A note:

“Say Yes or Roll the Dice” came specifically from a game called Dogs in the Vineyard. The game is set up to drive toward conflict, often escalating to violence. And the question is “Will the Character keep escatalling to violence.”

It’s important to keep this in mind when reading the rules found in the game:

Per the rules:

“Every moment of play, roll dice or say yes. If nothing’s at stake, say yes to the players, whatever they’re doing. Just plain go along with them. If they ask for information, give it to them. If they have their characters go somewhere, they’re there. If they want it, it’s theirs. Sooner or later— sooner, because your town’s pregnant with crisis— they’ll have their characters do something that someone else won’t like. Bang! Something’s at stake. Launch the conflict and roll the dice. Roll dice or say yes. Roll dice or say yes. Roll dice or say yes.”

It’s important to note that this is horrible for other games. But in the context of Dogs in the Vineyard it works really well.

When that game came out that notion took hold and metastasized — as ideas do. People applied it to other games. People applied it as a general principle.

Here is how Luke Crane used it in the rules for Burning Wheel:

“Vincent’s advice is perfect for Burning Wheel. Unless there is something at stake in the story you have created, don’t bother with the dice. Keep moving, keep describing, keep roleplaying. But as soon as a character wants something that he doesn’t have, needs to
know something he doesn’t know, covets something that someone else has, roll the dice.

“Flip that around and it reveals a fundamental rule in
Burning Wheel game play: When there is conflict, roll the dice. There is no social agreement for the resolution of conflict in this game. Roll the dice and let the obstacle system guide the outcome. Success or failure doesn’t really matter. So long as the intent of the task is clearly stated, the story is going somewhere.”

Keep in mind that Burning Wheel’s rules are very specific as well. So as a general principle “Say Yes, or Roll the Dice” works very well.

So, to be clear… in Burning Wheel (for example) the Referee says, “No, you can’t just do that” all the time. And that either means “No… you can’t do that at all,” or “Well, we won’t just say yes to that. Roll the dice and find out what happens.”

Chris Chinn over at Deeper in the Game translates the healthy application of the principle like this:

“If you want to export it, then there’s basically two ideas you’d be using:

• Characters succeed at things within their ability unless something is at stake that matters for the focus of your game.

• Drive play towards those conflicts about the things that are the focus of your game.

“If your game is tightly designed, this is pretty easy because the mechanics and the advice in the game are already pushing you this way.

“If your game is designed without a tight focus, or, worse, just badly designed, then you have to do a lot of work to figure out what the focus of the game you are going to run is going to be, and you’ll end up ignoring a lot of the skills/powers/mechanics, etc. that aren’t going to be used. You’ll need to tell the players about this so they don’t waste time creating characters with abilities that won’t get used, or spending time learning rules that won’t matter.”

What Chis is touching on there is that applying this principle to certain games is going to create a mess. And certainly people yanking it out of thin air and applying it mindless has produced messes.

To be honest I’m not sure how “Say Yes, or Roll the Dice” has anything to do with this conversation. But I wanted to offer some context for the phrase.