[F]irst level for us was all about avoiding the dice. It was about luring the goblins into slicks of lamp oil, and then lighting them ablaze. Or even better, trapping them between the blazing oil and the gelatinous cube. Or bribing the orcs to fight the goblins for us. If you had to go to dice, it meant someone was likely to die. So you did everything you could to avoid it.-Trollsmyth, commenting at this great blog post
A Return to the Stars
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After a veeeeerrrryyyy long, and mostly unplanned, hiatus, Stuart and I got
together to play more Stargrave in recent days. It was good! It was also a
bit ...
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Posts
That's a great read. And I agree that the quote is worthy of it's own link. I can truly relate to not wanting to roll dice too often at first level. This DM loves that sort of role-playing.
ReplyDeleteWaay way back before there was such a thing as "Amber," I read an article in Shadis or something like that by a relatively little-known writer of Palladium games, named Eric Wucjik, about "Diceless Gaming."
ReplyDeleteDiceless gaming was something he had come up with by relentlessly avoiding dice, as part of his challenge to keep his pathetically-statted, one-hit-point, first level AD&D halfling thief alive.
Believe It Or Don't!
avoiding dice, as part of his challenge to keep his pathetically-statted, one-hit-point, first level AD&D halfling thief alive.
ReplyDeleteEd, that's really cool stuff, there. While rolling dice is part of the allure of role-playing and in particular D&D in the first place for myself and my players, I cannot ignore the fact that it would be refreshing, I think, to see if we could go a full session without a single dice roll.
I definitely do not want a dice free model for an RPG, but just trying to do so might be a fun exercise.
I recently game up the DM chair in my group to let the players take turns running games...
ReplyDelete... I did everything I could to avoid rolling the dice just because death is so easy at first level. And I died anyway. In a pit. Damn it!
:P
If you're doing everything you can to avoid rolling the dice, it makes the times when you HAVE to roll much more dramatic. Everyone at the table pays attention to those dice.
ReplyDeleteIt lends itself to players choosing options OTHER than attacking everything they encounter... including running away. :)
I wrote a long post on this about three years ago on DF.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10243
I linked to the Eric Wucjik Forge article and a few other relavent posts, the links to which I hope are not dead.
chris ("rogatny") tichenor
Yes! that's the same story he told in the magazine article I vaguely remembered.
ReplyDeleteDamn, I hated to read this, in the context of Eric's current situation:
" We human beings can screw up anything, at any minute. If you imagine that we're living in dice-based universe, it stands to reason that the dice are rolling millions of times every second, just to see which of your replicating cells are doing their job properly, and which are failing bad enough to give rise to cancer."
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/24/