the silver key into the complex lock, it’s not a question of IF something happens, it’s just a matter of watching the fallout from your particular action take place.
You could run an entire game with nothing but choices. I hear Amber does a fine job, and Nobilis has some interesting concepts, too.
We’ve discussed some of the limits of choice before, and there we looked at why we might roll the dice. One of the reasons was that the dice can be a neutral arbiter, able to determine success and failure without putting the blame or credit on the hands of the DM. That is, if your adventure fails, if your character doesn’t slay the dragon or doesn’t see the trap in the door, they could die. That death, that permanent and irrevocable failure, isn’t something we’re comfortable letting someone just decide, based on their supposedly neutral judgment, to allow.
In those situations, we ask for a roll of the dice, in part, because the dice are clearly mechanical and neutral. You can debate the finer points of what your choice meant when you make a choice, but you can’t argue with that 1 on the d20 very effectively, can you?
This is why rolls occur when the game decides something is important, important enough to rest the success or failure of the adventure on, important enough that aspects like loss aversion and the desire for success come into play.
Which brings us right around to the question: what has D&D determined to be that important?
The Important Things
Combat
Most obviously, combat is this important in D&D. Combat as a method of killing your characters is something every edition of the game trucks in to a greater or lesser degree. Risking death is quite adventuresome, and D&D’s nearly irrevocable and final death is one of its defining features. Combat is the most obvious way to kill your character, too: there’s some other creature actively working for that end, jabbing spears at you and breathing fire at you and suchlike.
But combat isn’t alone…
Movement
This is especially clear in the “Thief” class, with its specific rules for moving silently and disabling traps, but movement itself, especially in earlier editions, was considered something that could kill your character. While choice served as the main way to move your character (you don’t need to roll dice to move), dice came into play when you might notice or trigger a trap, or a creature, or some treasure, or some secret.
Later editions added skill mechanics, and skills like Endurance or Climb or Swim, which also involved rolling dice to enhance the “fairness” of what your player would undertake while moving. We want the rules to determine if we fall from the cliff or drown in the water or notice the pit trap before we fall in, because, like with combat, these things can directly and seriously threaten the characters with a permanent and messy death. While nothing is actively seeking your demise, your demise is constantly something you put into the mix in order to undertake the movement.
It’s interesting to note that even stealth falls into this category: it helps you overcome the obstacle of other creatures, and rules for stealth are as old as rolling a d6 to determine surprise.
Influence
An area that has typically been the dominion of spells and a few skills, D&D has probably been the most reluctant to come around to the idea that non-hostile NPC’s can be as important as things you fight and fates you avoid. Choice has been the dominant mode of dealing with other people in the world for most of D&D’s history, but it hasn’t been the exclusive mode. From spells that charm (with the relevant saving throws) to skills for deceit (with the relevant ability checks), influencing NPC’s has had solid rules for rolls since OD&D, but they’ve largely been specific and narrow, in favor of a more organic system of choices.
This perhaps reflects the fact that failing to influence an NPC is less immediately deadly than failing to notice a pit trap or failing to dodge a bugbear’s mace. It is still a conflict, still a struggle, but it is not one where the failure will necessarily lead you to rolling up a new character if you get it wrong. It might make that outcome more likely, but it’s not automatic.
This area of the rules has grown more as the rules have become more narrative in focus, more about conflict and struggle in general than about specifically whether or not your PC lives to see the next sunrise. As failing to influence NPCs has become a way to “lose,” more rules have been introduced to support it, and more die rolls have been made to determine its outcome.
Knowledge
One interesting area that die rolls have covered in D&D is the area of character knowledge. Has your character heard of Monster X? About Nation Y? How much does your character know about the succubus, or about lock mechanisms?
Rules for this also date back to the “1d6 to determine surprise” rules. Stealth is attempting to avoid creatures while you move, and perception is attempting to know that a creature is there, trying to be stealthy. It can also be found in many divination spells (the Detect X kind of spells are rules for knowing stuff), and even in the rules for weapon and non-weapon proficiencies. Knowing how to wear heavy armor or how to grow crops is a category of character knowledge.
