Xanathar is basically designed to give monologues to his goldfish every single day.

In a recent Unearthed Arcana post, Dungeons and Dragons Creative Lead Mike Mearls talked about what he describes as the “three-pillar experience.” The overall design behind D&D is that the game is supported by three major activities: combat, social interaction, and exploration. Unfortunately, combat is the easiest to define in terms of actions and rewards. Since 3rd Edition, player experience points has come almost entirely from these combat encounters. Nods have always been made towards story rewards, but never in as clear a way as the amount of experience points gained per destroyed skeleton and zombie. In a very simple game theoretic way, if rewards only come from combat, then doing anything else is a waste of time.

Mearls has provided a plan in his post to overhaul the entire experience system to one based on milestones representing each pillar. While there is a lot of elegance to this approach, I think it serves to simplify things rather than to make everything equally robust. Which is why I decided to come up with a solution of my own.

The Monologue Mechanic is my approach to bolstering the social interaction pillar of gameplay in a narrative way. I introduce a series of NPCs called critics, who only exist to learn about the players and their journeys. They want to hear the stories of each adventure and turn them into legends! Or potentially make fun of the heroes, which is why I used Statler and Waldorf as my major examples.

One method to creating legends is to build real villainous monologues. When a hero gets a chance to listen to a diabolical rant, they suddenly have plenty of new opportunities to build a story. One hero might furiously scribble down the entire evil plan, making sure to get every nuance about both the future and the past. This hero wants to tear down the villain’s entire engine, just like most of the crime dramas I’ve ever seen. On the other hand, some heroes want the chance to engage with the villain and build up a dialogue before the climactic encounter. When face-to-face with the lich mastermind, a hero might want to drop in a few clever one-liners!

As a reward for their actions, heroes gain everlasting renown across the land. While a hero can grow a good deal of fame by helping a community, things grow exponentially when someone is out there telling a real legend. A famous hero can change the world in wildly different ways than one who acts in secret. A robust Fame System can also give characters rewards in terms of recognition and even the kind of Fans who would be willing to put it all on the line to help their favorite champion of the land.

My hope is that by creating The Monologue Mechanic, players will be more excited to engage in their own heroic story. Of course, other game systems exist that put the focus on different pillars than D&D. Fiasco is all about improvising and building a complete story from some cleverly linked details, and while combat is possible, it’s all just another step in the wild and sometimes heavy narration. Numenera leaps into exploration by giving players a vast unknown world that is tied to our own in only the most ephemeral ways, then providing a settlement to build up in the face of that mystery.

I think role-playing is at its best when tied to a strong group of story-driven players. If that sounds like something you might be in for, feel free to check out The Monologue Mechanic on DMs Guild now!

Earlier this month, I had the amazing opportunity to sit down with the one and only Joseph Scrimshaw and talk about game theory. I know I talk about it a lot from my own academic point of view, but sitting across from a wonderful comedian turned everything into an incredibly interactive conversation. This is the kind of thing I wish I could do every day. Listen in, if only to find out how to deal with wild bears who want to play games with you! It might just save your life.

First, watch this.

Ridiculous, right? This is a record-breaking moment in the history of a game show that has been on TV since 1956. It’s also a perfect moment to take a look at some game probability as we determine exactly how ridiculous this moment actually is.

Let’s start with Wilbert. Determining the probability of an event occurring requires us to create a pretty simple ratio. On bottom of the fraction are the number of possible outcomes in a situation. On top, the number of favorable outcomes. In this case, we want to find out the number of possible spins of the wheel and the number of ways to get $1.00.

How many possible outcomes are there? There are twenty different spaces on the Wheel, starting at 5 cents and increasing by 5 all the way to $1.00. Your first spin can have any of those twenty results, as can your second spin. However, you only get a second spin if you don’t land on $1.00 the first time. There are 19 ways to get a second spin, and a second spin has 20 different results. We call this the sample space—the group of possible outcomes.

Okay, so how do you get a $1.00? You can either spin it on your first go, or get a total of $1.00 by adding up to spins. If your first spin is 15¢, the only way to get a dollar is with 85¢. 30¢ has to match with 70¢. For each spin, there’s only one possible second spin that nets $1.00 total. Which means there are twenty different favorable outcomes that lead to $1.00. Notice here a trick about probability: we consider 35¢ + 65¢ to be a different outcome than 65¢ + 35¢. Order matters.

So, not significantly different than rolling a 20 on a d20. But it didn’t just happen once… it happened five times in a row. What are the odds of that? Here’s a moment when you often stump students in a high school probability class (Hi there, former students! –Rich). There are five of them… maybe we should multiply by five? But that makes it more likely that the event occurs, which is wrong. So then maybe the next step is to divide by five… this is the point where I put an X next to the test answer, hope the next one is better, and plan to have a brief discussion about how probabilities are always horribly unintuitive.

When it comes down to it, the right answer is to build a probability tree. When we do this, we can start to put together the actual solution. In probability terms, this is a then question, as in event A occurs, then event B occurs. In then problems, we multiply the probabilities of each outcome together. Which means the odds of these five $1.00 spins happening in a row is roughly one in two and a half million.

How many stars are there in the sky? Would you believe that you only see between 2,500 and 5,000 that are visible to the naked eye at any one time? Think about one star in that vast expanse. One in two and a half million is another few orders of magnitude entirely. So, as much as I enjoy watching Drew Carey’s impersonation of Bob Barker, I’m not planning to see a Showcase Showdown like this one ever again.

