[Help] How to introduce players to diceless gaming?

[Maese Mateo]

I recently backed Lords of Gossamer & Shadow since it looks like a very interesting product. Problem is, neither me nor my players have any previous experience with diceless gaming.

What sort of advice can you give me to sell diceless gaming to my players or tu run diceless games in general?

Thanks.

[Panjumanju]

The advice Erick Wujcik gives in the Amber Diceless Roleplaying book is pretty comprehensive. It boils down to this: you have *already* been doing diceless gaming. There are lots of times when breaking out dice to decide something would make it more arbitrary and less meaningful. And for the GM, an author in a book does not need dice to tell them what happens next, why should you? Events follow as a matter of course and consequence.

Diceless selling points:
* Fast paced.
* Players don't need to know the rules, just know their characters.
* You don't have to break your back bringing chainmail dicebags and heavy books to game!
* It's easy for the GM to run (although a real pain to prepare.)

//Panjumanju

[Artifacts of Amber]

Panjumanju Hits most the hi points.

I also sold my new amber game to players use to dice by allowing them a lot of the universe creation. When they asked questions aboutthings that didn't really matter I threw the answer back at them and let them be the creators. I'm not sure how Lords of Gossamer & Shadow would handle that but In amber it fits the Genre. No more need for the GM to define every nook and cranny of the world. My players enjoythat aspect.

It will / does take time to becoem use to the format so explaining a lot of things with examples helps I think. My players are now starting to get/recognize where they sit in the rankings of stats and I  provide examples of what could effect those ranks so they know even someone you can't out sword fight now may be weakened so they can to prevent them from feeling outclassed.

To be honest the best thing is to just start running a game. I had a lot of difficulty selling the game but luckily my players trusted me as I have run for most of them a number of years. So now they are enjoying it even though the never did anything quite like it before.

I love it as it has very little prep for everyone , and since I run two other games in the same week I need that no  prep sort of game. All my prep is more thinking about t he game which I can do most any place when I have a free moment.

[Croaker]

The good points...

There are no rules to learn or interpret. This is huge.
For exemple, I'm also in love with Ars Magica (a great game!), but we keep having rules disputes on the forums, and I've seen numerous times people argue about parsing of a sentence. You'll never see that in a diceless game, nor will you forget a rule that would have applied to the situation.
So yes, this means it is pretty fast-paced. You won't spend 15 minutes for 5 players to shoot an arrow at a deer, until one lost patience and fried it with a lvl 50 lightning blast (real-life experience of rolemaster)

No randomness. You see, players often see the dice as their friend, allowing them to do things they couldn't have done otherwise. But it is a treacherous friend, and being at the litteral mercy of a bad fumble can be distasteful. When you can do something, you can do it, period.
This also means that you don't get dumb results like a character punching a dragon to death just because he had an insane exploding roll.
Although this is less and less true (god bless), this also applies to character creation: You won't have a character who's stats are all spread between 9 and 12 when your pal has nothing under 16.

=> Players have control, both at chargen and ingame.

How to run it? Like you run any other game. The only difference is that, when you'd have called for a dice roll, you just ask yourself if the PC can do it or not.
This is not as hard as it looks: You're already doing this! For exemple, let's say a PC wants to climb a glass wall. In another game, you'd have set the difficulty to "impossible (30)", and have made him roll 2d6+5 to try to beat it. In a diceless game, you just say "it's impossible". And you don't have to worry to explain how he might have succeeded at this should he roll some critical success.

But really, don't worry: I'm sure LoGaS will have some great advices in how to do it. You can also buy the Amber pdf, it has some great exemples of play, and pretty good advices, too (notwhistanding the fact that it's one of my 2 favourite games )

[jibbajibba]

Amber has a second big hole, which LoGS might resolve. Because the skill system come down to I used to work as a computer programmer so I use that skill to hack into the mainframe leaving the GM a bit confused round difficulties of that sort of thing and relative skills I put a skill system in.
Stiill diceless basically compare your skill to the difficulty or to the opponent and highest wins.
Amber defaults a lot of these sorts of things to a warfare comparision which is a deal breaker for me. This actually helps players used to dice as it lets them try out the resolution mechanic in a realtive safe way, as oppoed to a mind due or a duel to the death. If they get how you can use skill, and stamina in a horse race they will likely see how you can do it in a combat and when the opponent switches it to psyche by taking over the mind of your horse you will start to see how the 4 core attributes interact.
As I say LOGS may not have this concern.

[Maese Mateo]

Thanks for all the advice, guys! I feel a little bit more confident about running a diceless game now.

Can't wait to see the finished LoG&S pdf to run a game (the only thing I don't know is if I'm going to use the default setting or Planescape, well see).

@jibbajibba: you can download a preview PDF (around 10 pages) for LoG&S that cover character creation. Maybe you can check it to see if the problem you talk about is still there.

[finarvyn]

Some of my players had a tough time figuring out how diceless works in practice, so I like to give them a situation to see what they do with it.

Imagine that you're in a tavern and some guy shoves you. What do you do?

Hopefully, they will ask basic questions such as "how big is the guy?" or "how tough does he look?" instead of saying "how many hit dice is this guy?"

