Leaving it to chance

This post stems from a conversation I had with my sister Bel the other day. We were discussing a session of World of Darkness (pen & paper) that we'd both been part of this weekend.

Firstly, Bel is pretty new to Pen & Paper roleplaying. In fact the session in question was only her second time. However, Bel is not new to roleplay, having run a Harry Potter roleplay site (along with me at times) for over 10 years. The site was an entirely story driven experience with no game mechanics. Each "player" took the role of one wizarding character and made all the decisions that character would make in the collaborative story. There were only 3 golden rules to follow:-

1 - No godmoding. Simply put you had to be realistic within the realm of the scenario. No being awesome at everything all the time. It makes for dull stories.

2 - No puppetting. You control your own actions and not those of others. You can for example say you cast a spell at someone but it was up to them to say whether it hit or if they dodged etc.

3 - No Centre of Universing (CoU). Your character isn't the be all and end all of the story. Give others a fair chance to take part and always be considerate.

The community that the site established got to grips with these and produced a wide variety of different stories with hundreds of different characters.

So back to this weekend. When I was discussing the session with Bel I wanted to know what she did and didn't like. She did like the idea that she could literally roleplay whatever she wanted her character to do. But what didn't she like? Dice rolls.

Now Bel isn't anti-dice in general. She loves board games of all varieties. We regularly play things like Elder Sign that are entirely dice based. No, what she didn't like about dice in Pen & Papers was leaving important rolls down to chance. The first P&P we did was based on walking dead where Bel played a gifted archer. When trying to shoot an arrow at a stationary target under no pressure, she missed, because the dice said so.

Okay this could have been explained away by a sudden gust of wind or that the bowstring broke, but her complaint was that it wasn't very realistic and didn't make for good story. She suggested she'd like to play a system where she got to decide whether she was sucessful or not. To most D&D fans this would seem crazy. Why would you ever choose to miss? Bel's point was that it would be to make good story.

I haven't seen all the pen and paper systems out there but there are very few I've seen that have diceless options. So the idea of coming up with a system that allowed trusting players to come develop the story they saw fit to was definitely intriguing. I'm a big fan of dice in these games, I like an element of randomness to keep things in check but I guess different people like different things in this case.

I'll write more on this in another post later. In the meantime I plan to have a think about how a good diceless Pen & Paper might work.

Till next time...