What are the incentives to roll dice?

A whole lot of role-playing games use dice to resolve stuff like conflicts or to see if you manage to complete a task without putting yourself in danger. Some games tell you to never roll the dice when nothing is on the line. Seems reasonable to me, no need to invoke chance if there is no risk, right? But what if you are incentivized to roll anyway? What if a game makes it so that you have to roll to progress, even if there is no risk?

Looking at a few games, we have for example D&D. The consequences for failing a roll with no risk in D&D is usually nothing at all. You failed, big whoop, there was nothing on the line, nothing happens. If you are the crafty kind of GM, you can always give some options before the roll, like oh you want to roll for history here? Well if you fail you’ll invent a conspiracy theory which your character will believe and then the whole campaign suddenly revolves around that. If you want. But not all GM’s are like that, the roll might fail and nothing happens whatsoever. The mechanics don’t punish you for rolling a dice whenever you want to. You are not incentivized to stay away from rolling dice, but on the other hand you are not incentivized to roll every few minutes either.

Looking instead at a game like Rolemaster, rolling dice for fun might have consequences. You look at a window, decide that you want to figure out what famous artist made that beautiful stained window that overlooks the plaza, and you make a local lore roll. (Do you have ANY idea how specific the skills in Rolemaster are? The character sheet is 6 pages for a reason.) Well suddenly you fumble. The risk is small but it is always there. So you fumble, you roll a 66 or a 00, you have a stroke and you fall down and die on the spot from straining your brain. Well that sucks. You are very much not incentivized to roll constantly in Rolemaster, since things can go catastrophically wrong.

Now take a game like Forbidden lands (Svärdets sång) by Free League publishing. You’ve got a standard year zero engine under the hood, dice pools, pressing rolls, 6’s good, 1’s bad, all that jazz. But if you look at other games in the same family, like Vaesen, or Alien, the more horror-y games, a couple of things stand out in Forbidden lands. Let’s say you play a mage. You want power points. You get power points by pressing rolls that hurt you. If you have a 1 in your rolled dice, and press that roll, you get 1 power point. You also get damage to an attribute. To cast your mage spells, you need power points, so you need to press rolls, and you need to take damage. You are incentivized to roll a lot. Preferably in situations with low risk, so you don’t risk dying from the environment around you when you charge up. In other year zero engine games, this incentive isn’t there in the same way. Failing is just very bad (and a way to fail forward), not also a way to get closer to being able to kame-hame-hama all over some poor enemy who just happens to get in the way of your old person rage.

Players in Forbidden lands are thus incentivized to halfway kill themselves while cooking dinner, gathering berries, or trying to spot something in the tall grass over there. Mechanically, you have to explain how you press the roll, but it’s always possible to come up with a reason how you do that, you grab the pot with your bare hands to save it, you wade into a blackberry bush, you crawl into the grass to see better, whatever.

Anyway, what you risk getting is players who rely on power points just trying to squeeze every last roll out of the system, slowing things down, requiring resources from other players to be able to participate, and generally stealing the spotlight.

Sadly, this makes me feel like Forbidden lands is a much worse game mechanically than it could be. What could be an interesting balancing act trying to keep power points up while in actual risky situation instead for me has ended up being tedious.

And this is why it’s important to talk at the table and manage expectations, and make sure you view the rules in the same way. If you don’t agree with the rest of the table, that table might just not be for you.