Setting the Stakes in D&D 5E

Stakes

What would you like to see in a 6th edition of Dungeons and Dragons? 

The last time this question made the rounds on Twitter.com I realised I had a very definite and specific answer. I'd be willing to pay full price for a 6th edition of D&D that was identical to the 5th edition in every way except for this: the PHB contains an additional paragraph, under the section on the core mechanic, about setting stakes. This is a crucial, crucial, crucial part of the resolution mechanic in the vast majority of TRPGs which D&D simply doesn't acknowledge. Here is an archived post on this topic from the days of The Forge (a phenomenon with which indie game designers seem to have had a long and passionate affair followed by a messy breakup, but which Wizards of the Coast seem blissfully unaware of). 

Why is setting the stakes so important, and how exactly should we go about it in D&D 5E? In fact, first of all, why should we go about it? Am I being unfair to WotC here by assuming the omission is rooted in hubris and incuriosity? Maybe they don't mention setting stakes because it's not actually an important thing in their game. But I think it is. I want to back up a bit and explain why, by addressing a common complaint I hear about 5E, especially from fans of earlier editions, which I think is actually a symptom of the lack of attention to stakes. 

WotC, I am available.

In Defence of Bounded Accuracy 

Here's the complaint: 

The numbers in 5E are too low. There isn't enough difference between a player character who's good at something and one who isn't. If the party want to examine some ancient magic runes, the wizard might roll adding their Intelligence and Proficiency Bonus for a total of +7, and the fighter might roll at +0, and although it's much more likely that the wizard succeeds and the fighter fails, it is still too common, over the course of a campaign, that the reverse happens. That +7 isn't enough to overcome the big stretch of randomness created by the d20, so we end up with frequent instances of the learned wizard being stumped while the big dumb fighter somehow knows all about it.

The complaint is about bounded accuracy, a design principle WotC settled on early in the development of 5E. Modifiers and target numbers stay within a certain range regardless of player character level, instead of being engaged in an arms race that results in bonuses of +40 against target numbers of 50 at high levels. The purpose of this is to keep things manageable - so the DM doesn't need to constantly scale up the target numbers as the PCs grow in power just to keep things interesting. After all, if the number I need to hit increases in lockstep with my bonus, then the numbers cancel each other out and I might as well not have bothered. Bounded accuracy is the solution to this problem. 

But, without the concept of setting stakes, it creates the problem above: someone with the right ability and proficiency in the right skill isn't really that much better off than someone without either. 

Or are they? Well, it depends on something rather larger and more abstract that lies behind the nuts and bolts of modifiers and target numbers, and even design principles. It depends on design philosophy, on how we conceive of the TRPG medium itself. What do these two approaches to the maths of the game suggest about the underlying philosophies of their respective editions? I'm going to compare 3.5 to 5E, skipping 4E because I'm not familiar with it (sorry - I'm aware it's reversed its fortunes and is now everyone's favourite edition - I'm a bad nerd). 

Design Philosophy Showdown 

When I finally got around to playing D&D for the first time, as a first-year uni student in a happier time, I was struck by something as I looked through the 3.5 Player's Handbook. The book's aesthetic had a pronounced strain of... let's say naturalism. Much of the character art is sketches with the guiding lines still on, details of hands and eyes, characters not in action poses but laid out before us for examination, Vitruvian Man style. The world of D&D is a strange land and the PHB is our guide to understanding its flora and fauna. A manual of Natural Philosophy for the curious layperson. By today's standards it pushes this conceit into rather dodgy territory around the point where we get sketches of the different playable races' skulls. 

Dungeons and Dragons and Anatomy Lessons

But it matches the design philosophy of 3.5 perfectly: take a look at the rules themselves and you'll see pages and pages of tables listing the target numbers for skill checks of various types. Climbing a wall - with many handholds - with few handholds - when it's slippery - and so on, for every skill. 

This is an RPG that regards itself as a physics engine: deterministic, mechanical, comprehensive.  The game's rules crunch through data about an imaginary world, throw in a random element and output "success" or "failure", with an unspoken assumption that the meaning of those words should be obvious in a given situation. 

5E, by comparison, regards itself as a tool kit. By default you play the game by simply describing what's happening. The dice and mechanics only come out at moments of uncertainty, and they have nothing to say about their own meaning in those moments. 5E expects us to figure out what "success" and "failure" mean for ourselves, based on the context of the fiction surrounding the roll. The game expects us to have already filled in all of that fiction through play, organically, instead of as an itemized list of factors. It expects the GM to pause for a moment before the dice are rolled, and consider "what does it mean if this character fails this roll? What does it mean if they succeed?" 

And the character themselves is part of this equation. Not just their ability and proficiency, which are already a numerical factor in the roll. That's just the tool we use to weight the die, it doesn't tell us what we need to know about who they are. I mean the fiction invested in that character. 

In our arcane runes example above, the wizard probably gets more information on a failed roll than the fighter does on a success. Perhaps the wizard is able to make an educated guess as to the significance of the runes without knowing quite what they say, while the fighter happens to recognise the runes for "cloud" and "porridge" while having no idea what to make of that. 

Here's another example. The characters are in a tavern and the bard decides to play some music for the patrons, hoping to make a good impression so the townspeople will be more helpful in future. They roll a natural 1. The next day they return to the tavern and the fighter decides to sing a song. They roll a natural 20. Does this mean the bard, trained from a young age in performance and music to a level of skill that is literally magical, happened on this occasion to break the e-string on her lute and fall off the stage? And the fighter, who has never performed to an audience before, somehow sang to make the heavens weep with joy? No, obviously not. It means the bard gave a technically flawless but uninspired performance and the townspeople were mostly indifferent, and the next night the fighter gave a raucous, so-bad-it's-good rendition of a sea shanty and everyone joined in because they were drunk. 

This is stakes-setting in 5E. Two important caveats: 

First, no one can be blamed for not getting this instinctively. As I've mentioned, the text of the game does a very poor job of explaining it. It may not present itself as a scientific manual the way 3E does, but it does seem to take for granted that the stakes of a given roll should be obvious. Don't be fooled. Play the game for a while and you'll find the design of the game very much expects you to take a moment to figure out the stakes each time the die is rolled. 

Second, all of this applies to ability checks. Basically none of it applies to attack rolls and saving throws. In combat, you're playing an entirely different game, one in which the stakes are set for you by an overdetermining system of turns, actions, hit points and special abilities. To see what it's like to carry the toolkit approach into the heat of battle, you need to look beyond D&D...