Month: June 2025

I have a confession to make: I like rolling knowledge checks. It’s bad game design, I know! The general arc of the hobby for the last 15 years or so has aimed  towards removing randomness from anything that gives players information, knowledge and perception checks most of all. It started with Gumshoe back in 2007, replacing all investigative rolls with the GM simply giving information to players with correct skills, and continues in recent games like His Majesty the Worm giving you a refreshing pool of points to “bid lore” with rather than getting any dice (or in that case, cards) involved.

I absolutely agree with the principle, too. It’s one thing to create uncertainty about whether or not you manage to shrug off a spell or sneak past a guard, but quite another to hide potentially crucial intel from players. Making meaningful choices constitutes the lion’s share of what a TTRPG is about, and one cannot make meaningful choices without sufficient information. Mystery scenarios, in particular, completely fall apart if the PCs miss clues, prompting the Gumshoe solution in the first place. Even that primary issue aside, the GM did all that prep, they deserve a chance to show off all the neat details and interesting backstories written in their notes.

However. From my earliest days playing RPGs, I’ve made a career out of knowing things. I’ve created two separate characters (one in d20 Star Wars and one in D&D 3.5) who maxed Int and grabbed basically every skill on the list. I don’t care nearly as much about being the person with the highest DPR as much as being the person who gets to raise their hand when the GM asks if anyone has a particular knowledge skill. Yes, that function still holds entirely in the Gumshoe model, and it remains satisfying even without a roll. However, it feels odd to remove uncertainty from knowing things and not from every other kind of skill in the game. It leaves intellectual abilities feeling like an afterthought, and makes the player wonder if anything would have actually turned out differently if they hadn’t invested character building resources into that history degree – would the GM have just given out that information anyways to move the plot along?

Even though it worked in my favor, the relative cheapness of buying up the equivalent of an advanced degree in nearly all forms of study gave the off-putting sense that the game authors didn’t respect that character archetype as much as they did someone who could stab people very slightly more accurately. Certainly, stabbing is a core part of the standard TTRPG experience, but if people want to pay lip service to exploration as one of the three pillars of their elfgames, then the rules ought to reflect that. Being an adventurous archaeologist, a hardboiled detective, or a tactical genius is fun, none of those things are so far outside of the expectations of play as to not be worth modeling with mechanics.

So as bad practice as it is, I must admit I kind of enjoy getting to pull out my huge positive modifier for appraising art or deciphering a dead language. It feels good in the same way that having a big to-hit or damage value is for other people. I want to live the fantasy of being the Doctor (of Who) and going around already recognizing (and having strong opinions about) every new place, obscure custom, and rare creature the party meets.

What Is To Be Done

How to thread that needle? The first, simplest option is rectifying the rest of the system not to use dice as well, bringing it into congruity – this option I’ve explored a great deal in the past, and is too large a subject to cover in a single post. So instead, let us think about how to employ randomness in knowledge skills without recreating the problem of failing to provide crucial information.

A fairly obvious solution presents itself immediately: you get most information simply by having a relevant skill, but you can make a check to get extra, more secret information. Gumshoe does something close to this (albeit with currency instead of dice) and it’s similar to the Landmark, Hidden, Secret model of dungeon design. It’s a start, but it’s hard to define what information is special enough to warrant a roll: you don’t want a GM to feel the need to carve out some information they might have otherwise provided just to make sure there’s a reward for making a check. Additionally, the secret information ought to provide some pertinent benefit to justify sinking points into getting a higher percentage chance of learning it, which is extremely case-by-case and often nontrivial to engineer.

Another way is making intelligence-type checks into a sort of escape valve for when you don’t have an appropriate skill, or no skill directly applies. I’m particularly fond of the rule in Dolmenwood where, if you spend an hour smoking some good pipeweed while mulling over and discussing how to deal with a situation (in-character of course, although one could, strictly speaking, do a LARP version), you can make a roll to force the GM to give you a hint about what to do. This rule has a lot of character to it, it’s both genre appropriate and almost believable from a realism perspective – it’s also exceedingly funny, even to a non-smoker like me. That’s just one application, though. It’s a piece of the puzzle but not the solution on its own.

Another very easy drop-in mechanic is allowing players to make knowledge skill checks to generate one-time advantage against a relevant target: make a Nature check targeting a snarling beast facing the party down, and the fighter gets a reroll the next time they attack it – or when attempt to calm it down with an offer of rations. This makes utility-focused characters much more useful in combat situations, as well as pretty much any situation.

