Anyone else ever done it?

One of my best all-time DM experiences was giving players descriptive sheets, equipment lists, and nothing else. Some of the players were newbies and some were old hands like me. One guy who was in that game came up to me a decade later, told me about this long, involved, wonderful political game he played in that lasted several years, and capped it off with: I finally played in a game that was better than that one you ran.

What attracted me to doing this was that I tend to hate players fiddling with the fucking rules and mechanics during play. I tend to want them to just visualize their character and tell me what it does. I tend to view the rules as tools for helping people do that, and any time people start gaming the system, I get pissed off and want to bring down a +10 vorpal doomhammer on their heads. These are only tendencies, but they are things I have felt, even strongly, from time to time.

(For those interested, the system behind the screen was a lightly house-ruled version of mentzer basic D&D. I recommend doing this with a light system you know cold so there's as little slowdown behind the screen as possible.)

Players did roll their own dice generally for task resolution and in combat.

The goal was to give them nothing to think about but their characters and the setting, to make system disappear entirely by removing it from their grasp.

I enjoyed playing this way and think I may go back to it for the next game I run. Anyway, if anyone wants more details, to talk about how it works, or to share their own experiences, be my guest.

One thing some people ask me is why have a system at all if you're going to play this way. It provides what some latter-day literary critics like to call 'resistance'; the sense of the world/text as something which is not infinitely plastic in the face of the exploratory/interpretive will. Also, all the usual shit about not killing PCs by fiat, etc.

Damn.
Sounds close to how I run my GURPS game. We never stress over the rules and no one has ever been a dick about the rules.
 We sometimes curse a run of bad rolls on a set of dice - but the comedy value of that in some encounters is priceless.

-Ed C.

I did consider doing it once in the very early days, but I decided against it. For one, it was too much bookkeeping for me. For another, I eventually realised that I don't mind people trying to game the system.

As I've mentioned before, that's how the Finnish RPG Hiljaisuuden Vangit works by default. The players aren't even expected to know the system behind chargen: instead, they fill in in-game "surveillance reports" on their characters, the details of which are then translated into the mechanics by the GM.

I think is a perfect doable thing as long as the system doesn't put much of a burden on the GM (bookkeeping and complex rolls). I've had this experience as a player in CoC and it was great.

A lot of French gamers do this I understand, and one French rpg codified it in that only the GM had access to character sheets and rules, players just said what they did.

My main concern with it is that it increases my work as GM, and I tend to dislike anything which does that.  Other than that, I can see it could work well.

I had a control freak DM for 2e who, in addition to making us track XP down to the hundredth, also did most of the die rolls and kept track of our hit points secretly behind a DM screen.

I think we rolled for damage, but that was about it.  Never for to-hit, since that might reveal the creature's armor class.

Yup, we have no idea how many hit points we had left, only the relative degree to which we were wounded.

I found that this really did not improve my immersion or enjoyment.

-O

I see the advantages, but I'm far too lazy a GM to try this method for anything but the lightest or best known systems.  I could do Basic D&D or Risus, and maybe FASERIP Marvel or Classic Traveller.  Not much else.  Still, those are 4 of my favorite games, so I could do it if I really wanted to.

This is, essentially, how I'm thinking of running a childrens game. Let them describe what kind of character they want to be, translate that into game terms behind the scenes, and then let them adventure.

Their interest in the rules will come later, if at all. They do't care about "XP" or "Cure Light Wounds." They just want to play with some arbiter of rules.

Though in writing this, I can see my son wanting to write down and track everything. Must run in the blood....

I tried it with a pbem D6 Star Wars game.  Players knew what they were really good at, good at, fair at, and suck at as well as their personality.  I'd give descriptions of damage and such - no mechanics or numbers were mentioned to them.  

It was kinda fun to get a new mindset.  You don't have things like the standard D&D situation of someone collapsing on the ground but no one rushing to their aid since they're only at -2 and have several rounds left.  Players do thing differently if they don't know for sure if they could survive another hit.

But it's too much work for me to attempt it in a face to face game.

Ish! Too much work! I could certainly run all my games this way, but I'd never want to...

-clash

This kind of game can be tricky. It can work marvelously if done right, but there is plenty of room for things to go badly with this setup.

It mostly hinges on how good the GM is at communication. Since the players can't see "oh I have 3 hp left" or "hey look, my skill bonus for fighting with a bow is almost twice that of my sword fighting skill" the GM has to be able to give them an accurate idea of these relationships, Otherwise the player's idea of what their character is good at or how close to death they are could be very different from the character sheet, leading to confusion and frustration.

If the GM does a good job of comunicating these things to the players than it can be a lot of fun.

These responses are all pretty much on track with my experiences. I wouldn't do this with a rules-heavy or even -medium system, and I agree that the GM needs to communicate well about details descriptively to make it work. That has sometimes been a strong suit of mine though.

I wanted the experience of play to be as much like the experience of reading a fantasy book as possible, with the addition that you 'author' scenes through the action of your character, with whom I wanted the players to be imaginatively identified.

I think my playstyle in general pushes traditional RPGing in the direction of 'narrativist' play, but I tend to not be willing to compromise player identification with character and immersion in the setting. I guess I have a certain idea of what I like my players to be doing which fits well with system- and stat-blind play, at least in some cases. I do think this produces or can produce a significant sense of 'player authorship', so long as the actions characters take in the imaginary environment have meaningful effects on that environment, but it is a more limited kind of authorship than you get in a game like Universalis or the Pool or Hero's Banner. Or more limited in the short term anyway, long term issues are more complicated and nobody in the traditional design or Forge communities understands them very well AFAICT. If anyone wants to bug me about that please start a new thread, I'll reply, let's leave this one for system-blind play.

As with some LARP approaches, I do think this kind of tabletop play can really strongly facilitate the satisfactions of immersion and role-playing, which I personally get a lot out of.

I do the exact opposite each week!

Seanchai

Out of curiosity, what do you see as 'the exact opposite'? For me the exact opposite would be something like Go or Checkers. Do you just mean you think about system stuff a lot while you play?