The Rocks Don't Do Math Nor Divine The God's Will
But they make or break a community of equals.
This article is a companion/revisit of my old article in authority in TTRPGs. This time, we are spending more time delving into our relationship with dice and other randomizers1. Why do we have lotteries in cooperative collaborative storytelling, for what purposes, how do they work and what relationships they foster — and thus, how they shape social construction of knowledge, communication and the art we create.
In the time between my original article and now, there has been a renewed interest in examining the lies of so-called representative democracies, pointing out such structures arose to prevent true democracy and politically theorizing about the democratic power of lotteries2. Not only that, in response to this renewed interest, there has been earth-shaking scholarship done on historically and anthropologically lotteries have shaped communities, social relationships, political imaginary and served to foster egalitarianism3.
It seems lotteries have always been a powerful tool to remove power from figures of authority, to give a horizontal structure and assure a certain “fairness” or “equality” — everyone has the same lot, and the same opportunity to get an equiparable outcome of possibilities, even when absolute measured equality is impossible. And more important, this power came from a shared center, which in turn creates a community of those that share the same lots.
I think it is fair to say, as I mentioned in previous work, that we often approach dice and other mechanisms of lottery with the same goal: to create an egalitarian fairness in the process. This is no accident: even the people that think the least about the art-form have some sense that cooperative collaborative storytelling requires an effort to break away with existing hierarchies, form a new center and have power come from this center, forming a community around it that even if they may not have equal parts, share in a share of storyteller lots.
Not All Lotteries Make Us Equal The Same Way
While that desire seems to be common, things are not so easily categorized. As such, I draw on existing scholarship on lottery to examine the lotteries of our TTRPGs. Not that the particular mechanisms of a lottery are irrelevant — dice or cards, no matter the shape or number. For this analysis, the same humble d6 can be different things, depending on the purpose and relationships that create/created by the lottery in which they are used. Sorted them in a rough estimation of how frequently they show up.
Distributive: these are some of the most important egalitarian lotteries, as they define a group, mark them as equals and assign different lots of outcomes to them — everyone is considered equal before the lottery, and not only that, the process of the lottery makes them equal and able to socially and politically live as such. It is also not only of the least frequent/diverse in TTRPG implementation, it has a quirky character. While historical and social examples of distributive lotteries are overwhelming positive — allocation of land, food, loot, inheritance, positions of authority conferred by the group through the lottery, etc. — they are almost exclusively negative in TTRPGs. This is why distributive lotteries are almost exclusively used in combat, as a way to assign pain — in the form of consumption of resources, or even death. The 15 on the dice can equally land on the wizard or the fighter, but it can kill one while bouncing off the armor of the other; they are equal to the choice of lots. While there is a lot of indirect distribution in combat, as a result of lotteries within lotteries, sometimes the distributive nature of combat can be quite explicit: like in some initiative procedures, determining through lottery which enemy attacks which player character, or be what combat is in games like Trophy: Gold and Troika! It was quite difficult for me to find non-combat examples of distributive lotteries, mostly being other games where players have a limited number of actions, and lotteries end up deciding who ends up handling more or less difficult choices — and even those tend to share on the negative connotations. In fact, the most non-combat distributive lottery seems to be the punitive “rolling dice is a lose state” of certain games and artistic movements: everyone is equal before the lottery, and everyone can be forced to draw a lot equally, and get one of the many outcomes — leaning towards bad, but hey, you accept as equal when you started playing the game and were seen as equal before the center of the group by the threat of lottery.
Selective: Selective lotteries’ purpose is to shape the group, then, after rendering all equal, select people for particular tasks, purposes or even to get the spotlight. These processes are pretty common in cooperative storytelling, however, tend to rarely be formalized. Lotteries are often taken to decide who goes first into a room, whose turn is now to act, etc. Games with classes and archetypes often have a subtle/indirect selective lottery to them, but alas, rarely formalized. Some, however, are quite literal. Phoenix Dawn Command card mechanics has a limited pool, thus selecting which kind of immortal legionary you are by it; if you are playing with physical cards, Assets in Ironsworn end up as a selective lottery, deciding what is the social role of your ironsworn. In TTRPGs, selective lotteries seem to thrive when you want to foster a sense of equality at the same point you want to add creative restrictions to the cooperative storytelling — and in the rare cases in which they are formalized, have an excellent design record at fostering so.
