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Milos said:
>The point I particularly object to is your statement that chance is
>required. Ever heard of diceless roleplaying games? Amber, for
>instance? Or is that not really roleplaying?
>
>I agree that chance is required. Dice is on of the most random
>things you can get. It remains true that nothing is really random in
>material world, but randomness of something can be determined by how
>similar the frequencies of getting specific result are for each
>possible result.
>
>Human mind can never be random enough, if it can be random at all.
>Dice-rolling generates outcomes of uncertain actions, and there are
>great number of possible outcomes for different actions. Multiply
>the number of possible events with average number of possible
>outcomes for each event and you get a laaaarge number of outcomes.
Well, you're correct, of course, but if you define chance in such an all-inclusive fashion then it's meaningless to require it, isn't it? Since you have chance (by that definition) in any case.
By "random" I had assumed that some sort of more traditional randomiser was being required - dice, for instance, or cards, or even rock-papers-scissors - and I don't agree that randomisers are required.
Although don't get me wrong - I'm not a die hard "HeroWars and D&D suck because they use dice" fanatic. :-)
>Dice-based roleplaying always generates new stories. Diceless Rping,
>on the contrary, is based only on what our minds can imagine, and
>our imaginations are already based on imaginations of the others.
>Simply, one person is too much influenced by the works he/she
>read,saw or heard to be totally original.
That's not been my experience. I have to fall back to Amber as the specific example here, because I haven't played any other diceless games. (I've played diceless variants of more traditional games - such as Champions, for example - but that isn't nearly as different as you'd think).
The reason Amber isn't as predictable as you're implying - in my experience - is because the player characters are sufficiently powerful to completely derail any attempt to force them into a story of the game master's design. In a very real sense, the game master in Amber is more of a moderator than the actual storyteller in many cases - he's there to see what happens if PC A decides to beat up monster B or other PC C (PCC? Talk about clumsy! :-). And if none of the players have anything particularly in mind, then he'll throw in a few plot hooks. He probably also has some sort of overriding campaign hook that he will attempt to advance through NPCs, but that's not really much different from what the players are doing (he just has more characters to control).
Dice wreck as many stories as they make, IMHO. I'm sure I'm not alone in being able to recall experiences where my mighty hero who SHOULD have been able to take out the snivelling kobold/corporate security guard/trollkin without breaking a sweat couldn't hit the broad side of a barn because of successive series of "1's". And for the game masters, there's been more than one occasion where I've had to grit my teeth as the megavillain who's supposed to give a show of invulnerability and frightening power before buggering off and leaving the PCs to his minions gets wasted by an untimely critical hit (or equivalent).
In such situations, the game master in any game is more than tempted to overrule the dice roll. I don't think I've ever met a GM that doesn't "cheat" from time to time. And the argument could be made that if you're prepared to override the dice in an emergency, why not just override the dice all the time?
RPGs descend from wargames. It's true that lots of wargames use dice or some randomiser to decide results, but the big granddaddy of them all (chess) isn't random at all... yet the possibilities of this game have kept the imaginations of some of the brightest people in our history alive for centuries.
As I said - I'm NOT suggesting that any game using dice "5uX0R5". But
I _don't_ find diceless games to be any inherently less
"roleplaying", which is what the first poster implied (and I
apologise for the harshness of my original response).
- --
GAZZA
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