Ahem... Erick's Forge Adventure?

[RPGPundit]

Hey Erick,

Care to give us the story about how this article came to exist?

RPGPundit

[Blackleaf]

"Dice and Diceless: One Designer's Radical Opinion"

Yeah... pretty radical stuff. :rolleyes:

[RPGPundit]

Its a pretty radical rebuttal of the standard Forge pov; though whether that was what Erick intended or not is unclear to me.

RPGPundit

[Blackleaf]

His points are basically:

• Games with dice involve more than rolling dice.
• Only games without dice don't have dice in them.

What am I missing?

[Croaker]

3. Games with dice are no better or worse than diceless ones, just different.

[Erick Wujcik]

Care to give us the story about how this article came to exist?

I was reading a few postings about diceless role-playing which seemed based on the assumption that diceless role-playing was somehow a different kind of role-playing than otherwise. Not just in terms of the flavor of the game, or in terms of various techniques and systems, but in the core nature of how diceless games were to be played.

Since I disagreed, I wrote the article, wherein I tried to get across:

1. All role-playing games are dominated by 'diceless' resolutions. In other words, if you rolled dice for everything that might have a random outcome, you'd never get around to having any fun. Therefore, any role-playing is, mostly, a diceless activity.

2. Dice-rolling, or any other random event resolution, is really a relatively rare activity in role-playing. When done well (as in the case of most successful RPGs), dice are applied only when the results have an interesting impact on the progress of events.

3. Any dice-based role-playing mechanism dependent on dice can be replaced by other, non-random number generating mechanisms. In fact, from one RPG to another, it's possible to find replacements for every dice mechanic.

In the years since 1985, when I ran my first diceless campaign, I've run countless other games, many based on published systems, others of my own design, without using dice. I won't say that running without dice is necessarily more fun, or better, but I will claim that the players generally didn't miss the dice, found their adventures just as chaotic and bizarre (real randomness, I've discovered, is the result of two or more role-players interacting), and didn't feel that the experience was at all different.

I'd say the article was successful. At least to the extent that, as far as I know, none of the contents were ever contested.

Erick

[RPGPundit]

I have to say that it was easily the best thing I ever read on the Forge. Of course, that's not exactly a high standard to set it against.

But no, the article was quite good; I was more curious about what brought you to post it on the Forge in the first place; and whether it was something you did as a rebuttal to the theorists, or whether you approved of what the Forge was doing, and if so whether that had changed since the time you wrote that article.

RPGPundit

[JongWK]

(real randomness, I've discovered, is the result of two or more role-players interacting)

I agree with this. No GM plot survives contact with the PCs. :keke:

[Trevelyan]

I feel a little sorry for Pundit. Finding that Erick has an article published over at the Forge must be like a right wing Christian discovering that the minister at his local church spends his saturday nights dressed in black robes and listening to the Beatles played backwards.

[RPGPundit]

I feel a little sorry for Pundit. Finding that Erick has an article published over at the Forge must be like a right wing Christian discovering that the minister at his local church spends his saturday nights dressed in black robes and listening to the Beatles played backwards.

Hardly; it was a little more like trying to find out why a fellow freethinker would have gone to a Creationism website; but when it was clear that it was in order to offer a rebuttal to their dogmatic beliefs, well, that clears it up, doesn't it?

RPGPundit

[Croaker]

I don't understand this.
What is the Forge supposed to stand for???
Aside from Terres de Magie (the custom-made bullshit whose sole author and GM almost disgusted me of rpgs after years of gaming), I fail to see what could suscitate such hate in a RPGer world

[Trevelyan]

Hardly; it was a little more like trying to find out why a fellow freethinker would have gone to a Creationism website; but when it was clear that it was in order to offer a rebuttal to their dogmatic beliefs, well, that clears it up, doesn't it?

RPGPundit

Dashed nice of those "creationists" not only to entertain the free thinker's point of view, but also to continue to display it years after the fact.

You'd almost think that some of those "creationists" weren't so tied to their "dogmatic beliefs" as you like to presume.

[Croaker]

Euh... That's well and good, but what are the forge's supposed dogmatic beliefs?

As far as I see, it's just a forum dedicated to RPGs, mostly independant ones (whatever this may be), I'm rather at a loss.

[RPGPundit]

Euh... That's well and good, but what are the forge's supposed dogmatic beliefs?

There's quite a number.

1. The most fundamental: that RPGs must be focused into one of three types: Gamist (where the game is about mechanical competition between the players and "winning", not roleplaying; most of them believe D&D is/should be a "gamist" game), Narrativist (the only really cool option of the three and what they subtly suggest is the actual "right" kind of play, which is mostly pretentious story-gaming where you "address premise" a lot), or Simulationist (anything they don't like but can't lump into gamist). Any game that tries to combine elements of this is "incoherent" and will be horrible.

2. Most regular RPGs do exactly that, and are therefore terrible. The Forge justifies the fact that these games (like D&D or Vampire) are popular by claiming that most roleplayers are in fact "secretly miserable", lying to themselves and others either intentionally or unconsciously.

3. Forgies believe that games, in order to hold to one solid "creative agenda" must have very strictly-defined rules that govern almost every action of significance; things should never be left up to GM fiat, and any game that does that (like Amber does) will be "Poorly designed".

4. Forgies generally believe in "creating story", and that to do this in a way that "empowers players" means stripping the GM of any authority and power, leaving him as nothing more than a strict facilitator of the rules with no personal authority (like the banker in Monopoly). Hence, the opposite of what Amber does.

5. The forgies hold as one of their dogmas that "immersion" (the idea of getting into your character) as a goal in roleplaying is false. They claim that "Immersion" doesn't actually exist, its impossible to achieve it, and that if you could achieve it it'd be mentally unhealthy, and that people who think that "immersion" is the main point of roleplaying (ie. most roleplayers) are either profoundly ignorant, mentally ill, evil, or all three.

Those are just a handful of the main ones. But you can see how a game like Amber, which is from their point of view incoherent, GM-tyrannical, player disempowering (to them!), and naturally leading to immersion; and yet is wildly more successful than anything they've ever come up with, and succeeds better at doing everything they claim to want to do than anything they've tried, would be a real sore spot to them.

RPGPundit

[Otha]

Wow.  Wrong on every single count.