I think that concept can go further, though. The following system is one that I’ve implemented in various stages of refinement over multiple campaigns, streamlined into a generally understandable common parlance. I won’t argue that it’s wholly groundbreaking, given that the fundamental components of it came from other games I admire, but it’s a synthesis worth presenting in a distilled format all the same.

Study

You automatically know any information about things you encounter, as long as you have a relevant skill. Also, as a camp action, you can study a topic – a person, place, organization, object, event, or anything else relatively narrow in scope – to learn a secret about it. To do so, you must have a substantial source of information about the subject: having the thing itself on hand always works, but any firsthand observation or reliable testimony fulfills the requirement, including a report from a spy, a textbook, blueprints, or the aid of an expert. Make an Intelligence (or equivalent) check: if you succeed, you gain Secret: [Topic]. Failures or mixed successes may provoke wasted time or enemies finding evidence of your party, depending on the system.

A secret is like an item but doesn’t weigh anything or take up inventory space. At any time, you can spend a secret to declare one fact about its topic, temporarily speaking about that aspect of the game world with the authority normally reserved for the GM. A fact is a single, concise sentence describing something about the topic. Although it can be crucial in the current situation, it cannot be overly far-reaching in scope, nor can it contradict anything previously established unless you provide a convincing explanation for how the apparent nature of things was misleading. If you’re playing a game with treasure-hunting as a focus, disallow placing magic items and other valuables into rooms and chests.

The first time you or an ally uses the new fact to their benefit, they gain advantage on a relevant check. It can also make things happen that obviate needing to make a check at all. The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible applications. For a less free-form variation, tie specific applications to relevant skills and classes.

• Person: Reveal something they’re very fond or afraid of to use as leverage. Use knowledge of their daily schedule to declare that they walk into the room just now. Disclose a crime or scandal they were a part of and have been trying to hide.
• Place: Recall a map showing a hidden room, trap, entrance, or shortcut. Point out a spot where a well-placed charge could bring the whole building down. Find a useful piece of equipment stashed in a drawer.
• Thing: Say that you’ve crammed yourself on the basics of the subject, and can act as though you have a skill for the rest of the day. Reveal an exploitable weakness in a suit of armor, a monster’s physiology, or a program’s security.

The fact that this action briefly puts narrative authority in the hands of someone other than the GM may rub those of a more traditional mindset the wrong way. Yet, I’ve used it for years in games that otherwise follow an entirely standard player/GM split, with minimal friction. The big difference between this and, say, spending a Fate point to add a detail to a scene, is that it’s not based on spending metacurrency from an top-down authorial perspective, it’s simply an easy abstraction of in-universe research and planning that the PCs are spending time and resources on. In my experience, players loved getting to declare “I’ve looked over the schematics, and there’s a secret passage right here” to skip past a troublesome room; it rewarded them for advance scouting and research (something often not worth doing in RPGs) and made their character seem clever. You could even find secrets already in the world (such as discovering a naturalist’s journal in a locked drawer), letting you treat knowledge as a type of treasure with real mechanical value to players.

This is by no means the only way of handling knowledge checks, but it’s one I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of. It’s a powerful and flexible enough ability that you could write a scholar-type class (call it the Lorekeeper, Sage, or Genius) based around entirely around using it and still be able to keep up with many spellcasters – it’s already preparation based, much like a wizard. It fulfills the fantasy of competence for academia as much as most systems do for warfare. I think nerds ought to get the spotlight sometimes, too.

Dice and I have never gotten along particularly well in the context of roleplaying games. I appreciate them as fun Platonic solids (other than the black sheep d10), they feel nice in the hand, and I’m not immune to that variable ratio schedule behavioral reinforcement that comes with a critical success. However, every game I’ve published until now doesn’t include them. They’re just too random: they make clever plans fail to work, interrupt dramatic moments with incongruous outcomes, and very often make competent player characters look like bumbling fools. I spent many years working very hard to avoid resorting to them, mostly by eschewing randomizers altogether, sometimes by adding cards instead. This past year or so, though, I’ve reevaluated that position. All of those criticisms are correct, but trying to remove dice has revealed the situations where they shine.

What are dice good at? Well, the most obvious thing is that winning a roll feels exciting, it’s a little hit of gambler’s dopamine. It’s so expected from most RPGs that when I’ve tested diceless games, players would sometimes report that it didn’t feel like they were actually taking an action when the moment lacked the binding agent of the roll. Perhaps more crucially, they take heat off the GM: players will readily blame dice for their misfortune, even at low probabilities of success, but their ire may lodge with the GM when that’s the person who keeps telling them they failed. Third is the basic yet endlessly useful function of rolling on charts to procedurally generate people, places, and events, which also ease GM pressure by giving them a semi-automated tool to refer to.