Mixture: An homogenizing force, a mixture lottery is one that seeks to destroy or suppress previous hierarchies, clear the slate as much as possible, and start the cooperative collaborative storytelling as equal as possible. It also covers many lotteries used to solve conflict — such as player vs player or character vs character situations. In the horror game Ten Candles, who you are is assembled from a mixture of index cards written by other players. Through degraded through the telephone game of PbtA interactions, the purpose of bonds in Apocalypse World was a mixture lottery to foster new social positioning for the story, starting from an egalitarian point despite any hierarchies before the game. Belonging Outside Belonging games wing between informal selective lotteries and mixture lotteries in its assignment of roles and thus building the mixed queer community. Quiet Year game engine is a long mixture lottery. Every “rule zero” or worldbuilding game ever made seeks to do a mixture lottery, and it succeeds or fails by how well it implements it.
Procedural: a procedural lottery is one about turns and rounds, of rotations and places; it fosters an egalitarian cooperation by creating a group and treating every member of the group an equal, replaceable part. Where a distributive lottery focuses on the “lot” you are given, the selective on the specificity of the person for the role, the procedural lottery is homogenizing — however, not as much as mixture —, entirely based on the idea that eventually, all will serve this lot. Almost all combat lotteries that are not distributive are procedural, the most common being initiative/turn order. They are present in every rule written as “when…”, whenever who the player is or is playing is by formal or informal lottery, put in the Situation and there is a formal lottery for that: a move, a saving throw, a selection of choices, etc. The framework basis for both PbtA and OSR games is built entirely on the incorporation of stacked procedural lotteries.
Divination: Alas, this is the most common form of lottery in TTRPGs, for arbitrary adjudication by “an external force”, the oracular divinatory purpose. Curiously, this is the only one that is not done as part of fostering an egalitarian base for a community to form, but a status quo preserving one — the lottery equivalent of shrugging and deciding on the arbitrary nature of the (dice) gods to avoid erosion of the existing community, social relationships, hierarchies and harmony. We have it everywhere: random encounter tables, wild magic, gonzo tables, oracles in solo and cooperative games, every single piece of rules that you are supposed to roll “when you don’t know what is going to happen“, Reaction rolls, everytime GM Kyle sub-delegates to dice.
The Lot of the Artform
The original article went a lot into the nature of vertical-authority in TTRPGs and the benefits of the arbitrary lottery. All those arbitrary benefits remain true, all the trade-off of authority remains, however, looking at the kind of lotteries we will look them not when we seek an arbitrary authority and its benefits but when you turn to lotteries as a rational call by a group to foster horizontal-equality, when our dice are part of rational egalitarian actors: The reason for this analysis is quite straightforward: we seem to be a pretty good job in doing the former4; but we may be missing a lot by not trying to do the latter.
When is a lottery rational? Well, the simplest short of hand is when the lottery is part of a series of rational decisions that require an equalizing shake-up at some point, rather than getting a lottery to avoid making a call; that is, integrating the lottery as part of something the group has been thinking about VS using the lottery in lieu of thinking as a group, and leaving it as something post-lottery.
When is a lottery egalitarian? When the act of turning to the lottery, and abiding by its outcomes, both creates and is created by a center that creates a community of equals. When the group decides on the lottery, and after it the power returns to the center of the group, reaffirming it in the process. Note, that this does not mean as an alternative to things like the game rules and/or a GM-like authority; in fact, the first call that makes an egalitarian lottery is to choose who is to preside over the lottery — like “rules as written” or GM bias. However, turning to that presiding element, as well as abiding by the lottery results must come from the center — it is not GM Kyle or the Book or the Evil Designer making the call, it is the group deciding/abiding by the results of the lottery and entrusting the invested presiding authority to see it done.5
Back To Authority
One can only speculate on the aversion to egalitarianism — and thus, democratic collaborative cooperation — the absence of distributive lotteries or the overwhelming negative character of those begets in TTRPGs. One can safely say, however, that it seriously limits our imagination, how much authority we need to invest on people, the role of lotteries on that or make us shy from restricting that authority once granted.
However, one can be quite confident in explaining why things are like that. There is no big conspiracy, the reason why these are not more common was already covered in the original article: despite being a central element of how cooperative collaborative storytelling happens, there is not much interest in thinking about authority in TTRPG, and what little it is, it is often distracted into abandoning the question of authority in lieu of fighting the Evil Designer/Tyrant GM.
So of course, when we rarely think about the benefits of an arbitrary authority — and putting it in a temporary vessel like a lottery — why would we ever think about making an active effort to make our cooperative storytelling egalitarian through lotteries?