As I wrap up final production on the Puzzle Keyring this week, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I was inspired to make it in the first place. I enjoy puzzles and codes, of course, but there are different ways to show that passion. I could have made my own puzzles or designed an escape room. So why did I decide instead to create a teaching guide for new players to experience the joy of solving puzzles? Because I remembered how it felt to fail.

One day, I sat at a picnic table with three friends just outside Multnomah Falls. As we’d hiked up to see the waterfall, we’d been handed a series of beaded necklaces. The beads were of all sorts of different colors, and while we saw some repeated combinations, there wasn’t an overall pattern. Finally, we received a burned CD filled with Madonna songs. Mystified, we sat at the table and listened to the tracks, hoping there would be some secret code hidden inside, because the necklaces seemed terrifying.

We eventually figured it out—the colors were resistor code, the groupings were frequencies, the frequencies were notes that matched the Madonna songs. While I like to describe that solve sequence to friends as an example of how complicated and inspired these puzzles can be, I also can’t help but remember my frustration on that afternoon. We were playtesting a 36 hour puzzle event called Wartron, and the other two teams had tons more experience than our rag-tag little team. We knew they were ahead of us. We knew that our supervising member of Game Control was silently sitting with us, watching our struggle. We also knew there wasn’t much we could do about it.

Failure is a tricky thing. Our bodies train us to avoid it with fear and pain responses. In the real world, failure often has consequences as well. And yet, there are lessons that can only be learned through failure. Lessons about resilience, introspection, and self-development. We play games our whole lives just because they give us a safe space to learn these lessons. It’s almost a tragedy when all we do is succeed. We need to fail.

Playing and losing cooperative games is such a perfect way to experience failure. You and your team fail to stop the shadows from taking over the Round Table, or you let the Frost Dragons destroy your little town. Now comes the best part—you and your friends can talk about losing. Failure forces you to look at what you did and see how to do it better. How to find your own success. Maybe this time, you keep all of those explorers out of the center of your Island! (BTW, that’s exactly how you need to play Spirit Island. –Rich.)

So Wartron? My team and I floundered for hours in the face of codes and puzzles we’d never seen before. The other teams were so far ahead, they may as well have been in another game. Suddenly, things started to click. We learned new techniques and began to recognize similar mechanics. I could look at a puzzle and know how to the find the solution, and if I couldn’t, someone else on my team could. We found our second wind and eventually caught up to the other teams. It’s been years since Wartron, and I’ve never forgotten that satisfying thrill of pulling into the lead.

These days, I’m not too worried about getting stuck on a puzzle. Sure, some of that is from that moment where the switch flipped in my brain, but so much more is just from all of that failure. It taught me how to get back up. So now, when someone shows me a brutal cooperative game that just crushes us in the first round, I get amped up. The best thing anyone can learn from failure is that burning desire to set the game back up and play it again.

Have you played Splendor? If not, you really should. It’s a great game where you play a gem merchant, collecting gem resources to buy better and better mines and shops to sell your wares. Purchasing these mines and shops give you permanent gem resources, allowing you to buy better mines and shops and so on. The game is fantastic because of the huge ramp that becomes available to you during play. At the start, you strive for the most basic mines. By the end, you could buy those on a whim, but you’re on the lookout for better and better storefronts. The game ends when someone hits fifteen victory points, so its important for players to build a gem engine, gathering points as quickly as possible. When you do? It’s a very satisfying experience.

In theory, that’s how the game is supposed to work. The Splendor problem is that this isn’t the key to victory.

One day, I decided to play in a Splendor tournament in Portland. As I recall, the winner would earn some promo goods, but I admit that I lost focus on the prize very quickly. This was the day I learned about the Splendor problem.

Splendor is a game that has a flow in mind. The cards at the bottom have a low cost, but low victory point value. So you grab gems to acquire them, which takes a couple turns. Once you have enough of those, they help you grab the second level of cards. These help you take the third level, and you can finally grab the Lords at the top. The Lords require you to own certain colors of gem cards, so players are careful about what they acquire during the game. This flow is built into the setup of the game, the rule book, and the playmat. Sadly, it’s all wrong.

During the tournament, three of us played with the flow. The fourth player had been taught the real strategy. As soon as I saw it implemented, I recognized that the flow was wrong. Building a gem engine wasn’t the key to victory. Instead, players should use highly targeted efficiency. Skip level one cards entirely. Find a level two card that only requires one gem type. Reserve that card, granting you a wild Gold token. Take only that gem resource. Eventually, acquire that card. Do it again. Then move to level 3. Have fifteen victory points before anyone else hits six.

Why does it work? Beyond being ruthlessly efficient, this strategy also requires you to take most of a single gem type. Since other players need a wide variety of gems, they will find themselves starved for that gem type. This turns a vaguely competitive game into a different one, where efficient players are now controlling the resource market. It’s mean. I tried it once, instantly won, and gave up on the tournament.

The Splendor solution brings back the fun of the game and, I hope, the original intent.

The new expansion Cities of Splendor adds four variants to the game. Instead of Lords at the top, there are Cities. These either require a TON of gem cards to get, or a massive pile of victory points. Plus, now the game doesn’t exactly end at a victory point total. The game ends on the round when someone gets a City, and only players with a City are in the running to win the game.

When you add Cities into the mix, the game becomes a race to build a City as fast as you can. In this case, having a lot of gem resource cards is a huge advantage. Now, players have a realistic chance at victory no matter which strategy they employ.

I am, of course, very interested to see how this expansion plays out in reality. In my demo, players seemed very excited to play with the flow of the game. But it still may be possible for that alternative strategy to win out with certain Cities. We’ll see! Plus, with three other variations I haven’t even discovered yet, I think this expansion is actually going to put Splendor back on my play list for a while! That might be the most welcome change of all.