IDLE HANDS...

We've rolled dice for as long as we can remember. Playing our beloved games and hoping for that great roll. Sometimes fate shines upon us and sometimes it leaves us in a dark cave. The element of chance is incredibly exciting. How could we live without it? Some game developers have said you can. I'll enter one contestant. Marvel Universe Role-playing Game. I use this example because I have experience with it. In the game you start off with points to put in to your character to flesh out abilities, skills, powers, etc. Pretty standard. Once that is all done, one of your abilities will determine how much energy you have to spend each round or page. Marvel Universe Role-playing Game does not use the standard round but panels and pages like in a comic book. The goal was to give the feel of being in the comic book that you write as you play. Back to the energy pool. The Game-master explains the situation to you. Say you have arrived at an abandoned chemical factory and you are searching for clues to a villain. If you have a power or skill that would allow you to do that then this is the time for energy allocation. Let us say you have 10 energy. You have a 4 in Infra-vision and a 6 in Force Field. You can allocate your points to max out those two powers so if you find something and it triggers and attack, you will be prepared. However, you have no points in movement. Moving will not be something you can do this page. This is just a small example. It seems like it gives you a new experience with great freedom and control. The time I ran it, it seemed clunky and slow. This was years ago. I am considering giving it another chance. The questions is, what do you guys think? Is a dice-less game possible? Are we too rooted in the roll? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Sure. There have been a few RPGs that use it that are not just pure storytelling with no game.

Most I have glanced at use a point system combined with either storytelling or a more straightforward RPG style play. Actions are described and points spent to beat whatever challenge comes along.

One of the earliest I saw was one where the players had a finite amount of points to spend to get to the end of an adventure. They could chose to take damage or some other sort of failure in order to conserve those points for later and likely harder threats.

Active Exploits used a simmilar system with an added fatigue style element where the more effort you put into beating a task, the more worn out you got.

There are several others free or not. I think Nobilis is diceless?

Active Exploits and Marvel Universe seemed to me to get it backward: the point should be to make it less of an accounting exercise, not more. Amber Diceless made more sense in light of that opinion.

Active Exploits spent alot of pages saying very little. The fatigue system was neet. But the book is cluttered for something that is supposed to be easier.

I dislike the concept of diceless, because at that point it often becomes an arguing match (IN MY EXPERIENCE) because there's no unbiased arbitrator in the form of a randomizer.

Also, my personal experience with Amber was very negative, simply because the GM clearly favoured other players so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Of course you can achieve a roleplaying game structure without dice. The only difficulty in a diceless system is having a solid framework to manage player expectations, so no one feels that the behaviour and responses of the game are arbitrary. Dice are the easiest and most versatile way to do that, but they're not the only way.

And I'm not just talking about your fru-fru storygames, here. I'd like to paraphrase Erick Wujcik to say: all RPGs are diceless. Some of them intrude on that structure by having you roll a dice sometimes.

//Panjumanju

Yeah, diceless games are entirely possible. I'm playing in an online PbP Amber game now and it's going fine. True, they seem to often boil down into story telling exercises but then that just moves the emphasis to role-playing instead of dice and figure playing. Recently I bought JD's Lords of Gossamer and Shadow and it's pretty good. It's about 85% a reworking of Amber but has improvements too, in some ways I like it better than the Amber rules. Pick up a copy and see for yourself.

I commiserate with you about too much dice. I'm playing in a Pathfinder game with my local buddies and it seems like half of what goes on is dictated by the dice. My GM loves random encounter tables and the smoothness of every battle is rattled by critical hits and failures. Last night two swords were fumbled and stuck into the same tree for the duration of one battle. (And we always seem to roll more fumbles than crit hits.) It can be annoying but also surprising as a supposed "easy encounter" suddenly results in a death. Then there was the day when a random encounter was a Phase Spider which stole away two PCs which resulted in a long trek as the two attempted to get back to their home plane/world.