The rules for this area tend to be very binary: either you know a fact, or you do not. You make your roll, or you do not. Like interaction, knowledge is sort of a layer removed from your demise, but it is a bit closer than interaction may be. If you don’t know the water is tainted with throat leeches, your death might come swiftly and surprisingly. If you DO know that rust monsters are more interested in food than in pursuit, you might get away with dropping a big shield and running instead of risking your magical rapier against the beast.
Rope Use and Cheesemaking?
D&D has had a history of occasionally going a little overboard with respect to things that die rolls determine. At various points, your character’s ability to tie a knot and their ability to make cheese and their ability to tend a bonsai plant were all accounted for.
When you look at the uses of these skills, though, you can see that they feed pretty easily into one of the four above categories. For instance, the Cheesemaking proficiency in 2e was first an element of Knowledge: you knew how to make cheese, and could presumably use that knowledge in any way it might benefit you. It also had an element of Influence, in that you could roll the die in order to make a truly magnificent wheel of cheese – certainly something that would work in your favor if someone were to eat it.
Use Rope could be seen to be similarly a sub-set of Influence, where it is made to help dictate an NPC’s actions (by tying them up), while its counterpart, Escape Artist, was used to avoid that influence and retain control of your actions.
A run through the city to catch a villain? Movement, with a dash of knowledge (for knowing the back alley shortcuts). An investigation of a harem? Influence, with knowledge on top (for knowing the signs to look for in a succubus).
Conflicts and Challenges and Monsters
So, the list above is fairly complete. That is, there’s few things that you roll for in D&D, in any edition, that don’t feed into one of these four big categories.
Thus, it means that these categories are the important conflicts in a game of D&D. These are the points at which it matters to be objective and impartial, to have options and to be able to interact with the rules to influence the outcome. It’s not just about choices at these points, it’s about die rolls to determine the results.
And what opposes those rolls in basically every circumstance? Monsters. From Aarakocra to Zombie, from rot grubs and rust monsters to revenants and rasts, the creatures that inhabit the worlds of D&D exist as a menu of potential challenges, a bountiful buffet of things to make your characters’ lives difficult.
That is what a “monster” is in D&D: a creature that the PC’s must overcome, or suffer some risk. They can overcome this creature with knowledge, with influence, with avoidance, or with combat. The monster itself threatens them with death in combat, hazardous movement, inflexible minds, and dark mystery.
Definitively, monsters are not just made for combat. Certainly, many monsters work mostly on that level: you go up against orcs, and you’re probably going to have to deal with pointy ends and soft bits sooner or later. But there are monsters that live mostly as movement challenges (the aforementioned rot grubs make certain areas dangerous to move through, but not others), or monsters that are mostly influence challenges (a defensive aarakocra, or even a wild dire wolf when there’s a druid in the party), or monsters that are mostly knowledge challenges (find the weakness to a rakshasa or a vampire and you win against it; if you don’t know the weakness, you lose).
These are “monsters” as most editions of the game have defined them. Though 4e took a harshly circumscribed view on what was worthy of the title “monster” (and thus worthy of inclusion in the Monster Manual), the arc of D&D absolutely includes centaurs and nymphs (influence challenges) and rust monsters and piercers (movement challenges) and liches and werewolves (knowledge challenges) and bandits and bugbears (combat challenges) in the same class of game rule: a monster.
Monsters are things that make the PC’s fail. Since the party fails in more than just combat, monsters, necessarily, most be more than just combat challenges. And perhaps monster manuals should be thought of, not as books of things to slay, but a compendium of challenges to pit against the party…in every way that matters. Cheesemaking can save the day, if it is used to create a delicious cheese that then persuades the scheming courtesan to talk about that time she thought she saw a forked tail beneath the skirt of one of the other women there, because succubi aren't things to fight with swords, but things to fight with knowledge, with influence. Monsters are not about combat, they are about challenges. Challenges of all sorts.
...Right?