It is untapped artistic potential; in the original article I shared the conclusion that the why and what of authority is going to play a crucial role in the maturation of the TTRPG artform. The very reason why I’m revisiting this is that the recent literature on lotteries convinced me they are the how we may do that.
This is an important point to touch base, because I have seen people misled themselves that they are promoting revolutionizing and democratic artist movements, when their misaligned aims ends up thinking that all rules are tyrant and homebrew by GM Kyle is inherently liberatory, that anti-democracy is inherent to the art-form, or that democracy is impossible to design for and rejecting the entire notion of cybernetics 6. There is also the issue that experiments in rational egalitarian lotteries have been quite shy so far: GMless/GMFul games overcorrect often into overdesign or overGMing, while being quite lottery-skeptic; the most remarkable experiments still end up being things like Night Witches’ rotating GMs, where the selective lottery is tied to when the Witches relocate base. Again, there is a lot of rich potential for experimentation for those most ambitious artists of the artform.
But when you go into the dark, you better bring a lamp or you will be lost. It is very easy to be distracted or misguided, and that is not a problem of design. No, we talking culture here. Sure, a lot of you think of lotteries as fair, and could easily turn that into egalitarian. But how many see them as rational? How many see them not as a a source of chaos, that incidentally, tends to be fair in its promethean outbursts? Before we can start to do art that benefits from egalitarian lotteries, we need to adopt ourselves adopt an egalitarian mindset.
This is quite tricky, as with all things social and cultural and relationships; without looking into their context, the very same things can look alike. Which again, is why developing that egalitarian mindset is important to learn to recognize it and pursue it. However two things are key to developing:
Understanding there is a center and receiving outcomes from the center as equals creates community.
Accepting that in cooperative collaborative storytelling, it is to the benefit of the community — and the art — if you seek to make all participants as equal towards the center, be them synchronous peers (players), asynchronous collaborators (game text, designers), or presiding authorities (game masters, facilitators, veterans).
Approaching exceptions and things that reinforce the power of the center of the group; who rolls the dice, the game designer, the Game Master, to be occasional exceptions that not only confirm but reinforce the egalitarian norm7.
Here’s an example of egalitarian mindset in action:
When playing a game with class archetypes, a player declares they would be interested in playing the sole, roguish, damage dealing archetype. Despite no rules covering this, the Game Master offers to preside a selective lottery in each player is handed two archetypes, and to choose between one of them. The agreement of the players of this as something that treats them as equals reinforces the center, even as it invests power to the GM to preside over this.
Exceptions do not need to erode, and can indeed, reinforce the egalitarian mindset:
When playing a game with class archetypes, a player declares they would be interested in playing the sole, roguish, damage dealing archetype. The other players agree with it, so the center grants them a special boon, beyond the scope of any lottery. The rest decide by formal or informal selective lottery the other roles for themselves, including a lot for other archetypes the Rogue player can switch to.
The Game Master offers to preside a selective lottery in each player is handed two archetypes, and to choose between one of them. The GM asks from a boon for this: they want to remove some archetypes from the sortition. The center abides, and let’s the Game Master remove some they personally dislike to oversee during play. However, rather than an arbitrary call, this was a boon granted by the center as part of overseeing a lottery, reinforcing the community of peers.
The very same situation and context could be approached without egalitarian mindset in mind8:
With limited archetype choices, a player insists they “always play the Rogue”. They don’t agree to any lottery, insisting they get this boon. The center is forced to concede or crumble — but it is clear that this center that is formed leaves most of the players outside of it, starting to erode horizontality in the community.
Players protest lottery methods, as they are not “in the rulebook”, limiting the implementation of a lottery that comes from the center. Authority becomes stratified in the rulebook.
The Game Master presides over a selective lottery, but makes his privilege to remove options they are biased against, rather than doing so as a boon granted by the group for their role in presiding over the lottery. The center loses power, as the Game Master entrenches itself above their peers.
Once you internalize an egalitarian mindset, it becomes easier to approach lotteries for egalitarian purposes rationally, rather than exclusively an wild arbitrary element. Then you can start to critic how the artform performs within this framework, and only then can effectively make your art in dialogue with that.
