Are you playing D&D if there are no dice?

[GoodKingJayIII]

I've played in a game where the DM rolled everything out of sight. We never came to a session with dice.

As a DM I've tried the same, but I prefer when my players roll. Less for me to keep track of.

 

[Korgoth]

According to ancient Gygaxian wisdom, you can deviate from the rulebooks all you want but if you do so, you are not playing D&D.

Edit: typo.

I'm sorry, but I think this is a false statement. If this is drawn from the preface to the 1E DMG, then you are (perhaps quite unintentionally) misrepresenting what Gary was saying. I'll quote the relevant passage:

The danger of a mutable system is that you or your players will go too far in some undesirable direction and end up with a short-lived campaign. Participants will always be pushing for a game which allows them to become strong and powerful far too quickly. Each will attempt to take the game out of your hands and mold it to his or her own ends. To satisfy this natural desire is to issue a death warrant to a campaign, for it will either be a one-player affair or the players will desert en masse for something more challenging and equitable. Similarly, you must avoid the tendency to drift into areas foreign to the game as a whole. Such campaigns become so strange as to be no longer "AD&D". They are isolated and will usually wither. Variation and difference are desirable, but both should be kept within the boundaries of the overall system. Imaginative and creative addition can most certainly be included; that is why nebulous areas have been built into the game. Keep such individuality in perspective by developing a unique and detailed world based on the rules of Advanced D&D. No two campaigns will ever be the same, but all will have the common ground necessary to maintaining the whole as a viable entity about which you and your players can communicate with the many thousands of others who also find swords & sorcery role playing gaming as an amusing and enjoyable pastime.

It is important to keep a few things in mind. The passage just before this says that ability scores should represent roughly the same thing in most campaigns, spell and magic item effects should be fairly consistent, etc. so that it is easy for players and their characters to transition from one campaign to the next, and so that a network of players can be built up which will allow various DMs and players to all be speaking a common language; eventually "grand tournaments" could arise from this structure. "Network externalities"? I think Gary already thought of it.

Also keep in mind that the above was written as the preface to the same book that includes rules for combining D&D with Gamma World and Boot Hill, and written by the guy who wrote Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

So what Gary seems to be saying is more along the lines of "If you redefine the Strength table so that 3 means you can kick over a mountain and 18 means you can punch a black hole into the cosmos, or you reset the attribute range for PCs to go from 1-1000 (but keep the values as they are... so that an average character hits for +485 damage or something), or you say that magic swords can only be used by half-dwarf half-giraffe mage-titans, etc. then you've gone so far beyond the assumptions and framework of the game that it's not AD&D anymore, and so you have isolated yourself from this network of gamers we're building and have overturned my fundamental (and wise) design philosophy."

But he is not saying that if you make up a house rule you're not playing AD&D. It was designed to allow that, in fact! Gary states that he purposefully leaves the rules nebulous in certain areas so that everyone can have their own rulings and procedures and world. He says that difference and addition are desirable. His concern is with morphing it into something so unrecognizable that it could no longer be considered AD&D. Hence the concern is not with modification, but with totally altering the underlying assumptions and framework. In which case I think it would be fair to call it a different game.

 

[Fifth Element]

I was actually thinking of another passage, I think, and not being serious at the same time. So don't take it too literally.

 

[T. Foster]

There were some guys I played with a couple times back in the 80s who used some silly electronic random number generator called a "Dragonbone" instead of dice. According to Rob Kuntz, when Brian Blume was GMing Boot Hill he used to insist on using the random number generator function on his calculator instead of dice (and also insisted on making all the "rolls" for the players as well as himself). And of course there are the chits from the Holmes Basic Set.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Ah, the Dragonbone.

I'm surprised this hasn't made it into Belkar's dialogue on Order of the Stick .

 

[KB9JMQ]

It might still be the same game but boy would I miss rolling dice.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

No dice on the table? Horrible thought. What do you throw at players if they make bad puns? What do you stack or twirl to give subtle hints about the DMs boring game? What do you drop on the floor with the dark carpeting and look for it for a couple of minutes?

Seriously, dice may be backward, but I like it that way. Some things I like doing the old way.

Plus, I have about 800 of them buggers, I'm not going to put them away now.

 

[Korgoth]

There were some guys I played with a couple times back in the 80s who used some silly electronic random number generator called a "Dragonbone" instead of dice. According to Rob Kuntz, when Brian Blume was GMing Boot Hill he used to insist on using the random number generator function on his calculator instead of dice (and also insisted on making all the "rolls" for the players as well as himself).

Well, at least if you were using the Dragonbone and it made you miss your save you could say "I just got Dragonboned."

 

[Thaniel]

I've played in 2 games via IRC where the DM did all rolling himself in private. They were the 2 games I most miss. The channel log wasn't filled with numbers and such. It was marvelous.

In combat, we would privately tell the DM what we were attempting to do. When our turn came around, he would privately tell us how well our attempt did, and we would describe it ourselves in the channel window. It was nice not having to worry about the dice.

Was it D&D? Of course. We had our character sheets. We knew our bonuses. We went (as far as we knew) by the rules in the book (house rules notwithstanding). The fact that no player ever touched dice or a dicebot made little difference.

To whomever it was that said that by taking away dice you take away the G in RPG.. Actually, I don't know what to say. I'm flabbergasted at that opinion. That's all.

 

[Shade]

No dice is no dice for me. I'm not interested in amateur theatrics, no offense to those who are of course.

Ditto here. It ceases to be a "game" if it is simply collaborative storytelling.