I'm a diceless roleplayer who likes dice. ... Yeah, I know. But it's a problem. I love the aesthetics of Fudge dice, but the mechanics don't work. (9-point dice spread, 7-level adjective ladder, do the math.) I love rolling tons of Champs six-siders. I love polyhedral dice and I never play games that even *use* them. More than that, though, when I run PBeM I almost never use dice. Why? I dunno. I like the surprise in them, especially in PBeM where I can have a wacky result come up, go "Oh, wow," and then come back to the keyboard 24 hours later with a whole slew of new ramifications to work with (as GM *or* player). And yet... as I brought up in Carl's blog (http://raven.phoenyx.net/mutterings/), and in our as-yet-unpublished podcast, dice make for dysfunctional storytelling. (Note absence of capitals; you'll just have to guess at what *I* think of as "storytelling.") It's often possible, especially in PBeM, to wind the story around what the dice do... but sometimes it's not. And in real-time play, you *really* have to think fast sometimes. And I don't like thinking fast. I like thinking hard. But dice are cool. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
