Check Check

There was a conversation on the r/osr subreddit the other day about “eschewing ability checks”—the author wanted advice about how to kick the habit of calling for checks, operating under the assumption that correct OSR practice is to roleplay everything and, well, eschew checks. Some people did just say, “Yeah, don't roll checks,” but the response was varied. The top comment, though perhaps incomplete, is excellent advice:

I call for an ability check when I am on the fence about whether something should happen or not. […] if I'm torn, if I really can't decide for myself, I let the ability check decide.

Randomness and unpredictability are a big part of the fun of a game, but although the GM hopefully creates a lot of unpredictability and (seeming) randomness for the players, the players don't necessarily generate the same for the GM. Particularly in trope-heavy genres like fantasy and SF, with the weight of generations of gaming and storytelling history bearing down on you, it's really easy to reach for the obvious or familiar, not just when developing a setting (vaguely Celtic elves, caves full of goblins, dwarves with Scottish accents) but also when responding to questions or uncertain situations on the fly.

Random tables help a lot. I'm running a Stars Without Number game for a bunch of 5e veterans (and a couple newbies) right now, and right from the start (sector creation, where you have to puzzle out head-scratchers like hundreds of millions of people living at a medieval technological level on a planet without an atmosphere, or the capital of a regional empire having a population of only a few hundred) it's taught me a lot about how much more engaging and exciting things are when you let the dice lead you away from your own reflexive inclinations. And as in setting and NPC creation, why not in the way the world and the NPCs respond to the player characters?

Yeah, I want my players to actually describe what they're doing, and I'm going to wave away checks that are just a complete waste of time—like, yes, you're searching the room for the hidden thing you know is in here somewhere, you're obviously going to find it given enough time—but whenever they propose something where the two (or more) possible outcomes present a real narrative fork in the road, even a very silly or trivial one, I turn to the dice instead of just picking the most logical, probable, or convenient outcome. I think that's what's missing from the comment I quoted at the top: Just not knowing whether something should happen isn't quite a high enough bar. Sometimes you have no idea what should happen, but it doesn't really matter either way. If the difference between success and failure in the check is your players getting a few more coins or having to fight five guys instead of six guys, yeah, don't bother with the check. Just make a decision by fiat, and you might as well err on the side of rewarding them for making the effort.

But if it's going to take the whole story in a different direction, even in a small way? If whatever results from this check will have ramifications for the rest of the campaign? That's cool. They want to take over the computer system and blast all the guards out of the airlocks? They want to convert the kobolds to their religion and persuade them to overthrow the dragon? They want to go completely off-script and, say, poison the governor and then replace him with a clone? Let them cook. Let the dice decide.

It's fun for smaller stuff too, even completely trivial things. One of my players wanted to make tiramisu from various imperishable synthetic crap in a spaceship's galley. Seems like a tall order, but her character had gone to culinary school at one point in her youth, so hey, why not just set a very high difficulty target and see what happens? And she nailed it. So now she's canonically a genius in the kitchen. Doesn't affect the story right now, but later? Of course it's going to come back in one way or another. And we are all the richer for it.