The Joke Roll

Picture this.

You’re playing an RPG with your friends and just thought of something incredibly funny and incredibly sophomoric, and with a dangerous grin on your face you scoop up your dice and declare your intention to “roll for crotch grab!” or “yeah, I’m gonna roll to see if I can keep myself from getting a crush on ‘em.”

No sooner has this silliness left your mouth than your GM rolls their eyes and goes “come on, don’t roll for that. What if you fail? There’s no stakes! There’s no point! You can just do it if you want to do it!”

This is the correct answer, in the same sense that the “correct answer” to a paint-by-numbers picture is to follow the given numbers, in the same sense that the “correct answer” of a lego set is the model that the given instructions tell you to build. Given the principles of RPG storytelling and the agreed-upon rules for setting stakes and abiding by the rules of randomization, it is the correct answer.

Which is very interesting, because I think we both know it’s the wrong response. You’re leaving good clean dirty fun on the table!

This is a part of the RPG experience that almost everyone can identify with, and yet there seems to be at least some conventional wisdom that dictates such goofs and japes must not be graced with the cold authority of the gameplay mechanics. To roll for such tawdry delights would be to cheapen the objective metaphysical machine that fuels your fantastical journey. The problem with this perspective is that it is prescriptive, and I prefer a descriptive one. We know that people love to roll for jokes. What I want to know is why.

If I were to put it dryly and dispassionately, I might say that there is inherent humor in the intentional juxtaposition of uncompromising rules and personal silliness. It’s a bit like avant-garde art, a bit like putting a urinal in an art gallery. Here are all these finicky, fiddly rules for swords and adventure and heroic fantasy, and I’m going to roll this sparkly die and add my constitution modifier to see how much piss I can piss into the piss urn. Maybe I’m revealing myself to be immature, but honestly? That sounds pretty funny to me! Rolling for that sounds funny! All of the complaints people make about comedy rolls are technically true: It cheapens and undermines authority, it lowers the stakes, it steals focus from “more important” things, and it can mess with the tone of a story. These same qualities are what makes it good humor, at least in moderation and in correct social context - timing is everything, after all.

What really interests me about it, though, is that it is a meta-mechanic, or a meta move, that naturally emerges from RPG play and uses an inherent quality of the dice roll structure in a way that very few trad games intentionally harness: the spotlight.

In a game where the majority of conflicts or moments of uncertainty are handled via randomization (I suspect other arbitration processes would also work, but I don’t want to deal with all that right now), rolling the dice is about emphasis. The game rules tell you what moments it cares about, what moments it considers worthy of emphasizing, or at least the moments it is most concerned with telling you how to emphasize. A game in which you roll for combat but not for conversation tells you what moments it cares about emphasizing and vice versa. The power of the comedy roll is in the way it plays with the concept of emphasis.

When you say you want to roll for something in a game, that means you want to take the microphone, even just for a moment. You say you want to roll for something, and everyone looks at you, curious, excited, waiting breathlessly to see what’s about to happen. It’s important. And then you say something completely silly, and that emphasis, all that attention and expectation, gets subverted and betrayed. Comedy, as they say, is about subverting expectations.

That’s why this is a meta-move that demonstrates emergent gameplay. The comedy roll isn’t programmed into any trad game, yet it emerges in any table that plays them. It’s a fundamental form of humor in these spaces, an entire type of gag that relies on the meta-mechanics of attention and gameplay emphasis. And what people discover naturally, we can and should add to our understanding of the medium and the mechanics that are common to it.

In the spirit of incorporating the joke roll into our games and pry free our sense of humor from the cold straitjacket of “stakes”, I propose a three-part model of Challenge, Legitimacy, and Spotlight.

The Referee is obliged to invoke randomization when...

We can understand these parts as being layered and additive. After all, I’ve already shown that rolls definitionally spotlight, so that’s always true. Challenge rolls are obviously also attempting to Legitimize a change to the world or to the character’s fate. But these layers come with expectations, and if we peel back the layers and remove the expectations we can arrive at nuanced approaches to arbitration that are more fit for purpose.

Most rolls and checks made in trad games fall into the Challenge category, which involves stakes as the key component of the roll. You can’t make a Challenge roll without stakes.

Peel back the expectation of immediate, concrete stakes to reveal more abstract and general stakes and you probably have a Legitimacy roll. The stakes for a Legitimacy roll usually have to do with facts or lore about the world and its features and inhabitants. Sometimes there are in-the-moment repercussions, like a monster having a vulnerability or not, but generally these rolls are made during investigative sequences and many referees struggle with how to resolve a failure for a roll that has no immediate stakes to it because the character wasn’t actually doing anything to the world at the time.

Peel back the need for any meaningful stakes at all, and the only thing that rolls do now is Spotlight. What happens if you don’t piss as much piss as you wanted? Probably not very much, unless you were in a pissing contest, and even then it’s hard to imagine that’s particularly important. It would be kind of annoying if failure or success did make a big change, because you as a player probably weren’t TRYING to get thrown out of the bar or catch the whole place on fire or get arrested - you just wanted to do something funny. And that’s a fine thing for a roll to do! There’s no need for joke rolls to derail an entire session just because a failure is a failure is a failure. And this doesn’t just go for trad games, either. PBTA games can be notoriously stringent about comedy rolls, because according to the principles, a 6- must be met with a hard move. I say: no it doesn’t! A move’s outcome should be commensurate to its stakes, otherwise you risk losing verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief, to whatever degree that might matter to you and your table. Most games don’t think no stakes are very fun, but most tables DO think it’s pretty fun every so often to roll for something stupid and get knocked on your ass.

That said, there’s an interesting resonance between Legitimacy rolls and Spotlight rolls. Both of them have that kind of “well, what am I supposed to do with this?” quality that not every referee enjoys navigating, because wisdom tells them that you must be punished for a failure. I think explicitly including low-stakes and no-stakes rolls is good for games, not bad. For one thing, they’re probably already IN your game. They’re in the culture. People will likely be doing them if the tone of their game is even CLOSE to lighthearted. This article is about a descriptive lens on play culture and working with what people are already doing. I think these moments can be difficult for referees because they’re not told how these rolls are different from Challenge rolls. Most games only acknowledge the existence of Challenge rolls, after all. But if we told referees about these different points on the spectrum, I think we might be able to lose a couple of friction points. The groaning and eye-rolling, the “you’re not supposed to roll for that,” might fall away, because the referee would hear you and go “oh, okay, this is a Spotlight kind of roll. I know how to arbitrate this.” Granted, the loss of that friction might make the joke roll just a little less funny. But it also might not, and the overall experience might be better, so… whatever, man.

I want to clarify that I am not presenting the tri-layer model of rolls as objectively true. It’s a fuzzy model presented in a vacuum that is meant purely to widen the scope of visible possibilities, not nail them down perfectly in place. It’s just a starting point for further iteration and exploration. The rest is up to you.