Dice Mechanics and Design

 

There are moments, reading about other designers and their turning points, when I feel a faint kinship with that familiar image of someone shaking a fist at the sky. Not out of bitterness, but out of a need to understand why something didn’t sit right and what I might have done differently.

I had that feeling this morning while reading an interview with John Harper in Wyrd Science magazine about the development of Blades in the Dark, its relationship to Apocalypse World, and the natural evolution of a game to suit what you need. The element of discussion that caught my eye was the discussion of dice mechanics: how resolution systems shape not just outcomes but the entire texture of play.

It took me back to the origins of the dice mechanic behind The Dee Sanction and, later, Sanction.

Enter the Maelstrom

The starting point, perhaps unexpectedly, was frustration. Specifically, frustration with Maelstrom, a game I have a great deal of affection for. Its Elizabethan setting is rich, evocative, and full of promise. Character generation produces individuals with history, profession, and a sense of lived experience. You are not playing nobodies.

And yet, when it comes time to act, those same characters often feel curiously ineffective.

The character generation system, along with an often unmodified percentile die, tends to produce low chances of success, even for capable individuals. The result, in play, can be a kind of inertia. You attempt something meaningful, you roll, and… nothing happens. The moment passes without consequence, and the energy at the table dissipates. It’s the moment you roll and get a Miss a Turn outcome in a classic board game.

I knew I didn’t want that.

Failure is Not the First Option

I didn’t want this situation in my game, but I didn’t want to swing too far in the opposite direction, either. The Dee Sanction is not about heroes in the conventional sense. These are not figures of effortless competence. They are agents operating at the edges of their ability, often outmatched, often improvising. Failure—of a sort—needed to remain present.

But not the kind of failure that stalls the game.

What I wanted was forward motion. Not a revolutionary idea, perhaps. Many modern systems embrace this principle, but I wanted to achieve it with as little mechanical overhead as possible. No stacks of modifiers, no nested subsystems, no need to interpret a lattice of conditional rules. Just a single roll, clean and immediate.

That constraint led me, quite naturally, to probability.

Fifty-Fifty

If you begin with the idea that a character should have roughly a fifty per cent chance of clean success, you can start to shape the system around that expectation. A four-sided die offers that simplicity: two faces succeed, two do not. Elegant, but perhaps too blunt. Or sharp, if you’ve managed to step on it in the dark or in a hurry.

So I stepped up. (Rather than stepped on.)

A six-sided die became the baseline. On a roll of 3 or higher, you succeed. On a 1 or 2, you do not simply fail—you Falter. The distinction matters. A Falter means the action still carries forward, but with consequences, complications, or costs. It is, in many ways, akin to the mixed success seen in Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) on a middling throw of the dice: the story moves, but not without friction.

This was the core: success is common, progress is constant, but the world pushes back.

True failure still exists, but it is conditional. The size of the die you roll is not fixed. It shifts depending on your preparation, your equipment, and your circumstances. If things are in your favour, you might roll a larger die—Stepping Up. If they are not, the die Steps Down.

And if it Steps Down far enough, below a four-sided die, you reach a decision point.

This is where Call to Fail enters the picture.

I’m Not Smirking

At that moment, the Game Master might ask, with a certain quiet expectation, whether you wish to proceed. To Call to Fail is to accept that things will go badly, but to choose to act anyway. It is not imposed upon you; it is an invitation. You are saying: this matters enough that I will embrace the consequences. It’s the low throw in PbtA

Even in that space, the story does not stop. A character who falls still moves: perhaps crawling, perhaps grasping, perhaps dragging themselves forward inch by inch. The important thing is that the scene evolves, the fiction deepens, and the table remains engaged.

Looking back, I cannot claim that this approach is entirely without precedent. Design is always, in part, a conversation with what has come before. But at the time, it felt new to me. More importantly, it felt usable. It felt like a foundation I could build on, adapt, and carry across different settings.

Challenge Accepted

That, ultimately, is why the mechanic exists as it does.

Not to be clever for its own sake, nor to chase novelty, but to solve a problem I kept encountering at the table: the dead moment after a failed roll, when nothing changes, and no one quite knows what to do next.

If the system can prevent that—if it can ensure that every roll, in some way, propels the game forward—then it is doing the work I need it to do.