From: millerl@jeremiah.wharton.upenn.edu (Loren J. Miller)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: Diceless or Senseless? Confession!
Date: 14 Aug 92 02:57:24 GMT
Organization: wcit

In article <batemanc.713717474@p4.cs.man.ac.uk> batemanc@p4.cs.man.ac.uk (Mad Chris) writes:
>But when he made the hole, the water just kept gushing and gushing forth,
>until Mad Chris was swept away by the flow of water and he drowned.

Well, you got this part right. You were wandering along, saw what you
thought was a problem but wasn't really because nobody here really
thinks that dicey roleplaying games are going the way of the dinosaur,
and thought you would raise a big stink about it. Markoff Chaney would
be proud of the fart you laid, so I'm surprised that you pretend to
take offense at the minor splatterings of controversy that struck you
after everybody in the middle of the stream had already been roundly
insulted, and their chimpanzee status acclaimed in kingdoms here and
abroad.

Well, I take it back. You, Mad Chris the pseudo-Discordian pedant, are
not a chimp. The exalted status of the chimp among the ape kingdom is
far beyond your meager abilities. You are a baboon. 

Listen, I hear your mother calling you... "Eep eep eep, Chris!"

I never said that dicey roleplaying games were going away. Nobody here
said that. That particular hallucination was yours. Nobody is going to
lay claim to it so take it somewhere else.

>You may believe that diceless WILL supercede diced entirely ( and if you
>still believe this after over 100 posts of controversy, then welcome to

I don't believe it nor did I ever say it. You and the other dice
defense squad members put that in my mouth and the mouth of everybody
else who spoke up in defense of amber/diceless. Diceless RPGs are not
a new phenomenon, BUT Amber is the first published diceless game,
because until now everybody in the industry thought that diceless rpgs
would never sell.

Wrong.

Now that they have been proved wrong, you should expect to see more
diceless games, and the quantity of required dicerolling in published
rpg systems will go way down. In this way the prediction that got you
in such a tizzy is correct, though we agree there is no way that dice
are going to go away completely. Hell, if you have been reading my
postings in this thread maybe you can remember that the system I run
right now is a dice heavy one, RuneQuest, and I don't intend to quit
it.

>But to my surprise, three of the four play testing groups wrote back in their
>first report saying: "This is all very well, and all very realistic. But we
>like Fumbles! We like to screw up! Please put back in Fumbles, even if they
>only apply to Player characters!".

So change the envelope. Try to keep the feeling of screwups and
critical success without ruining the plausibility of the game. How
about saying that there are two kinds of encounter in any game. The
first one is a standard encounter and crits and fumbles don't happen
in such an encounter. This means such encounters play out much more
quickly and forces can be analyzed rationally without probability
being overthrown by luck. The other kind of encounter is a climactic
one, where the players need all the help they can get, and if a player
gets geeked by a lucky shot it doesn't ruin the rest of the scenario
because this is the climax of it anyway, or at least a minor climax
that gives the player time to pick up a replacement. Yes, this is
stolen from Torg, but it's a good idea.

Torg, BTW, is the greatest roleplaying game in the world, bar none.
[more advocacy bait]

>This is FACT.

I'm glad you agree with my assessment of Torg.

:-)

>That's it. You don't have to listen to me any more ( assuming you have
>just read this far ). One final request: nobody but me has mentioned
>Freeform. Am I the only one who's heard of it? If you know what I am

We've heard of it, but until Amber nobody had published any kind of
"freeform" or diceless (a much more accurate descriptor) RPG. Even
though CORPS and Vampire attempt to come close, they both involve
plenty of dice rolling in actual play.

>All Hail Discordia!
>Mad Chris.

I hope you enjoyed this little golden apple which I rolled back your
way. "Kallisti"
-- 
-- 
Loren Miller     <MILLERL@scrolls.wharton.upenn.edu>
All our patients here are suffering from severe over-acting. When
they're brought in they're all really over the top.