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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 9025100" data-attributes="member: 6777737">It doesn't matter. You only have to agree upon the mechanism before you need it. Nothing requires that mechanism to be random. That's simply common convention, with all the assumptions and preconceptions we have trapped within. That's why I mentioned Amber Diceless as a "more pure form of FKR." If I bid 420 on Combat, well, I get to decide the results of combat. That means if you want to beat me, you need to do so without combat. It'd be like saying that we're writing a book together, and I get to write all the chapters on Combat, while you get to write all the chapters on, say, Sneaking or Diplomacy.Let's branch off for a moment. Let's assume that any time an author is writing fiction, they're playing a one-person game of FKR. They are running the world as a character, running each character as a character, and so on. Not all authors write this way -- essentially role-playing their characters in each scene -- but some do.Randomness doesn't really help a story. A narrative arc generally isn't satisfying because it's random. Quite the opposite. If Luke and Han were on the Death Star, in the detention center to free Leia and they opened the wrong cell and found a Tauntaun doing a can-can, that would certainly be random. Doesn't really progress the story, though. Abject confusion isn't really one of the hero's thousand faces.Returning to games, randomness doesn't make something a game, either. Plenty of games involve basically no randomness, like Chess or Go or Tic-Tac-Toe. Indeed, the Storytelling Game itself is a game without randomness. Typically it's said that you only lose that game when the story ends.So there's no reason to assume that randomness, let alone dice, is a necessary or even inherently desirable element to FKR. It seems simple because you can write it down in few words, but it's really only "simple" because we have preconceived notions about what dice are for in games. Once you think about the role of dice, it starts to make less sense.And, yes, while you need good-faith players for diceless FKR, we already know you still need good-faith players for FKR with dice, too.</blockquote>

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