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(http://raven.phoenyx.net/mutterings/), and in our as-yet-unpublished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
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