Join the SAQ newsletter by visiting https://www.start-a-quest.com

Gambling is fun (but evil) but also fun

I was selectively bred (in a lab) to be the perfect human for developing a gambling habit (it wasn’t a good lab); I’m competitive, belligerent and impulsive. You know, like a D&D player. But rather than chasing my natural inclination towards fiscal degeneracy, we’re all better off if I channel that energy into something productive like replicating slot machine mechanics in a D20 system.

My system

I’m still working on a full PDF, but here’s the gist. You roll a D20, then you lose, break even or win. If you roll a 20, you get to play a bonus jackpot minigame, and you can cheat or be sabotaged to add or subtract 1 from your roll. That sounds simple, but there’s a lot of juice in how the D20 table is constructed. You can mix and match the numbers to create wildly different experiences, and doing so revealed two truths about player psychology to me, two areas where the player brain and gambler brain overlap.

1. Players love a rigged game

For slot machines, “the house always wins” is legislated certainty. Return to Player (RTP) measures how much of a player’s balance they can expect to take home after long session of gambling. In Australia, RTP on a slot machine isn’t allowed to be below 87%. The machine is telling you, “Do not invest in this reverse ATM!” But how good would it feel to beat the odds? Everyone would be amazed. And if you round it up, 87% is pretty much 100%, right?

That’s how players think! If you say the odds are against a course of action, it only incenses player stupidity. I love players 🙂

2. Players want change

When you spin a slot machine, there are only five results.

• Lose your entire bet
• Lose part of your bet
• Break even
• Win some money
• You hit the bonus jackpot

Of course the jackpot is the most exciting result, but can you guess which is the least exciting? I tested my D20 tables by writing code to play millions of bets to make sure they were fair, all with the same 94% RTP, but when placing single bets, some D20 tables just felt… dull. If they’re all mathematically fair, why should some D20 tables feel different?

The D20 tables which felt dull were the ones with too many break-even results. I want to win! And if I can’t win, I want to lose! When the players roll a dice or interact with your game, the WORST thing that can happen is nothing.

But why not play a real game?

When Matt Mercer’s players drag their campaign to the casino, he’s prepared a suite of mini-games of skill and strategy for them, not just games of chance. Here’s Liar’s Dice, or Dice Poker, or some variation of Rollies. But where else in your TTRPG are players expected to actually perform the task their character is attempting?

I’d much prefer the abstraction of gambling. That’s kind of what slot machines are in real life: abstractions of gambling. I don’t want to play poker! Just let me pull this lever and pay me based on how many poker symbols land in a row.