The Six-Sided Solution

So if dice cause as many problem as they solve, how do we retain the good aspects while excising the bad? By rolling first and saving (for) later. I’m calling this new mechanic the “dice bank”, and it works like this:

Instead of rolling a die when you need to make a check, roll six dice ahead of time and put them in the center of the table. Whenever a player would roll a die, they instead choose one of the dice from the table and apply it to their check as though they rolled it (adding modifiers versus a target number as usual), removing it from the pool. Once all six dice have been expended in this way, roll a new set of six dice and repeat. The GM uses their own separate pool of dice for NPC checks.

Everything else stays more or less the same. You can slot this system into any otherwise standard one-die resolution mechanic – although I wouldn’t recommend it for systems without penalties on failures, as otherwise you could easily eliminate low dice by calling for meaningless rolls. I’m using d6s for all actions in the game I’m working on to test the concept, but it would work just as well with d20 or otherwise. You’re still always rolling, but you can peer a few steps into the future and pick when you want that high roll and when you can accept a low one. Therefore you’re always making a decision when you go to pick up a die, which isn’t necessarily the case with the normal roll-to-save paradigm.

I’m calling it a dice bank as a generic term, but in a given game it might easily be given a diegetically flavored term like “fate”, or described as the opportunities presented to you. It’s inspired by the video game Citizen Sleeper, in which each day you roll a set of dice and assign them to the actions you take during that day. Although in that game the allocations only modify probabilities up or down, with the bank you directly use the pre-rolled dice for actions.

What this means is that, although you still get the full range of successes and failures at randomized rates, you’re making a meaningful choice every time you make a check. You’re asking yourself (and often, collaborating with the group strategically) how important it is to win this time, enough that you’re willing to fall on your sword next time. Input randomness instead of output randomness, a melding of skillful play and dramatic flow.

It also creates some unique design space in how abilities might manipulate the bank: you might be able to change the size of the bank to “see the future” a little further, toss out dice you don’t like, refill the bank up to maximum sooner than waiting to use it all up, store a die and carry it over into the next pool, or even opt to do an immediate new roll instead of selecting a die from the pool. Perhaps most interesting is the possibility of abilities you trigger by spending a specific rolled number, e.g. a spell that can be cast only with a 5. Such an ability would be especially valuable if it wanted low values like 1 or 2, because it would be an efficient way to get rid of dice likely to create failures in normal checks.

Dice might also be spent on things that aren’t strictly skill/attribute checks: in theory they could also be applied to encounter rolls and the like. Essentially anything the system procedurally generates (events, reactions, hex contents, treasure) could be handled in this way. By default I imagine that the GM would use their own dice bank for these, both in-game and out: it would turn pre-session prep into a sort of minigame in which rolled dice became a sort of budget to work with, assigning them to different things. Alternatively (or on top of that), players might be allowed to influence procedural rolls with their own dice, explained as, say, the ability of a hunter to track down certain prey and avoid creatures they aren’t interested in.

Further Considerations

There are several dials to be tweaked here that may significantly alter how the bank feels in play: first of all, how many dice go in the pool. I’ve chosen six to roughly match with the upper end of the number of players around the table, but it could be higher or lower, or simply be set equal to the number of players.

Second, each player could have their own pool of dice instead of drawing from a communal reserve. This would have the upside of removing the chance of arguments about who got to use which dice, but the downside of limiting the teamwork aspect of sharing dice. Collaboration could be reintroduced by making an assistance action that hands people dice from your pool to represent your aid. However, for the sake of parity the GM would then potentially have to maintain dice pools for individual NPCs, which would be much more of a pain. This may not be a popular opinion, but I strongly favor GMs using the same rules as any other player at the table, for consistency.

Third, it wouldn’t have to be dice: you could easily use a deck of cards instead. In fact, if pools were individualized as above, the system would simply become having a hand of cards that you played from, a well-established concept everyone is already familiar with. I suggest dice first due to the prevalence of dice as the medium of randomization in TTRPGs.

Fourth and finally, the dice could be rerolled on a particular schedule, such as whenever you make camp, or at the start of an encounter. This approach has a certain appeal, but I’ve decided against it for because it gives you more opportunities to throw out low dice. The choice of when you allocate your low dice is the most interesting aspect of the system, and not something that should be easily avoided.

Although fairly simple on its face, the dice bank could manifest cascading effects throughout the rest of the rules once actually put into practice, so I’m going to get a few rounds of playtesting in and report back in another post. I shall redeem dice on my own terms.