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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 9507814" data-attributes="member: 1465">As a GM I love randomness as a way for me to be surprised by the narrative instead of being always pulling the strings. If you've read The Art Of Game Design, you might have seen an astute possible definition of "fun = pleasure + surprises". If I want my GMing to be "fun" rather than simply pleasureable, there have to be surprises for me as well.But randomness isn't only in rolling dice. What the players decide to do is unknown to me in advance and therefore it works as essentially randomness from my point of view. Picking up a published adventure instead of making my own also gives me a sort of randomness, which would be felt even more if I could read it as we play it instead of in advance (although for practical reasons I cannot really avoid reading it before). If I make up an adventure or part of it, I might use random tables to surprise myself but eventually I do it so rarely nowadays that when I do, it's because I am motivated by using an idea on my mind (or a new monster!) so I am probably not randomising.That considered, I don't actually need that many dice rolls during the game for it to feel random enough. I generally favour rewarding players rather than characters, so I tend to resolve non-combat challenges more narratively, and leave rolling dice for when I am undecided on whether the players are doing a good thing or not. Think of it as the result of having grown up playing point-and-click adventures: I like problem solving, not gambling. I keep combat rules as they are whatever game I run, primarily because I want to play combat as intended by designers of that particular game, no need to change the level of randomness. The main exception is character death, because it is a topic of its own. I let combat results unfold without fudging, but should a player character really die for good, I stop the game and decide together with the player if they want it to happen or would rather continue (with some penalty agreed together so that there is a consequence) and how to fit with the narrative. I adopted this habit long ago, having learned that some people have long term emotional investment in their characters and I intend to support them.As a player I sometimes create my PC randomly in some of their details, especially spells so as not to be tempted to play again the same stock mage, and have even a few times done so completely down to all the details (even the name), it's fun for me and I never ended up with an "unplayable" character. During the game though, it can happen that if the GM make me roll too often, and I might get the feeling that my decisions don't matter much: that is when "pleasure" is removed from the equation, only "surprises" remain, and the result is not "fun" anymore.</blockquote>

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