Dice & Diceless?

[Erick Wujcik]

Do you think it'b be possible to have players who love doing diceless rpg and players who love using dices play the same rpg at the same time? Like one side of the table would be the pro-dice and the other side the pro-diceless?

I've actually done this a couple of times.

For me the end result is always the same; everyone ends up abandoning the dice.

It's mostly just a matter of speed (at least in my case), since the players not using dice are getting more things done, and seem to be having more fun.

Erick

[xiombarg]

It's mostly just a matter of speed (at least in my case), since the players not using dice are getting more things done, and seem to be having more fun.

Woah! Welcome to the Forge, Erick.

I have to admit it's not surprising that the author of Amber Diceless Role-Playing has had this experience -- enthusiasm counts for a lot when it comes to convincing someone one way or another, and I would suspect that you're not the world's most ardent proponent of dice, despite your work for Palladium.

As brought up in this thread, dice or diceless is tied into a lot of other system issues and philosophy issues. Dice CAN be made speedy, and diceless can be fairly slow if a lot of people are involved at once -- it depends on how things are set up. And while I love diceless play (I've been to Ambercon North several times, after all), I find that dice can augment fast-and-furious play -- for example, mechanics where the die "explodes" on a high roll (criticals, or open-ended), jiggered correctly, sometimes cause outrageous and surprising successes that aren't possible without some form of randomizer (like the Joker in most uses of cards in Deadlands).

[Mike Holmes]

That's all true, Kirt. But Erick's point stands in that, in the case of a system where the two options stand side by side, and the dice method is just inteded to randomize the other method, then it will neccessarily be a little more time consuming. As such, he's speaking clearly to Claude's proposed design.

Mike

[xiombarg]

That's all true, Kirt. But Erick's point stands in that, in the case of a system where the two options stand side by side, and the dice method is just inteded to randomize the other method, then it will neccessarily be a little more time consuming. As such, he's speaking clearly to Claude's proposed design.

Hmmm, then I guess it comes back to some of the earlier commentary regarding the philosophy of what you're doing.

I remember there was a rumor that John Wick wanted to do L5R diceless, but AEG wouldn't let him, so he created a mechanic that was, in essence, diceless if you did the math for it. (I don't play L5R so I have no idea how true this is.) If John takes your advice and makes his mechanic statistically even (using FUDGE dice), then, yes, generally only handling time will be the issue, and only those with a desire to gamble a little -- or those pathologically addicted to dice -- will stick to the dice method. But is that statistically low chance of getting a higher roll worth the extra handling time?

So, okay, I see your point. I guess the question then becomes: Is there some way to lower the dice handling time so that it's nearly as good as the diceless method? Otherwise you're likely to have the slide to diceless that Erick talks about.

The other method to make the dice-rolling method *slightly* better than the diceless method, tho still risking a low roll, so it's "worth" the extra handling time in some situations, and not worth it in others. (For example, say, instead of getting one FUDGE die per point of effort spent, you get X + 1 dice, where X is the amount of effort spent...)

[simon_hibbs]

That's all true, Kirt. But Erick's point stands in that, in the case of a system where the two options stand side by side, and the dice method is just inteded to randomize the other method, then it will neccessarily be a little more time consuming. As such, he's speaking clearly to Claude's proposed design.

Plus of course you've got the time overhead for deciding which mechanic to use in the first place. The people who always choose diceless will win even more fun time. My solution to this, which I'm going to playtest tomorrow night, is a diceless system with a kind of Hero Point mechanic.

Each player gets a few Fate Cards (ordinary playing cards) that they can use like Hero points, to reduce the consequences of a defeat, or even turn it into a limited victory. The Narrator gets fewer cards than the players, but still gets some.

Players have a big incentive to narrate their way through problems Amber style, because that way they save Fate Cards for when they realy need them. Nevertheless, they don't have to feel that the Narrator is in total controll, and can influence outcome if they feel they realy want to.

If the Narrator chooses to oppose a Fate Card with one of his own, the value of the cards is compared, and the highest card wins.

No dice or calculations of any kind are required, and often you won't even have to compare card values, if just the one card is played. I'm hoping this will give the best of both worlds, with none of the disadvantages. I'll let you know how the playtest goes.


Simon Hibbs

[Mike Holmes]

Neat.

That's all I have to say about that.

