Does chance favour a good story?
simon_hibbs:
Quote from: Erik Weissengruber on March 14, 2011, 05:20:30 PM
The trick to dice, then, is just to find dice mechanisms that give you all of the latter and none of the former. We have some very good such mechanisms available now, and more all the time!" [emphasis mine]
I had a discussion on exactly this at my local gaming group last Friday. I ran the game using a diceless karma based system somewhat derived from Amber. My argument on this is that in this system, if your character sheet says you are a remarkable swordsman, you are always a Remarkable swordsman. You never get to suddenly be a crap swordsman because some stupid piece of plastic came up 99.
However the point you raise about chance and risk is something I'm very aware of. I'm experimenting with using cards to inject some uncertainty. Each player gets 3 playing cards randomly at the beginning of the session. If after coming to a conclusion in a scene based on diceless play the player wants to push it, they can play a card which acts like a Hero Point or Plot Point. If I choose, I can oppose it with a randomly drawn card. The cards don't resolve the whole contest, they just spin the result slightly one way or the other form the way it would have gone otherwise. If you were about to get spitted, a card won't suddenly give you victory, but it might mean you're only badly injured.
This worked pretty well. The players can choose which of their cards to play, perhaps reserving their best cards for critical contests. It means most of the time I as narrator can push the envelope in contests and bring them to the brink because they do have a resource they can use to pull things back again. I think the mechanic works quite well, but I need to build up a bit more experience using it effectively so I plan to use this system for a few one-off games as and when I have the opportunity.
Simon Hibbs
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