The whole point is the dice! There is something mystical and addicting to buying new dice and then cursing them the first time when they epically fail on the first roll.

The only two times we tried diceless was Amber and some silly concept called 7th level or 7d or dimension. It was way to cerebral for us.

Again goes back to dice. Now, we also played the old d100 Palladium system and also the d6 dice of Gurps, but we always pined for the multifaceted dice of d4-d20.

It's an interesting question.
 
The key to running a good ADRPG is to make the game unpredictable, even without the use of dice. That unpredictability comes from several different sources but generaly, gameplay mimics the pacing found in Zelazney's works. Conflict escalates from tactics to investigation to strategy to logistics and then once a logistical superiority is achieved the players leverage it to get a strategic victory which they leverage for an investigative victory which they use to have a final tactical showdown with the jerk that started it all. Although within that grand story-arc are sub-conflicts nested in sub-sub-conflicts....-- kinda like a narrative fractal.
 
Setting all that within a dungeon is problematic. Tacticaly dungeons are alot of fun and investigations work well too. Strategic conflicts are not commonly encountered in dungeon crawls because the dungeon doesn't exist when the characters arn't there and for similar reasons there's not much going on logisticaly. So to make it work you'd have to add actors with strategic goals and dungeon resources that are logisticaly significant.
 
Without the randomness of dice, you'd have to come up with some other way to keep the players guessing, and also have a set-in-stone way to tell them 'no' that avoids the apperance of simple GM fiat. In ADRPG this is done with a sufficiently complex magic system. The Pattern can do this, the Logrus can do that, Trumps can do this other thing and they interact like so.... Those powers are too metaverse-spanning for a normal dungeoncampaign (unless the entire metaverse is made of dungeons?) but for a more D&D themed diceless framework, you could leverage the stuff players already know about how fire and water interact. How adamantium and mithral work. So a very simple subplot could look like this...
 
A mysterious jerk swipes your stuff and hides it in a cairn. The cairn is guarded by an incorporeal wraith that (and here's the important part) you cannot defeat. After some investigation you learn some information about wraiths and using that information use it to formulate a strategy. You get the stuff you need (logistics), execute your strategy, solve the mystery of how to enter the cairn and get your stuff back.
 
Now at any point along there you could have extra complications and it's the job of the GM to emulate the ADRPG source material by overwhelming the players with stuff to do. One of Zelazney's masterstrokes was how he reveals three books in, that the clue that Corwin ignored and Random neglected to explain in the first chapter of the first book is profoundly important. "To paraphrase Hamlet, Lear and all those other guys: I wish I had known this some time ago." -- Corwin
 
Just to be clear, in ADRPG any fight you would win is won dicelessly and any fight you would lose is lost dicelessly. The rest of the game is stacking the deck so that you have the upper hand, high ground, home team advantage, greater numbers, technological superiority, better training, and a trump up your sleave if things go bad.

In Amber we've done some dungeon crawling from time-to-time, and it works ok in small doses. I'm not sure how that would work as the main focus of a game, though.

RPGPundit

I've been running a Castles & Crusades game recently. I've made a few rulings that push the game towards diceless-ness:

-Instead of the more common 50% chance of breaking, arrows, bolts, and darts that don't hit a soft target, such as an unarmored of lightly armored enemy, break automatically.

-Monsters have their average total hitpoints, as opposed to rolled HP (I did roll for a major creature, however). So, a 1d6 HD monster has 3 HP.

-Wandering monsters are not rolled for; an estimation of where they might wander to is made based on noise and the location of their lairs.

Despite these things, character creation retains all of its rolls (hence the 1 HP Elven Wizard). The reason I prefer removing the rolls from things is not some misguided hatred of dice, but because each roll made slows down play a small bit more. Character creation is "front loaded" so to speak, but adding rolls in the middle of play can be irritating.

I think the problem with the diceless "dungeon crawl" is that diced and diceless games operate under totally different philosophies.

