The greatest storyteller is a six-sided cube
As a big tabletop project begins to come together (coming soon đź‘€) and I'm booking my travel for a December trip to Philadelphia to attend PAX Unplugged, I've had dice on the mind. Specifically, I've been perceiving aspects of everyday life through the lens of the dice games I can't quite stop thinking about.
The typical Dungeons and Dragons style of dice rolling is mostly ubiquitous in culture these days:
- Your character encounters a challenge or a task they want to complete,
- You negotiate with the Game Master to determine which skill or attribute will be tested by this challenge,
- The Game Master sets a number goal commensurate with the challenge that your character must roll over to succeed
- You roll the die to determine how well you succeed or fail at your goal.
But, as they say, tabletop games have come a long way since D&D or Candyland, even if the little doo-dads we chuck across a table haven't. What has really stood out to me, especially in the games I'm going to talk about today—Citizen Sleeper, Amberspire, and Mothership—is how the value of the dice roll is less about success or failure, and instead has deep storytelling potential.
Citizen Sleeper asks: What will you do with your initiative?
Take Citizen Sleeper, a dice-based narrative adventure game where you play as a Sleeper, an emulated consciousness in a synthetic body just trying to make their way among the stars. In Citizen Sleeper, you pre-roll your die every morning. As the "turn" refreshes, you roll up to six six-sided die.
How well can you succeed, even when you wake up feeling like shit?
The pre-rolled dice in Citizen Sleeper (and other similar games like my personal favorite Duskpunk) is not just enumerating your ability to succeed or fail at a task, but is functioning as a mental health pool and a sneaky little bit of characterization. The core question of each action in Citizen Sleeper, unlike D&D, isn't "Is this ploy worth gambling a dice roll on?" it's "What action today do I need to succeed on...and what must I fail at to make that happen?"
Because you (and your decaying body) can't do it all. The point isn't to get the perfect run; it's to continue the run.
Citizen Sleeper is, through its dice, telling you one of its core themes: there is so rarely a moment in life where you stumble upon a truly random critical success. You wake up every day with whatever capacity you have to do the things in front of you. Sometimes, you roll all fours, fives, and sixes, and sometimes, it's just six ones in a row. How the dice fall, before you're even able to do anything, influences how you approach your day, and, after a few days, you begin to internalize that. This is a "good day" or a "bad day" simply based on the dice rolls when you wake up. As clocks tick down, are you willing to accept a mixed success now, or gamble on getting a six tomorrow?
The story you roleplay in Citizen Sleeper becomes a tale of overcoming the adversity of your body, not the arbitrary difficulty ceilings of the world. How well can you succeed, even when you wake up feeling like shit? Oh, wait, maybe that's not Citizen Sleeper anymore. You have to make do with what you have: there are only so many times you can go back to bed after rolling straight ones before life comes knocking.
The greatest moment in a game of D&D is, after two minutes of dissembling, you and your group of goofballs conjure up a ridiculous scheme (often using that fifty feet of rope) to do something unexpected (and usually mundane). Dice enter the game after the planning, and they inform how that plan plays out. Sure, there is always an opportunity for things to go drastically sideways, but, broadly, a typical tabletop experience involves seeing a challenge, planning actions to solve it, and then finding out whether you do or not. The dice enter at the end.
Citizen Sleeper inverts this, forcing players to greet the unknown with their finite capacity for action. There's no amount of stuff in your Adventurer's Kit that is going to change a one to a six. You just have to play the day as it comes.
Amberspire's culture of serendipity
I've talked at length in my Amberspire review about how I love the game's approach to dice and how the game allows you to creatively explore a city's culture by its outputs, but since completing that review, I still can't stop thinking about it.
In Amberspire, you build a city on a mausoleum moon, placing buildings, growing the population, and collecting resources. Unlike your typical city-builders, Amberspire's buildings produce a random assortment of resources, laid out on a six-sided die. At the end of each turn, you roll their resource die and see what this particular Teahouse provides this turn. Is it, as you expect, Tea? Or perhaps this turn, I gain Music.
I can't stop thinking of the places I go in the terms of an Amberspire location.
It is so easy to think of spaces like Teahouses or Libraries as places with a single material export. One thing they provide. But the beauty of Amberspire, the thing I can't quite let go, is the beautiful poetry of immaterial exports. Coffeehouses in your community provide coffee and pastries, yes, but that open mic night provides Music, the bulletin board provides Opportunity, and the gentle clamor of laughter provides Joy. Or perhaps it's a college coffee shop that provides Knowledge or Study.
I can't stop thinking of the places I go in the terms of an Amberspire location. A college: Knowledge, Conflict, Friendship, Ambition. A community kitchen: Warmth, Sustenance, Peace, Sonder. These are the things a place is born from, not the bricks this brick factory outputs. And, back to the Citizen Sleeper example, I love how every day is different. Maybe today the brick factory does just output Bricks. Buildings need to be built, after all. But tomorrow is a new day. Maybe it's the day of Unity.
