Diceless Systems

[Malin Genie]

Has anyone here played any of them (with good or bad results?)

I read a review of Theatrix which looked very interesting, and I've read the Amber Dicless rules (which looked very setting-specific) but would be interested to hear any experiences (excluding Wolfspider's awakening to the erotic possibilities of DRPG which I stumbled across in a site search...)

 

[Morbidity]

No, no I want my dice. I insist upon having my dice. Without dice we are nothing!

 

[Bagpuss]

Burn the heritic! More seriously yes I've played Everway and to a certain extent Conspiracy X is diceless. Both games ran rather well. I think my players however missed the dice rolling, as much from habit as anything else.

Diceless tends to be more plot and story focused than other games. Not that diced games lack plot and story or that diceless games are necessarily better for story type games. (Think I've covered my back there, erm Woot D&D Rules! That should do.)

 

[Bagpuss]

No, no I want my dice. I insist upon having my dice. Without dice we are nothing!

But with dice you are just less than 6....

 

[Assenpfeffer]

There are more traditional diceless games like Theatrix ("Just make stuff up.") or Amber ("My Warfare is 45. Yours is 30. You lose.")

Then there are diceless games like Nobilis, which has a lot more system, and, like, rules and stuff, so resolution doesn't come down strictly to either flat value comparisons or GM fiat.

Well, actually, no, there's not. Nobilis is the only diceless game like that.

 

[Morbidity]

But with dice you are just less than 6....

LOL. How did I know someone was going to bring that up? That die is being isolated and will be given as a present to my next DM … unless of course I can convince the world to let me use 21 less the roll. Hmmmmm….. To make this on topic (vaguely) … you see innovation in dice should be encouraged rather than the complete annihilation of them. I can hear all their little plastic screams as I write this. Sorry, I think I’m still trying to come down from my GCUK sugar high.

 

[MarauderX]

Must....have....dice....

I played in an excruciatingly long campaign in which the DM set up a dice-less thing he stole from his cousin. The whole thing became so boring and encounters with everything became such a joke the DM stopped asking us what we wanted to do and just led us by the nose through his terrible plot line. I think it was my worst campaign I was ever a player in.

I think it could be ok if done right, but I like not knowing exactly what is going to happen when my PC tries something, like swinging an axe at someone and not knowing if I am going to hit let alone knowing where and what happens next (did the target die?).

Does that make sense? I'll stop rambling now.

 

[Petrosian]

I have played in Amber diceless and ran a Vampire TM game that was more often than not diceless (not really intentionally but when my players stopped bringing mtheir dice to the game I realized how much narrative resolution we were doing.)

In the hands of a bad Dm, neither diced nor diceless will work well at all. A Gm can make any encounter as unpredictable or predictable as he wants well before the players even arrive.

Diceless is not for everybody. It requires a GOOD GM and experienced players. The group has to be very much into a collaborative game and not a competitive game. If you want to show up an "game against the GM" diceless is NOT for you. If you think your GM 's decisions are arbitrary, predictable, or unimaginative, stick with diced.

On the other hand, if you want the outcome to be unpredictable but determined by choices you make (when positioned against choices they make) and want your efforts and decisions reflected... diceless is for you.

If you want to see your character fail for a REASON in game, and not because you rolled poorly, then diceless is for you.

If you feel that the proper order is to determine why your character SHOULD fail and then decide whether he did, as opposed to determine whether he failed and then start trying to explain why he did, then diceless is for you.

Speaking for the amber system, it takes the uneducated die roll, where the 1-20 swing has nothing to do with your actions, decisions or scene drama, and replaces it with double-blind partially informed decisions of opposed actions. Its that same double-blind partially informed methodology that adds the random element into any diceless competitive game such as GO or CHESS and produces a variable outcome even though the levels of player ability may differ.

There is randomness in diceless resolution, its just not based on arbitrary.

 

[Broken Fang]

I've played both Theatrix and Amber (and am in a pbem campaign currently) and loved them both. As others have already said it takes a good GM to run them and players that can explain/describe their actions.

Theatrix is fun because you can do anything with it. Amber is fun if you like the books. The Amber campaign we are playing in I get to be the bad guy (as I live in CO) and the party is after me (they live in TX). Mucho fun!

If nothing else try it and see if you like it.

 

[Thaumaturge]

I played the diceless Dragonlance "5th Age" stuff once or twice. It was all card based and...wierd. HP and AC were related so fully healed opponets were harder to hit. You could chose when to use your most powerful cards and when to just let a "roll" fall by the wayside.


Thaumaturge.