The Feel of the Dice

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I love this topic; you can find some musings on it all the way back in System Does Matter (not that anyone ever read the second half of the essay, after flipping out over the GNS stuff in the first).

Overall Creative Agenda is irrelevant to the issue at hand. We are talking about the Color of the System. Whether it contributes, in an individual case, to a specific way to encourage Creative Agenda, is a great question.

Point #2: Can the System's Color (physical objects' texture, motions, etc, just to name a few) enhance the overall Exploration? I think that everyone's experience that I've talked to about it, as well as my own, overwhelmingly votes Yes. The classic example is "handfuls of dice!" in Champions; it feels good to roll 15d6 for your solar-radiation blast. But there are lots and lots more. The first three d10s I bought with designing Sorcerer in mind are gray, red, and black, with matte finish and a strange, stark symbol for the "10." I still make sure to use them when playing Sorcerer.

The most recent example for my role-playing concerns the 3x5 cards used as character sheets in Tunnels & Trolls, as recommended in the 5th edition text. I even went and got a bunch of the Flying Buffalo T&T character sheets after we played a session, and the players turned up their noses. It was 3x5 cards or nothing; they like the implication of disposability, even as they grieve a bit for a lost character.

Best,
Ron

[Callan S.]

For a moment I forgot why I asked which CA it comes under back then, but I remember now (I'm pretty sure). It was really supposed to highlight how it doesn't come under any. The idea of enjoying the object not for what it does (or in RPG's, what CA it's designed to assist with), but for what the object is itself. Admiring its workings, admiring its knobs and dials/dice.

Sort of reminds me of that Andy Warhol (sp?) picture of a can of cambells soup. It'd be like an RPG, pages fanned open and nifty looking dice strewn around it, in a frame. Certainly the framed version doesn't examine how good the soup or the game is.

Anyway, are dice and such comprable to the artwork in an RPG, in terms of a feeling they convey and perhaps a CA direction that assist with? Certainly those sorcerer dice sound like it.

The odd thing is, the more these things like dice and artwork are used to assist CA, the more the RPG becomes a piece of art itself, outside of it actually doing anything.

But I'm not sure I'm adding anything much.

[Jason Lee]

The Color of the mechanics definitely matters to me.  I particularly like little tricks like exploding dice.

I've got an example of Color really mattering.  I've tried, and failed, at several extensive attempts to convince one of the players in my group that rolling 1dX versus 1dX is the same as rolling 1dX - 1dX.  He just won't believe me - Color matters.

[Mark Causey]

And in some instances I've been in, Color simply *made* the game.

I was with a smaller, shorter lived group (than my current one), suffering from WW Larp Big Lies Before Breakfast conflicting with what they'd 'known and loved', but still wanting to 'roleplay right.'

Deadlands gave them a chance to really have a lot of fun and not feel "guilty" about it, as they "weren't exactly roleplaying, I mean, it's not a LARP with rock-paper-scissors or just dice, it's got cards and poker chips. It's different, and damn, it's fun!"

I do, believe, though, that my Premise to them made all the difference:

"Hey, guys, let's do something different. How would you like to get some poker cards, some ante chips, some paper and a pencil and we'll play some Cowboys vs. Zombies ..."

That, and the fact that the most enjoyable part for them was all taking a Weird Background flaw/feature thing which allowed them to get powers or get screwed over with some draws from a card pile.

Come to think of it, we also heavily enjoyed a D&D game after that which only involved one session on one night: some random characters, around a table, staring at a Deck of Many Things ....

AtR