I urged my gaming group to take the gaming survey from Questing Beast that's been making the rounds, and they did, and I also told some people who play in my games on an irregular basis to take the survey. If you took the survey, then you may recall that there's a question asking your opinion on whether it's acceptable for the game master to ignore the results of a dice roll. I know how I feel about that, and I know it's a contentious topic in tabletop gaming, but what I found interesting was how a casual gamer reacted to the question.
My partner plays in most one-shots I run. She's not interested in participating in a campaign, but she enjoys the occasional adventure. She's only ever played roleplaying games with either me as the game master, or else with someone who has learned how to game master from me. In other word, her roleplaying world is pretty insular.
When she was taking the survey, and the question about a game master ignoring dice rolls came up, she had to stop to ask me what the question meant. That caught me by surprise, because in my great big wide world of gaming, the question was obvious, even notorious. But she didn't understand it.
The reason she didn't understand the question was because, as a game master, I roll dice in clear view of the players. Actually, to be precise, I don't roll dice, I outsource it to the players themselves because the dice tower is usually in the middle of the table beyond my reach. When a monster attacks a player on my left, for example, I have a player on my right roll the attack and damage.
That's the culture of the table. Everyone rolls dice where everyone can see. It wasn't exactly something I instituted intentionally, I just wanted everyone to see my rolls, and because I was rolling dice so everyone could see, everyone rolled dice that way.
Aside from one person who had a little gaming experience as a kid, all the players in my local group basically learned tabletop RPG from me because I'm the one that invited each of them over for a game 5 years ago. I knew, as I taught them how to play, that it was up to me to convey the rules and procedure of the game. I also knew I was establishing a specific table culture, but I was thinking in terms of collaboration, creating a safe space, encouraging diversity, and that sort of thing. It had not occurred to me that I was also serving as a sort of role model for the nuances of game etiquette. I kind of wish I'd done better, now that I think about it. I could have taught them from the start, by example rather than by instruction, to roll attack and damage at the same time. I could have demonstrated how to use a d10 to track Inspiration or Luck points. There are so many little tricks I should have been sneaking into their heads. Lesson learned!
So the question about ignoring a dice roll obviously didn't compute for my partner. In her mind, I guess, she was picturing a game master rolling dice (or having a player do it), looking at the result, and then announcing to the table that it didn't count. That makes no sense. So I explained to her that some game masters roll dice behind a thing called a game master screen, like the ones you see on TV representations of D&D, and they don't let the players see the roll. And then sometimes, if they don't like the roll, they act like it was some other result.
She stared blankly at me, and then asked, "You mean they cheat?"
Well, it's hard to argue with logic. The scenario I described to her is, indeed, cheating. In this instance, she has the superpower of ignorance. Nothing influenced her to draw that conclusion, she simply examined the facts and identified it with common terminology.
She had a lot more to say about it after I confirmed that she was understanding what I was saying correctly, and I played devil's advocate for a few moments but my heart wasn't in it, and she wasn't buying it anyway. I tried to explain that sometimes a fight gets boring, but then I admitted that a game master could, instead, have the monster flee or collapse or something. I mentioned random tables and how sometimes the result isn't very exciting, but then we both wondered why the theoretical game master in this theoretical scenario rolled on the table in the first place.
Basically, my partner came to the conclusion that if you're going to ignore dice rolls, then you shouldn't be rolling dice. And I don't disagree.
I don't think this is exactly a hot take, but I thought it was interesting that a casual gamer, relatively unspoilt by game geek debates and discourse, would immediately come to the conclusion that lying about a dice roll is cheating. There's an argument that her inexperience is exactly why she would think it was cheating. Maybe if she had to be a game master she'd feel differently. Maybe her players wouldn't actually care, as long as they were having fun.
It's hard to say for certain, obviously. But in a "clean room," devoid of qualifiers and edge cases, at least one casual gamer has confirmed that lying about a dice roll is indeed lying about a dice roll.
These kinds of conversations and insights have been the most unexpected thing, for me, about the survey. I think the survey data will be interesting to see, once it's compiled and released. But in the mean time, I know I've surprised myself with some of my own answers, and I've been puzzled by what some of my seemingly contradictory answers say about what I apparently value in a game. Most significantly though, it's opened up some fascinating conversations with friends as we compare our gaming profiles, as revealed by a refreshingly insightful survey.