There is diceless system in Stalker, a RPG set in the world of Strugatsky Brothers' Roadside Picnic. "Challenges" boil down to a target number that you have to exceed by idea (rated 1-5) multiplied by roleplaying (rated 1-5).

Long-time Amber Diceless GM, here.  Also, ran Lords of Olympus and Lords of Gossamer & Shadow a bit last year.

I prefer a diceless game.  I don't have anything against dice (they're fun to roll), and I don't have any sort of ideological like or dislike regarding dice mechanics.  If it works, I'm fine with it, and in my experience, diceless can and does work quite well.  I just prefer diceless because it moves the flow of the game along much faster and smoother.  Obviously, if you don't have to slow down to reach for a physical randomizer, then the action is going to move faster.

It takes some practice, through.  

No dice? I declare abomination! Abomination I say!

Actually, I've always wanted to try Amber but every con I've been to that's had an Amber game sadly was booked solid or during a slot I was GMing.

I am particularly interested in Lords of Olympus because of my love for Mazes & Minotaurs and the Greek myths, but my hope is to actually try diceless at a convention in the near-ish future.

I started with diceless RPGs.

Well, actually, my first game was Paranoia, but as a player so much of that was behind the GM screen that it might as well have all been GM fiat. And I was fine with that.

The hard part for diceless is giving the players a way to figure out what their actions will do. In a dice based RPG, you have numbers to quantify chances of success, that sort of thing. In a diceless one, you have to make sure you're on the same page, or a player might walk into a trap thinking it was super easy to pass through while at the same time you're thinking it's an extremely lethal one. (And not because of player incompetence, but just because you didn't clarify it enough.)

Quote from: noman;855677It takes some practice, through.  

And this is key, and in my experience, there are very limited people who can make it work, even with practice.

I've played and GM'd plenty of MURPG (Marvel Universe RPG) campaigns and the main problem I found over the years was the whole 'blowing your load' then being nigh on helpless for the rest of the fight/time.

A possible solution might have been to multiply the stat/action (skill or power) by spending energy, so Hercules (Strength 10)  would spend only 5 energy to match Spiderman (5 Strength) in an arm wrestling contest (5x5=25 obviously) or 6 points to push his arm over, obviously whilst quaffing a beer as Spiderman is using two hands and a foot against the table and still losing.

Or have energy recovery determined randomly with a cap of carrying energy over of 3 dice worth.

e.g. Spiderman (recovery 2D6 take best die discard other) is up against Venom (D8). Spidey is ultimately not as powerful as Venom but chances are he can hold his own because of the roll & keep thing.

Yeah I get that it no longer makes it diceless, but losing a randomiser makes fights predictable I found. Make it a resource management game instead of being completely diceless and I think it spices stuff up.

Another Marvel game, Marvel Super Hero Adventure Game, was diceless but had the randomiser (drawing cards) which made it interesting.

Still had the curse of the Marvel license though. Aside from the original game every Marvel game since (Saga, Diceless, Heroic) has lasted about a year before being dumped.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;855446I dislike the concept of diceless, because at that point it often becomes an arguing match (IN MY EXPERIENCE) because there's no unbiased arbitrator in the form of a randomizer.

I like solid rules for just that reason: I can get pretty capricious as a GM depending on my mood, my ambient pain level and how much sleep I had the night before.  The less that's dependent on me having a good day, the better.

I've run Amber Diceless for years and I think that it's a great system, but it requires the right kind of players and the right kind of GM.

(1) ADRP eliminates most "rules lawyer" stuff since the GM makes the final ruling on issues. It also tends to balance characters (i.e. less "power gaming") if it is adjudicated correctly.

(2) GM's need to learn a whole new style. My "go to" for most RPGs when I get stuck on the plotline is the random encounter, but htis doesn't work for ADRP because there aren't dice to run the encounter for you.

(3) Both the players and GM have to have a sense of trust that the other will "play fair" along the way. This may seem odd in Amber, since the "goal" is often to screw with others, but without trust for a fair game the diceless concept often fails.