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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Levitator" data-source="post: 3037017" data-attributes="member: 40099">That was my biggest concern when we decided to try diceless gaming.  I have 2 gamers in my group with over 20 years experience, and I'm a bit old school myself.  It was so surreal after the first session.  We were looking at each other like, "that was pretty cool!"  Besides the speed factor, the other fun aspect of diceless gaming for the DM is that we have many more opportunities for suspense.  Things like spotting ambushes are so much more suspenseful because I can click 1 time and roll Spot checks for the whole party.  Even their normal skills are more dramatic because they aren't seeing the actual numbers.  They can be be winning an opposed Bluff/Sense Motive check with a low roll but better than their opponent.  It could be because they have a high bluff skill and they are bluffing a commoner.  So I might describe it as, "the wizard in your party would be able to shoot 30 holes in this story, but the guard seems to be buying it.  They must rely on my descriptions and it's a much more fun way for me to DM.  By the above description I'm hoping to show the player that his bluff was weak and wouldn't have worked against a more intelligent person.  He succeeded in bluffing the guard because the guard couldn't follow the story and gave all of your big words more credibility than they deserved.  The numbers also help me describe other aspects of the game more colorfully than just matching up numbers.  I hate spending a half hour designing a really cool trap or ambush, only to have the suspense killed by having to say the dreaded, "roll d20 for me please".  That was such a buzzkill!  Now they just tell me what they are doing, and I tell them what is happening around them.I don't even give exact damage during combat.  I describe the damage in as much detail as I can to give them a fair estimate of how deadly the blow is.  We also use the clobbered variant, so they always know when they or their adversaries have suffered at least 50% of their current HP total.  Once combat is over and the wounded are tended to, I give them the specific numbers.  What's funny is that we've been doing it this way so long now that when they guess their totals they are always within a few points.  Burying the HP total away is another way to increase suspense and perception of danger.  And it also speeds up the game because you don't have people sitting there with calculators trying to determine their foe's max attack damage and trying to calculate how many rounds they can stay in the fight.Diceless is definitely a different way to game and probably isn't for everyone.  I only suggest that people try it and see before passing judgement.  And I only suggest it if rolling dice is causing game problems for the players or the DM and you think the group can benefit from it.  Actually, I would also suggest it to any DM's who like to be very colorful in their descriptions and relate information more like a storyteller than a court reporter.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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