One of the delightful things about playing lots and lots of boardgames is that I get to see lots and lots of different game mechanics. It’s something I don’t get to see so much with RPGs because RPGs tend to reward longer-term play where you play one RPG a lot and let the others sit idle.

I’ve been fascinated by the interplay between player skill and randomness. In general, games range on a continuum between no skill (snakes and ladders) where the roll of the dice is the only determinant of the winner, and all skill (chess). However, the types of luck involved do change – they’re not all the same sort.

In particular, if you boil a game down to the decisions you need to make during the game, randomness affects them in two ways:

* What actions can I take?

* What is the result of this action?

In a game like Monopoly, randomness determines what actions you can take for the most part. Your turn begins, you roll the dice, you move to a property and you have the decision of “Buy or Put up for Auction”. There is only one time when randomness determines the result, and that’s when you choose to roll the dice to get out of jail. It should be emphasized that landing on Chance or Community Chest and drawing a card is *not* randomness relating to a decision you’ve made: you’ve had no decision there at all. You start you turn, roll the dice, move to Chance, draw a card, and follow its instructions. It’s precisely because you have so few decision points in Monopoly that it’s not a game I enjoy playing.

However, there are games of high-skill with this form of randomness. Consider Through the Ages, where your actions are constrained by which random cards are available on the drafting board. Or Dominion, where your actions are constrained by the cards you’ve drawn. If you play one of those cards, you know what it’s going to do, you just don’t have full control over which cards are in hand.

Conversely, in a game like D&D, randomness is mostly confined to resolving an action you’ve chosen: I strike the orc. You roll dice to see whether you hit, and how much damage you do. Wargames have a lot of this, you attack and roll on the Combat Results Table to see the result of the attack. You roll a die to see if the smoke grenades are effective. 

Dominion is interesting because it actually uses both of these modes of randomness: if you play cards that draw more cards, then the result of that action is unpredictable; it’s random. 

The point of most games is to control that randomness in your favour, of course. Seed the right cards in your deck in Dominion and your draws become better and more predictable. Attack with overwhelming force in a wargame to make sure the CRT is going to favour you.

As I grow older, I find that I prefer the boardgames that are not random in action resolution, but have some randomness in action selection: that is, you have to select the best action from those that are available to you, but the choices are not the same every game.

The preceding is to give some background to one of the things that bothers me about D&D and Pathfinder, namely, special combat manoeuvres.

Consider disarming: in the 3.5E game, you could specialise in the mechanic so much that you would almost always succeed. And as the choice of when to disarm was always up to you, it created a great imbalance in the game which caused a lot of monsters to be easier than they might otherwise appear. (In fact, tripping might be even more of a problem in 3.5e…) The 4E solution was to limit the number of times you could disarm each day to a hard number, limiting the tactic’s strength in that way.

Consider what the disarm ability would be like if the opportunity to use it wasn’t something that was “anytime you liked” but instead something you could only do under the right circumstances? The challenge is designing a system that allows the right circumstances. 

D&D isn’t really set-up for it. Disarming is really something that should happen in a duel-orientated game where it’s an action that becomes open to you based on actions you’ve performed and actions your opponent has performed. Basically, you can only disarm if you’ve set yourself in the right position and they’ve made themselves vulnerable. I could implement that as a card game pretty easily.

However, there are D&D-type solutions to this:

* If you roll a critical hit, you can disarm (possibly if you have the right training) instead of dealing damage.

* If they roll a critical miss, your next attack can attempt to disarm

* If you hit in your turn and they miss in their turn, you can attempt to disarm.

The trouble with these solutions comes in two forms: rules overhead and extra decision points. Too many decision points actually creates problems in D&D with regard to its speed. I don’t know what the solution is, but I wanted to lay out the context for the problem.