For example, in a Diceless game (such as Amber) characters tend to move from one important encounter to another, and the "randon monster" really has no meaning. In a diced game (such as D&D) characters are trying to fight a war of attrition as they slowly plow though monsters, expending resources along the way.

In a diced game, as a GM I can throw a random encounter at players and I can plan ahead while they are wasting pointless bad guys. In a diceless game the action continues to flow and there isn't really any "down time" of the same kind. Either you are going to be able to beat the creature or you aren't and either way the GM has to pay attention and adjudicate the conflict.

I just see the two types of games as fundamentally different, and while the "dungeon crawl" works well in a diced game I just don't see it as valuable in a diceless game.

Quote from: finarvyn;342073In a diceless game the action continues to flow and there isn't really any "down time" of the same kind.

There's plenty of down time in ADRPG but it's usually related to players conspiring away from the table. Which makes me think that one way to explore the diceless dungeon concept would be to put the accent on PvP (team of greedy thieves anyone?)

QuoteEither you are going to be able to beat the creature or you aren't and either way the GM has to pay attention and adjudicate the conflict.

You've reduced the spectrum of outcomes considerably here. Maybe a PC can take that monster but will lose a valuable piece of equipment while dodging claws, or he/she'll get rabies from a bad scratch. Or maybe the creature is manageable but the players want to capture it to get information and have to find a way to neutralize it without too much harm?

I like the Malleus Arianorum's ideas on the topic. There seem to be a common gameplay background between how old school D&D dealt with picking locks and disarm locks (no skill roll) and ADRPG conflict resolution. An invitation for players to plan and display astute exploitation of environment and resources.

Quote from: boulet;342467You've reduced the spectrum of outcomes considerably here. Maybe a PC can take that monster but will lose a valuable piece of equipment while dodging claws, or he/she'll get rabies from a bad scratch. Or maybe the creature is manageable but the players want to capture it to get information and have to find a way to neutralize it without too much harm?

Perhaps I've oversimplified somewhat, but my main point still is that a dungeon crawl tends to be a series of encounters where the main goal is to beat the thing encountered with weapons rather than guile. If you enter a room and find three orcs, it's not in a typical dungeon crawler's head to trick them or find some way around them but instead to wade in and smash them. This philosphy is in direct oppositon to the Diceless appraoch, in my experience, because it's about attrition and reource jugglling (spells, hit points, etc) rather than a Diceless approach which is more about situations and evaluation of relative strengths.

Not to say that you can't do dungeon crawl style adventures in a Diceless format, but that I find that my players tire of them quickly and want to move on. I know that Jon Tweet has stated on his webpage that it's an "obvious" step to take D&D and make it diceless, but I can't find anything more concrete about how he proposes to do it. (I know about "take ten" and "take twenty" and hope that's not all he was talking about.)

Just my experience. Your mileage may vary.

Quote from: Hieronymous Rex;339553Has anyone ever done this? It might be accomplished using a diceless system proper (e.g. ADRPG), or a variation on another system (e.g. AD&D).

I suspect it would be fairly easy to turn older editions of D&D (especially OD&D and B/X) into a diceless game by having all things like weapon damage, monster hit points/dame, etc. be standard (e.g. their average amount, rounded down). You simply succeed in doing average things in an average way. Hit Points would be used to do things above normal.  A combat example: you swing at the monster and spend a number of hit points. The GM looks up the number of HP you spent and compares it to a table to see if that hits the xD AC y monster. If you do, you do standard damage unless you had spent HP to do more.  You might even be able to hit monster with say half your level or less in hit dice for standard damage without spending any HP. Hit points would have to regenerate much faster than they do in standard early D&D, of course.

You'd need a few sessions to work out the kinks (and to develop the result tables), but something like this, tweaked and playtested, should produce a playable and enjoyable (at least for folks who like diceless play) diceless version of D&D that would work for a dungeon crawl. Because it would be a resource management game, it would probably even feel similar to standard early D&D in play.