To Hit or Not to Hit: A Historical Look at Success in RPGs
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Dungeons & Dragons evolved out of Chainmail, which took the mechanics of wargaming and applied them to the swords and sorcery genre. As part of its inheritance, Dungeons & Dragons relied heavily on dice to determine if player actions succeeded. (In fact, early editions of Dungeons & Dragons offered options to use dice to handle almost anything you might want to do in the game, from creating dungeons to determining which of twenty forms of insanity a character might develop if rendered insane, to figuring out what might happen if you mixed a potion of invisibility with a philter of love. More on this topic later in this series of posts.)
Later RPGs questioned the centrality of dice in the game, with many seeking to reduce randomness, and some eliminating it entirely in favor of some mix of gamemaster and player dictate. Often this came from the desire for stronger storytelling: both gamemasters and players rebelled at having a story shredded by a particularly ill-timed lucky (or unlucky) roll. But most RPGs kept dice. Why?
One reason is that dice can be exciting. Randomness uncertainty creates tension and variety. This is pretty obvious!
But a second reason is that randomness helps enhance the sense that the RPG is a simulation of reality. RPGs inevitably seek, to varying degrees, to simulate some version of reality, some cosmos. In the real world, we are used to the idea that our actions will not always succeed or have perfectly predictable results. The abstraction of the die roll provides a simple path to creating the same situation for our characters and their foes. It's easier to imagine ourselves into the bodies of our characters when we can't know if they will succeed or fail within the larger world.
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If we jump in the Wayback Machine and head to the days of 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, said fighter's chances ain't looking so good. A 1st-level human fighter with Strength 16 average for a fighter using the recommended method for rolling character attributes has only a 30% chance of hitting a lowly goblin with his sword. That's right: just 30%. Now, there were a lot of quirks to AD&D's system are worth exploring in their own right, as they show other ways in which the genre has evolved; for example, all 1st-level characters had exactly the same chance to hit our poor goblin, but fighters were vastly more effective at higher levels, which is very different from how most modern games handle level progression. Still, for now, we'll just stick with our simple number.
In other words, back then, a character could be expected to fail at this core action over and over. Fast forward to AD&D's 3rd Edition, and the picture looks somewhat different. Take the 1st-level human fighter again, still with Strength 16. He's got +4 to hit +1 from having a level of fighter, +3 more from Strength and he's facing a goblin with an AC of 15. This gives him exactly a 50% chance to hit.
