Diceless Hellboy (boy-hell for some)*.

[GB Steve]

I ran Hellboy at GCUK a couple of times.

The first time I left everything to the dice.

The second time I ran it, I only used the dice towards the end of the game to settle some willpower rolls to see if the PCs could resist a genus loci of Dionysius and a couple of attack rolls. I could have adjudicated these diceless too, I guess, but I wasn't sure whether my fellow players would be happy with that. But I did describe to them the kind of thoughts that their PCs were entertaining.

Apart from a few minor details, such as the final confrontation in which Balbinus, here present, accidentally helped summon the god himself, the games proceeded in exactly the same way.

Admittedly it was a fairly simple game of find the bad guy and neutralise him. But this still intrigues me as I'm a firm advocate of diceless games.

I don't see a whole lot of difference, from the players' point of view, between the unknowingness of random rolls and the unknowingness of what the DM chooses to happen (what seems here to be called illusionism if I understand correctly).

How can the players tell the difference?

In this example, I don't know if Balbinus noticed, but I didn't make a single roll for NPCs. They were all directed by GM fiat. There was some vague handwaving for damage rolls but I only bothered because it is sometimes expected.

Is this some kind of semi-illusionism, i.e. letting the players roll but not bothering yourself?

Cheers,
Steve

*Boy hell because one Mr Steve Darlington was too tired to enjoy the game, and I didn't provide enough things for him to kill.

[Balbinus]

I did notice that you weren't rolling, but I think you said up front that you wouldn't really be.

Anyway, it wasn't necessary.  Principally because of trust.  I was happy that you and I were proceeding from similar, although not identical, genre expectations.  I was comfortable that I wasn't going to get screwed by an arbitrary decision.

So, why roll dice at all?  Mostly there was no reason.  In getting info if we failed in one avenue we had others, the question was how we got the info not if we got it.  In that context, you putting obstacles in our path as you see best is not a problem, provided that you take into account our stated actions as you do so (which you did).

Dice were useful when you introduced them however because the scene potentially reduced our control over our characters.  Players will accept that from a roll to a degree but it's difficult to accept it as gm fiat.

Not sure how much sense I'm making here.  Not sure it's illusionism btw since we all know what's going on though maybe it is, I'm not the most terminology conversant here after all.

The ultimate point anyway is this.  My character decided to try to contact Pan, that had an effect on the game.  You rolled, you could have got the same result by fiat, doesn't matter.  The point is my action affected how we got to the outcome and that meant I was affecting the story, that we would have got to the same outcome anyway doesn't invalidate my input into how we get there.

After all, how many games really end in party defeat?  It's the journey that matters, not the destination.  Dice help make player choices matter but they're not the only way to do so.

[Mike Holmes]

How can the players tell the difference?

In this example, I don't know if Balbinus noticed, but I didn't make a single roll for NPCs. They were all directed by GM fiat. There was some vague handwaving for damage rolls but I only bothered because it is sometimes expected.

Is this some kind of semi-illusionism, i.e. letting the players roll but not bothering yourself?

Hmm. If it is Illusionism, it should bereferred to as Misdirection. That is, somehow the players did not notice or care that you were not rolling. The usual Illusionist technique is to roll, and just make your predetermined announcment, regardless of the die roll.

But if the players don't mind you creating resolution by fiat, then I see no reason why you can't just leave it out in the open. Not Illusionism, but possibly "GM Determinism" or "Player Only Random Resolution".

Note that the term Illusionist is highly debated anbd has no real standard meaning. I use it here to refer to techniques that make the GM seem arbitrary where he, in fact, controls the results by fiat. Which has several potential uses.

Why do you ask?

Mike

[GB Steve]

I asked because I'm really surprised that some players can get so het up about this. I have been less honest about my dice use in the past and certainly about things such as NPC stats. My NPCs tend to act or be affected as the story dictates rather than having excat stats.

I'm OK with players resolving their own actions with dice, or even their own fiat to a certain extent - as we did with SAN in our game of Delta Green at the weekend, as long as it fits with the spirit of the game.

So my question still is, how can players tell the difference between me rolling dice or not, and why is it such a big deal?

Especially given that we are all striving towards that mythical 'good time'.

I'd rather be up front and honest with my players about the way I run things but I can tell from discussions with my regular group that this would just not work.