For example, one of our earliest critics claimed that as a democratizing mechanic that let “everyone play the game/find a game”, put the assumption that you can bring any character you have played in that game, all the places they visited and connections they made into any other game of that system. When one looks at it through it with egalitarian, making this game text is far from democratic: the center is bypass, or ignored, and you are expected to carry the boons granted by external authorities, independent of the cognitive load of that for your new community, and actively preventing lotteries that may break the old status quo and allow you to become an equal peer in that community — or at the very least, puts the new community already having to be on the backfoot and fighting an uphill battle for the difficult goal of equality. From that critical framework, that was a misguided attempt and implementation. Or a game designer making a game an impossible, slog, and shrugging it with “I told you they are unlikely to succeed”, while not giving a player or game-masters a clear disclosure of the fact, and in fact, establishing them to waste twelve to twenty four hours attempting impossible tasks, does not create a center — unless the players decide not to play; it is more a performance art piece done at the players and about their misery than a game in which they are cooperative collaborators. With this mindset, you can see one of the most common and pointless arguments for what it is: dice fudging. Strong reactions to it have nothing to do with dice fudging, but to the realization the center is being depowered, their community weakened, and there are clearly no equals here. It is either despair at the realization that a lottery the center agreed to is a lie, and actually there is an horizontal-authority calling the shots OR they never expected equality, they always seen the Game Master as an authority over them, and they expect them to nudge the lotteries in their favor as a way to dispense boons outside the lottery. Like so many things in TTRPGs, dice fudging is not about dice fudging, and the other side will always look ridiculous if you see them as arguing about dice fudging.
It is Protestantism’s Fault Again
What does it say about our artform when the most common is the one that is known to not foster equality, the one that is undertaken as one shrugs and surrenders that there is no way to achieve egalitarian compromise and thus fairness requires the arbitrary nature of the (dice) gods?
This is not a bad thing: as I mentioned before and all about the original article, there is a place for authority, there is a place for arbitrarily steps in decision making, there are things where you want a vertical-system and/or wild-card elements for tension or to add to the community new things that the center could not imagine — and without compromising the center/status quo, like by say, be singled out as the one that “ruined” our sci fi game by adding vampires to it.
Okay, so what is wrong with divination lotteries in TTRPGs then? Nothing intrinsically; mostly the oddity of the abundance of them vs the rational egalitarian approach. In fact, they can easily used in tandem/as part of rational egalitarian lotteries/to reinforce a status quo community that is already egalitarian. But they aren’t. And then, it is worth asking why not.
Very much like the lack of an egalitarian lottery mindset among artists and players of TTRPGs, it is question of existing relationships and creation of new groups and relationships. When the divination lottery helps you assist alongside a rational decision making which involves an answer nobody has an answer, the dice may “know”, through non-human means. You divine this arbitrary knowledge. However, when you turn to the divination to decide what you must do, what is happening, what are you doing now, that is not getting arbitrary insight/inspiration, it is divining the Will of The Dice Gods, what is fate and then you proceed to dance to it. You can see the distinction on PbtA: games closer to Apocalypse World treat moves as divination lotteries that work very much like other forms of lottery, when your rational decisions lead you to consult that move as an oracle; the deviation on Dungeon World and those that drank from it see even saying the names of the moves is anathema, much less stating intent to consult them on a specific, making a rational egalitarian call impossible — the arbitrary of GM and the dice rolling will set what you are playing to find out, and you are now playing it9.
While the previous example showcases how subtle the contrast can be, some are more obvious in this: Reaction Rolls, random tables, etc. Again, divination oracles are not inherently much of anything, but great for reinforcement of existing structures. Take for example, the average “having to roll dice is a losing state” game. This maxim applies to the players alone, so their interactions with lotteries, if any, is purely negative distribution lotteries, all the negative reinforcement towards the idea of a center this brings. On the other hand, GM Kyle is the Pythia at Delphi, dispensing inspired divination to the players, and having access to a vast repertoire of oracular lotteries to use, which then are subordinate to that very same inspired divination. Lotteries, they are aplenty, but these don’t create equality; no, the very relationship between players and GM here are so apart they may be considered to be playing different games, and absolutely not are in a community defined by the same empowered center. And none of this is caused or prevented by the Reaction Roll, no matter how you remix it.
Okay, but where this disproportional authority comes from, and the associated disproportionate representation in TTRPGs? Calvinism, of course. Its predestination, hegemonized and then enforced universally through its all-encompassing cultural imperialism, depowers rational lotteries in favor of arbitrary authority everywhere — including our baby artform. One is seen as “superior” or “natural”, or “easy”, while the other one has to actively adopt a mindset and work against it. And again, when one does not think about these things, one reproduces the background radiation. To the Protestant, ALL lotteries are a form of divination, blasphemous or witchcraft, to paradoxically be kept away from anything non-trivial or a last resort to know the Mind of God10 11. So, defer to existing authorities and then drawn on the final arbitrary authority when all alternatives falter. This aspect remained even when lotteries were removed from an association with God, making God a rational architect of fate — no, the arbitrariness came from elsewhere, and thus should be divorced from rational processes.
