Thinking about fate and fortune and dice games on this fine jovial morning, so a thread:

Yeah it's an RPG thread. Sue me.

So in D&D everything is left up to the roll of the dice (to an extent—roleplay is also a factor, but usually it's dice). There are generally no do-overs; sometimes you've got a better chance of rolling well (if you roll with advantage) or worse (rolling with disadvantage).

Sometimes other players can try to do something you've failed (persuade a guard, for example). Sometimes you can try again (like picking a lock, though the difficulty might change). Sometimes you can wait and come back and give it another go. But the dice always rule.

If you've ever played, you probably know that there are plenty of times where the dice rolls feel serendipitous. A situation goes so specifically that you're amazed that it happened so in tune with the story. You look back like, "That couldn't have happened any other way."

Of course it could've. It just didn't, because that was what the dice gave you. This happens even when it's bad—my character was once the only one who didn't want to go back and fight a beholder, and my character was the only one who got disintegrated. Dramatic irony by chance.

(This is not to say that ~everything happens for a reason~, but I'll get there.)

And if you've got a good GM, all of these dice rolls keep adding up. The guard that you failed to persuade is going to remember you, so it's gonna be harder to get past him again. The foreign dignitary who was impressed that you pulled off a job is going to help you out later.

It is never so obvious as in DnD that we're constantly making choices and rolling dice and discarding possible timelines for this one. Not in any sort of metaphysical sense necessarily, just that things could have happened differently. But for a number of factors, they didn't.

But most notably because sometimes that's how the dice land. There's a world where that character didn't get disintegrated. There's a world where I was born with a different chart. But this is the world I live in.

So it is not that everything happens for a reason. It's that everything that happens happens.

But you also do what you can to boost your odds. You level up. You take better scores. You leverage where your scores will be most useful—are you gonna try to persuade a guard if you have a -3 persuasion modifier, or are you gonna let the +9 persuasion bard do it?

That's what astrology lets you do. People don't have score sheets, but we do have birth charts. You can see the things that might be harder for you, and plan accordingly. You can improve your odds with magic, astrological or otherwise.

But that's also why free will is such a hard thing to prove—our actions are always determined by what we know and don't know and our experiences that have led up to this point. What is the birth chart besides a blueprint for that?

This is a really basic idea of this and obviously there are many more factors at play in life than in an RPG, but fundamentally this is why I struggle to land on a clear side of the fate/free will argument. You make your own choices, but they're never free of outside influence.

(Especially not when you have fewer resources and more external challenges to your agency and self-determination than others.)

To finish off, because this thread was supposed to be short (lol) and doesn't really have a tl;dr, I've always found it serendipitous that most DnD groups I've seen or played with have habitually played on Thursdays. Take the luck where you can, right?