[contracycle]

I've run a diceless campaign; I encountered no major problems.  Frankly I think that a lot of this arises from negative experience with power-hungry GM's, the screw-the-characters-with-the-rules types.  On that basis, giving a GM even more discretion seems only to make a bad situation worse.

In fact I find the opposite - because there are no objective criteria for anyone to compare against, every decision is in fact an act of persuasion on the part of the GM.  If the GM loses the players consent, their fiat will become problematic.  If everything is plausible and the continuity tight, the GM is not lording it over the characters etc, then I think diceless play works a treat.

The only difficulties I encountered I have taken to summing up as: its hard to visualise every bullet.  Where there is little or no mechanical abstraction, the GM is obliged to keep tabs on EVERYTHING.  Eventually I began to wish for some sort of mechanism to abstract this for me.  The problem was a little less intense in melee, which was easier to visualise.

It should be mentioned that I was running essentially system-free rather than dice free; with good abstraction for rating purposes - which gives hard data to crunch - I think some of the load is taken off.  And a system composed of descriptive ratings and GM fiat is essentially a Karma system.

[GB Steve]

The only difficulties I encountered I have taken to summing up as: its hard to visualise every bullet.  Where there is little or no mechanical abstraction, the GM is obliged to keep tabs on EVERYTHING.  Eventually I began to wish for some sort of mechanism to abstract this for me.  The problem was a little less intense in melee, which was easier to visualise.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, especially as you use combat as an example for and against the ease of use of diceless. If you mean things like HPs for damage or SAN for state of mind, then I get your point. But then the players can always write some short notes.

Mind you, I prefer to leave SAN to the players, as long as they play along. It's like Cowboys and Indians. If somebody gets shot, they have to lie down. I'll encourage by describing the external circumstances of any madness, such as voices, hallucinations etc but the players can choose how they react.

It should be mentioned that I was running essentially system-free rather than dice free; with good abstraction for rating purposes - which gives hard data to crunch - I think some of the load is taken off.  And a system composed of descriptive ratings and GM fiat is essentially a Karma system.

I much prefer this type of gaming. If you can get players who don't need to haggle over the exact meaning of what 'tough' or 'good with boats' means, i.e. where trust is present, then the freedom afforded the GM and players is wonderful. No longer are actions constrained by what is written on the character sheet (well, we didn't have character sheets when I ran my systemless game). I suspect that players who would haggle over the meaning of vague terms in diceless games would also be rules lawyers in stricter games.

Rules cut both ways - they deal with the situations they cover but also *always* introduce situations that are not covered or ambiguous. If the benefits are expediency and reducing the need for trust by having a common framework for some situations then I'm in the anti lobby. I want to encourage trust and for me, in RPGs, the journey is always more important than the destination.

I guess that's why I'm so opposed to levels and XPs: they abstract the journey. But that's another story.

[contracycle]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, especially as you use combat as an example for and against the ease of use of diceless. If you mean things like HPs for damage or SAN for state of mind, then I get your point. But then the players can always write some short notes.

I was thinking of the NPC's more.  I had a bunch of goons running about with SMG's trying to off the characters.  Say one of them gets a snap shot opportunity, a fleeting glance:

I don't have an initiative mechanic to determine if they can in fact shoot in time.
I don't have a mechanic to determine how many bullets they fired.
I don't have a mechanic to determine how many rounds are still in the clip.
Every bullet goes somewhere, but where exactly?

Most of this can be worked around in practice.  I know that a "short burst" likely to be 5 or 6 rounds, I probably know the cyclic rate of the gun in question, I can make an educated guess.  I probably know the approximate muzzle energy of the gun, so I can make an educated guess about damage levels.

If you are comfortable and confident with all this, its may not be problematic.  But this means you have to limit gaming to things you understand well enough to make judgements about, or your guesses become steadily less educated.  Even withou that, I found that in order to think about the effects of fire, I sort of had to imagine a line from the shooters viewpoint to the target, place a burst spread, and then report that to the players.  This is substantially more effort in visualisation than required to "roll an attack"; you need to do more 1st person perspective stuff for NPC's, I found.  Lastly, movement is a right pain; without a turn structure I had to sort of visualise every combatant in a sort of top-down view moving simultaneously.  Doable, but took effort.

So, the upsides were: it was fast, chaotic, terrifying, fog of war was present, and fractions of a second could mean life or death.  The downsides were: I found it exhausting, started to get paranoid about the probability distributions of my rulings, and the need for plausibility was much higher.