Mike

[ClaudeC]

You're welcome, Claude.

Your take has an oddity to it that's not neccessarily problematic, but I thought I'd mention it. When rolling an odd number of dice, you can't ever get the original number as a result.  

Mike

How about this:

If the dice does 1 or 2, the player will get -1
If it does 3 or 4, he will get +0
If it does 4 or 5, he will get +1

This way, even with an odd number of dice, the player can still have the original number if the dices land 3 or 4.

So, with four dice, you can only get 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 as results. With five dice you can only get 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 as results. As you can see, only even numbers can ever result from this method.

I'm sorry Mike, but could you give me more exemple. I'm having trouble understanding that part. Sorry, English is not my native language.

Claude

[ClaudeC]

The main reason I asked about the possibility to have pro-dice and pro-cideless players in one table is that I know there are different kind of players. And I also noticed that some rpgs were designed specifically for pro-dice players and others for pro-diceless players.

I wanted a game that would allow both kind of players to play the same adventure in the same world. If I had only pro-diceless players, then that'd be fine because the game was designed for them in mind. If I had only pro-dice players, then that'd be fine too because the game was designed for them too. And If I happen to have players from both side, it'd be fine too because the game was designed to handle those too type of players.

So you see I'm not "stuck" with one kind of player. It's not like "Oh, you guys love throwing dices? Let's play this rpg game #01." and "Ah, you guys want to play diceless? Well, I have the rpg game #02." I want to be able to say to my players that no matter what kind of system you like (i mean by that dice or diceless), you can still playing the SAME RPG game.

The system I'm working on has that philosophy. I wanted something that would be the link between the 2 systems, and effort points were that one.
Both system use effort points, but the way you use the effort points work differently if you use or not dices. The level of difficulty is not revealed to the players, so that the diceless player won't have an advantage over the dice player. As Mike said it, playing the game with and without dice can become a strategy since in my game, players can switch from dice to diceless whenever they feel like it. Some action work best if you use dices, some other when you don't use any dice.

For exemple:

You want to open a door. The GM knows the level of difficulty, but he doesn't tell you. You can use dices, but if the dices give you a low result, you can end up using effort points and still fail the action. You can decide to go the diceless way. But you can end up using too much effort points to open the door. In my game using too much effort points to do an action is like a critical failure. In this case, if you use to much effort in opening the door, you might hurt yourself (this rule apply only for diceless play). But you can also decide to check on the door. If you have Lockpicking in you skills list, you can find out how difficult the task is. You can find out the exact number of effort points to use to open the door. In this case, going diceless work best.

Another exemple:

You're fighting a guy. Because you want to survive this fight, you will put a lot of effort points in order to make a lot of damage. You don't have to worry about putting to much effort point when you use the dice system. The too-much-effort rule works only with the diceless system. But you will have to worry about critical failure when you use dices (it's when all your dices land "1"). Since you're using a lot of dices (meaning a lot of effort points), the chance that you can land a "1" with all you dices can be fairly remote. So in this case, it's best to go with the dice system.

I hope I explain it right lol Sorry for my English. What do you think about the system I'm working on? Is it possible or is it playable?

ClaudeC

[Mike Holmes]

You're proposed method would fix it Claude, as you are essentially rolling FUDGE dice as I suggested above.

For the original method let's look at the possible outcomes.

4 dice has the following possible outcomes:

++++ = 8
+++- = 6
++-- = 4
+--- = 2
---- = 0

5 dice has these results

+++++ = 10
++++- = 8
+++-- = 6
++--- = 4
+---- = 2
----- = 0

No matter what the original level is, rolling with the method you described always results in an even result.

Mike

[simon_hibbs]

Last night we playtested the diceless-plus-fate-cards system I described earlier. I need to write up more detailed descriptions of the attributes and abilities in the game, and how combat damage is handled, but the basic mechanics worked very well IMHO. At least I as Narrator found it fairly easy to run the game from the mechanics points of view, and the Fate Cards seemed to work very well. There was certainly a storm of cards coming down in the final confrontation scene, but because I had some cards to counter them with it wasn't a foregone conclusion at any stage.

The enxt step is to more fully express the game design in written form, so that others can use it to run a game too. I think that's realy the hard part in writing a game. I can design games for me to run fairly easily, but writing a game others not only can play, but will want to run themselves, is another matter.


Simon Hibbs