Advantage & Disadvantage

Back in 2019, I started working on a hack of D&D5 in order to address some of the common annoyances that arose during my playgroup at the time. One of those perceived annoyances was D&D5’s “advantage” and “disadvantage” mechanic. In that game, you normally roll one d20 to determine the outcome of a check, but various abilities, spells, conditions, and environmental factors can impose “advantage” or “disadvantage”. When making a check with either advantage or disadvantage, you instead roll twice, and take the higher (advantage) or lower (disadvantage) result from among them. My frustration with the mechanic at the time was that it couldn’t apply more than once. If five different sources all give you advantage, the implied narrative is that your chances of success are more likely, but mechanically it is exactly the same as receiving advantage once.

I “solved” this problem by allowing the mechanic to stack. If you had advantage from two sources, you would take the highest result of three rolls instead. If you had disadvantage from four sources, you would take the lowest result of five rolls instead, and so forth. This seemed like the logical direction to take this mechanic, but it actually sucked to play with. There’s already an absurd amount of book-keeping in D&D5, and trying to tally up and remember all the possible sources of advantage and disadvantage was just another item of busywork. Nobody liked this.

Of course, I didn’t learn my lesson at all. Several years later, when working on Remedy, I replaced advantage and disadvantage with “boons” and “banes” (TODO: Link Matthew Colville’s video from which the terms “boon” and “bane” were stolen lol). When making a check, if you had any boons and banes, you would roll an additional die and either add or subtract it from the result of the d20 roll. Each boon cancelled out one bane and vice versa, and the type of die used depended on how many boons or banes you had. For example, one boon would grant a bonus of +1d4, while three banes would inflict a penalty of -1d8. Anything past ±5 boons or banes were ignored, since I wanted the largest boon/bane die to be a d12. Once you understand it, this system of “dice size” is pretty neat, but it also totally sucked during playtesting. It was difficult to explain, and my playgroup had difficulty retaining it. Multiple simultaneous boons and banes were so rare that dice greater in size than the d6 were never used once. Nobody liked this.

Frustrated with the playtest experience, I tried explaining the boons and banes system to my sister, who had only ever played D&D5. She told me outright that the boons and banes mechanics were annoying and way too complicated. She was right; if it was too complicated for D&D5, it was too complicated, period. I immediately removed the mechanic with no replacement in mind. I figured I would fill in that hole later.

Some time afterwards, I read Wastoid and the unwritten rules of rolling by LootLootLore. The following part stood out to me, and felt incredibly relevant:

I have yet to see a game that jumps from:

• Impossible (you can’t roll for this, you don’t need to as you already know the outcome)
• Disadvantage (doable, but it would be hard to beat the DC)
• Rolling normal (the default for a lot of stuff)
• Rolling with advantage (chance of failure but it’s unlikely)
• Auto-success (You can’t roll for this you don’t even need to as you already know the outcome)

I’ve played a handful of systems (at the time of writing, Mouse Guard, Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars, D&D5, Monster of the Week) and agree that LootLootLore’s observation is applicable even to games like Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars that use custom dice pools. I currently provide a clarified version of this abstraction within the rules of Remedy:

The difficulty of any challenge can be described by one of the following five categories:

• Impossible: No check is required, failure is certain.
• Disadvantage: Failure is likely, but not certain.
• Normal: Neither success nor failure are certain.
• Advantage: Success is likely, but not certain.
• Trivial: No check is required, success is certain. Not all challenges warrant a check, and even challenges that do may have a more interesting solution than consulting the dice.

This helped me pinpoint why the advantage/disadvantage mechanic was so bothersome to me all those years ago. The problem wasn’t that the mechanic didn’t stack, it was that the way the game was being run cultivated a playstyle in which the mechanic was more relevant than it ever should have been. We were rolling for everything instead of asking if a check was necessary or even made sense. Since making a check was assumed to be necessary, we had to find a way to compress both kinds of impossible into the realm of potential check results. The dice were a hammer, and every challenge a nail. I still have a mountain of criticism for D&D5, but its advantage and disadvantage mechanic is perfectly fine, actually.

The game is the dialogue between friends. The dice are only a tool to help. Roll less and play more.