Amberspire is clearly a city-builder first, but the more I play it—the more I think about my city—the more I couldn't help but imagine it as a culture simulator, watching the machinery of the material and immaterial create life as much as structure. The building blocks of a city, community, or society, stacked high atop a handful of six-sided dice.
The true horror in Mothership is failure
Mothership is a horror tabletop game that allows you to play out your fantasy (?) of appearing in an Alien film. It's a game that asks the question: "What could a normal person in the awfulness of a sci-fi horror film on their way to being eviscerated?" The answer, resoundingly, is get stressed the fuck out.
Back to the D&D example. When you try to do something in Dungeons and Dragons, and you fail, there are a handful of outcomes: you don't do the thing, you do the opposite of the thing, you get hurt. Unless there is a lasting status effect, a typical failure won't linger. You can't scale the wall, but clamber through the window. You move on.
A handful of modern indie tabletop games have tried to commodify failure in delightful ways, making those bumbled jumps, failed speech checks, and catastrophic misses mean something. One of my favorites is Monster of the Week, a role-playing game where you get to play as the main cast in Buffy or X-Files. When you fail in Monster of the Week, yes, you don't do the thing you set out to do, but you also gain an experience point. In fact, failure is the only way to gain the experience points you need to level up.
My current favorite TTRPG failure mechanic, though, is in my beloved Mothership. When you fail in Mothership, you don't gain an experience point; you gain stress. Stress is a soft and hard mechanic. Like Citizen Sleeper, it is a known value that can shape your role-playing experience. I think we all inherently have an idea of how someone experiencing 2/20 stress compares to someone experiencing 16/20 stress. It's also telling that no character, not even a brand new one, begins the game with 0/20 stress. The baseline in Mothership is 2/20.
Stress comes from the inside, after all.
How that stress manifests as it grows is partly up to the player, but it's also something (like stress itself) that's constantly on everyone's mind at the table. Stress makes you do weird things. It distorts criticism into combat or hunches into paranoia. Stress in Mothership is something a Warden (the Game Master role) can prod at: "You're responding very rationally to this latest setback, but I see you're at 13 stress." It's also a number that players can increase at any time, whether they fail or not. Is the scenario getting pretty tense, and you think your character would be stressed by this? You, as a player, can decide to gain one stress, just like that. Stress comes from the inside, after all.
The hard mechanics of stress, the part where stress becomes truly dangerous, is when you critically fail. Normal failure is stressful. Critical failure is catastrophic. Whenever you roll a critical failure in Mothership, you also roll a twenty-sided die called the Panic die. If you have 2/20 stress and roll a four on the Panic die, nothing happens. Goody for you, this failure didn't cause a panic.
But Mothership is a game about stress. It's about normal people pushed to their max, trying to hold it all together in the face of impossible odds and the horror all around them. Even in a one-shot scenario, you can expect your stress to be closer to twenty than zero, and sooner or later, you'll panic.
There is truth in Mothership's panic system.
When (and it is when) you panic in Mothership, you take the number you rolled (let's say you have 12/20 stress and roll a 3) and check the Panic Table. Ranked from "best" to worst, the Panic Table gives you roleplaying and mechanical descriptions of how bad you panic. If you manage to roll a one, good job, you got the only good panic response: an adrenaline rush. Somehow, you managed to dump all your adrenaline in this moment to improve your chances of success. If you roll a twenty, though, whoopsies, you panicked so hard you died. You can spiral (17), you can feel doomed (10), you become jumpy (3), or you gain a death wish (13).
Each of the twenty panic effects (yes, including death) offers rich fodder for roleplaying, but, just like Amberspire's dice reflecting community, and Citizen Sleeper's dice mirroring daily life, there is truth in Mothership's panic system. I have spiraled, I have felt doomed, I have been paranoid, jumpy, and suspicious. And some of those stress responses have manifested this week.
Stress in Mothership carries over from session to session and is damn hard to let go of. That suspicion will narrow your eyes at comrades long after the danger has passed. And, of course, the longer you play, the more stress you gain, the more likely you'll panic and make it all worse.
But the inverse is true too.
This is modern life. The pain and the beauty of seeing the world through the multi-faceted faces of a die roll. Life is stressful. You will wake up having rolled six straight ones. That is the cosmic chance of probability. Some days, the greatest output of you, your workplace, or your home is a material good enriching something or someone else. Your stress counter goes up. You hover on the precipice of panic as you get another mixed success on that Big Presentation.
But sometimes, you roll a six on cooking dinner and generate Harmony, not Food. Your stress goes down. You lose the Overwhelmed condition. You go to bed, more hopeful—more likely even—that it'll be a three sixes day tomorrow.