Does the structure this creates sounds familiar?
When all types of lotteries are seen as divinatory, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: all lotteries are used or designed or implemented or interpreted as divinatory. So, of course, the default lottery in TTRPG is going to be some degree of divinatory.
The point here is that it does not have to be so. Protestantism is an aberration, with this brainworm without historical or anthropological equivalents. There is a richness of approaches to lottery and what it does to people, and how often, even divinatory one, is incorporated in rational processes and community building 12131415 1617. We don’t have to subject themselves to the dictates of Calvinism and the reactions to it.
We deserve to have that same diversity brought to TTRPGs. Let’s see what different things we can do with it. We are not prisoners to the hang-ups enforced upon us; it is true for this as it is true to the weird Evangelical nonsense of those that were the first to implement the modern version of the artform.
Or thinking about how lotteries don’t exist in the void, and shape and are shaped by the communities they create or those they exclude, can help us think about how our own art is in community by using them. How all of us are in dialogue with the design that came before, with the way things are assumed to be done, and to the different ways so many people have done things — that this artform did not start with us, brilliant geniuses and our petty enclosures. That there is a reason why we keep seeking the center — cooperative storytelling requires a center.
At the very least, bringing things to the center is going to make wonders for the cognitive load of games. That, by itself, is enough justification to try to do that more often.
For the rest of this article I will summarize them as “lotteries”: the ways we invite randomization in. For my own sanity and saving you to read dice or random a thousand times.
Gąsiorowska, A., (2023) “Sortition and its Principles: Evaluation of the Selection Processes of Citizens’ Assemblies”, Journal of Deliberative Democracy 19(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.1310
Drawing Lots, From Egalitarianism to Democracy in Ancient Greece (2024), Malkin I and Blok J
All those negative procedures and distributions, all those oracles, they are not going to change the status quo and the dynamics of a group, nor the authority invested of designers or game masters.
Readers of the original articles should by now realize the benefit of a horizontal-lottery in reigning in vertical-authority; these “check-points” are natural points to grant and retract authority, making it a reinforced, natural, given element to always think of it as temporary — otherwise, dice, GM and designer are just as equal as everyone else at the gaming table.
https://slowlorispress.com/post/742932982368698368/how-to-play-the-revolution
One can see the overlap between this and creating a local, specific culture of safety and comfort. Egalitarian mindset highlights where treating everyone “equally” is not enough, and where accommodations for inclusion, comfort and safety are needed. It also makes clear that continuing without those, means not being in community with those that need them.
Yes, it seems there is quite overlap between the old adague of “not be a dick” and egalitarian mindset culture. Think of it as a culture that is less likely to have you be a dick accidentally. Like in one of the examples: once something has reinforced a community of equals, things are going to create more harmonious exceptions. If you want to play the Rogue, then see the others as equals when each gets their class picked by lottery, how more likely do you think whoever got the Rogue is to exchange with your lot? Now that every step of the way has rendered you equals in community?
Or for terms more familiar with PbtA veterans: it is the difference between if the Conversation is emphasized as one moves further close or away from dice rolling.
Summa Theologiae II.ii.95.8; cf. Aquinas (1963)
Aune, David Edward (1983). Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans
David, F.N. (1962). Games, Gods and Gambling: The Origins and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era. London: Charles and Griffin
Aubert, Vilhelm (1959). Chance in Social Affairs. Inquiry 2: 1– 24
Bar- On, Shraga (2020). Lot Casting, God, and Man in Jewish Literature: From the Bible to the Renaissance. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press [in Hebrew]
Duxbury, Neil (1999). Random Justice: On Lotteries and Legal Decision- Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Hurlet, Frédéric (2019). Le tirage au sort dans les cités de l’Occident romain. In Borlenghi, Aldo, et al. (eds.). Voter en Grèce, à Rome et en Gaule. Pratiques, lieux et finalités. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée— Jean Pouilloux, 185– 202
Demont, Paul (2020). Selection by Lot in Ancient Athens: From Religion to Politics.”In Lopez- Rabatel, Sintomer (eds.)., 112– 129