Do you need or prefer physical dice when playing?

[Snarf Zagyg]

For once, I am not going to bore you with a long essay. I was recently in the excellent thread about learning from game designers started by @Art Waring (I highly recommend you check it out!), and it caused me to revisit an earlier series I had started about the physical nature of TTRPGs, and an examination of how the use of dice (and dice mechanics) influences play. However, I never actually finished the series! If you're curious (aka, a masochist), you can find the 2 1/2 posts in the aborted series here-

What Does the Choice of Dice Mean for the RPG?
Games People Play: Looking at the Gaming Aspects of D&D
Why We Love Dice in Our RPGs (Part 2)

Anyway, while reading back on those, I saw the following astute comment from @Clint_L which I never followed up on:

To your point about the tactile and other pleasures of dice...hmmm. Hard to separate nature and nurture in this regard. My first instinct is to talk about collectibility, sensation, etc. but I have been conditioned to value particular forms of these things. I notice that when I play with new students who have no experience of D&D they are absolutely fine with rolling on DnDBeyond (plus it does the math for them). I offer to lend them dice, and about half are not interested. I don't think there is necessarily anything inherent to the human species that makes physical dice objectively more attractive than virtual dice, but I would love to see a study.

And I was wondering about that! I can't imagine playing D&D (or other TTRGPs) without my dice. It is so foundational, to me, that I have to use them. Now, if I'm playing PbP, I will use coyotecode to roll because that's transparent, but that's just for on-line play.

So I wanted to put Clint_L's observation out to the EnWorld public in two ways.

First, a poll! The poll is going to ask you if you have to use dice when you're playing in person.

Second, the comments. I know that people will expound on the idea, and further clarify what they've seen others do, and how playing on-line might change what they prefer, so use the comments for that.

Have at it! How important are the DICE to your in-person D&D (and other TTRPGs, assuming you're not playing a diceless RPG or Dread or the like) experience?

 

[The Soloist]

I vastly prefer dice but as a solo player, to reduce the number of rolls, I often go for average damage results, instead of rolling. I usually run a party of three characters, plus the adversaries that's a lot of die rolling.

I tried playing solo 100% on the computer but it felt unreal.

 

[billd91]

I use physical dice when playing in person. I even use physical dice about half the time when playing virtually as well. I do not require my virtual players to use the VTT’s dice roller, though they may if they choose. I personally don’t like using virtual dice rollers on my iPad or iPhone if I can avoid it. There’s just something I like better about the physical dice.

 

[Deset Gled]

I haven't played an all in-person game since the pre-pandemic era. At that time, I would have said dice were critical.

But now that I've gone digital, I can imagine an in-person game where everyone uses tablets or laptops instead of dice and character sheets. I still think it would be important to have a slightly standardized RNG system of some form. And dice would still make me happy. But I'm definitely past the point of saying physical dice are fundamental to the game.

 

[John R Davis]

Dice.
Except say for a game with silly symbol interpretive dice like edge of the empire, when an app lets me know I have 4 successes and 5 complications.

 

[Art Waring]

For once, I am not going to bore you with a long essay. I was recently in the excellent thread about learning from game designers started by @Art Waring (I highly recommend you check it out!), and it caused me to revisit an earlier series I had started about the physical nature of TTRPGs, and an examination of how the use of dice (and dice mechanics) influences play. However, I never actually finished the series! If you're curious (aka, a masochist), you can find the 2 1/2 posts in the aborted series here-

Thank you Snarf, I don't feel like I deserve any praise, as talking about game design is what I love doing, but thank you very much for the shout out!

Yes. I think that dice are very important to game design, as depending on what kind of dice you choose to implement, you will be incentivizing certain styles of play over others.

Some games like Shadowrun (older editions anyway) are d6's only, roll a grip depending on your ability, and 5's & 6's are a success depending on how many you get. This allows me to build a Street Sammy focused on shooting with a smart-linked Roomsweeper, that can literally take out a whole room of gangsters in one attack round.

Games like dnd typically restrict players to single actions, leading to the same conclusion but from a different approach. However d20's are often referred to as swingy, and this system does not always appeal to everyone (notice how many of these games have options for modifying rolls like inspiration, fate dice, surge dice, or action dice, either before or after you roll depending on the game).

Hence why some games are doing away with attack rolls altogether (previously Into the Odd & currently MCDM?). Each different system offers a different incentive to players.

One thing that dice do add is increasing variance, in that games that don't use dice are easier to "solve" in terms of game meta, where games with dice and higher variance require a lot more games to "solve." Also, games with higher variance keep players engaged more, as predictable outcomes do not make for exciting games. I think that is part of why ttrpg's are popular, as they have a high degree of variance which means that no two games end the same, and you can keep playing for years or decades without becoming overly predictable (of course games can still get stale, but that is another topic).

My variant poll answer was: I am not a number: No More Paperwork!

 

[Staffan]

Math rocks go klicketyklack and make the good noise. I would not want to replace them with electronics unless abolutely necessary (e.g. I suddenly find myself in a pickup Star Wars game but those dice are at home).

For some reason, it's not the same when playing online – I'm perfectly fine using dice rollers there. I'd also be fine with using cards or something similar in a game intended for that – and usually, if a game designer goes to the trouble of replacing dice with cards, they often have something cool to do with them.

 

[dbm]

If I was running an impromptu game with just my iPhone or iPad (since my library is in the cloud this could happen) then I would be happy using a dice roller. But at the table my preference is for shiny math rocks.

 

[Parmandur]

Only spiritual dice on the Astral plane, thanks.

 

[uzirath]

I strongly prefer to use real dice for in-person games. I can't say that I have to use them because there are circumstances where I'll make an exception. Most commonly this happens when I want to roll for something out of an unusual number (e.g., "1 to 7") or, as a GM, when I need to roll for a lot of things at once. In the former case, Google or Siri or whatever is my friend. In the latter case, I'll use my trusty Discord bot to roll a bunch and calculate the results. You know, the PCs introduce a sleeping gas into the HVAC system and I've got to figure out how many people resist out of ~250 employees. (This happened in a recent Monster Hunters session.) Yeah, I could just calculate the odds and take the average, but even the digital roller feels more cosmically fair than that. Plus it knows GURPS and figures out crits and margins of success and failure, which is kinda dreamy.