Maybe the player decides to take a swing at the ruffian. At this point you tell him whether the guy is knocked flat, shook off the blow without noticing, or somewhere in between. Then it comes back to: What do you do?

That's the key. Focus the discussion on what you see and do rather than what numbers are out there. You pose a situation, they ask questions and react. You adjust the situation, they ask questions and react. And so on.

The GM has some numbers to look at, of course, but basically my players don't think about or discuss numbers once character generation is done. The GM can decide if the conflict deals with weapons (Warfare) or athleticism (Strength) or is a battle of the mind (Psyche). The GM can then look at the numbers and decide if they are close or not, and how this affects the situation. If numbers are close and the confrontation drags out for a long time, Endurance takes over.

But the players don't need to know most of this stuff. All they need to do is listen, ask, and react.

[Tolknor]

What sort of advice can you give me to sell diceless gaming to my players or to run diceless games in general?

Thanks.

The others have hit the high points.   So i'll toss a few thoughts in!

When i started getting my first Amber game together i talked to the players who were going to be in the game about the difference between hack and slash gaming and role playing.    Most were Amber fans, so we talked about the amber books as a game and the game as a book.  Its stories rather then mathematics.    

There were a 2 rules i had to set up when we started playing.   Hard ones since at the time i was running a game store and we often played there.  

No dice within arm's reach.  (Except my single red casino die that was for fiddling with not solving situations)  

No character sheets in front of them while the game was afoot.  They could have a game log with what items they had and other stuff but nothing with the statistics on it!  This was to keep them from fixating on numbers. +2 sword, +5 shield.  12 to hit.    +3 sword of slaying.  32 Strength.  41 Warfare.    Instead they could have a list like Shield, sword, 4 daggers, bow with 6 arrows, 9mm auto with 13 shots and 1 in the chamber.  

---------

I encouraged the players to consider what their characters wore.   They found out fast that knowing if their character was wearing sandals or engineer boots could make a big difference.  Just because a character was raised in ancient Rome didn't mean he would go into a Vietnamese jungle without combat boots.    

Character quizzes were key.   I often asked questions of the players.  Made sort of a game of it.   I'd ask questions when i wasn't running the game, during other activities.  "What song does Lyta hum when she's distracted?"  "What does Vance collect?  Matchbooks? baseball? hotel soap?  Fine Art?"  "What kind of pocket-change does Truman carry?" "Does Maura have a hobby?"

I also let the players ask me similar questions about the NPCs.   Nothing critical, but information can be power.  "Does Bleys collect anything?-Yes, string instruments and single malt scotch."  "Does Caine have a nervous tic?-Yes, he sometime flips a dagger one-handed"  "Does Random have a Poker tell?- No, but he knows everyone else's tell"  "What's Flora's favorite resteraunt in the City of amber?-Gustino's on the Grand Promenade."  The answers were usually given as "Rumor has it that Bleys collects stringed instruments", " The Amber Guardsman at the East gate said he sees Caine flipping a dagger whenever he's inspecting the Amber Horse Guard"   Its a nice game to keep a GM on his toes too.   Also it meant a player now had information that other players might not.

In both of the two question things the answers sometimes led to adventure!

[Lord Darkview]

Hey Maese Mateo, long time, no see.  It looks like LoGaS drew both of our interest.

I'm going to sell LoGaS to my circle based less on the "diceless" element and more of the "ease of learning and play" element, because Nobilis showed them that diceless does not mean easy.  If LoGaS ends up looking anything like ADRPG, it is completely possible for a game to run smoothly regardless of whether each player knows all the rules, none of the rules, or anywhere in between.  THAT is a selling point that very few other games can claim, regardless of the use of dice.

[Maese Mateo]

Hey Maese Mateo, long time, no see.  It looks like LoGaS drew both of our interest.

Hey! :cool:

I'm going to sell LoGaS to my circle based less on the "diceless" element and more of the "ease of learning and play" element, because Nobilis showed them that diceless does not mean easy.  If LoGaS ends up looking anything like ADRPG, it is completely possible for a game to run smoothly regardless of whether each player knows all the rules, none of the rules, or anywhere in between.  THAT is a selling point that very few other games can claim, regardless of the use of dice.

Considering how lazy my friends can be about learning rules, "easy to learn" seems like a good selling point to them. I'll have that in mind.

[RPGPundit]

The advice Erick Wujcik gives in the Amber Diceless Roleplaying book is pretty comprehensive. It boils down to this: you have *already* been doing diceless gaming.

This is an essential point. A lot of gamers who've never tried diceless assume its somehow going to be a way more alien experience than it is in actual play.

[Evermasterx]

We played Everway, which is a good start. It is not diceless (in Erick definition) because it uses a deck of tarot like cards (rule of Fortune), but the GM can use the rule of Drama (it's good for the story) intead of the deck, or the rule of Karma (superior stat/power) as in Amber. The rules are light and can be learned in half an hour.
I found that starting from that rewarding experience was an easy way to reach Amber... through the Shadows, of course .

[RPGPundit]

Everway is a good game; but I don't really see a reason why it needs to be a "gateway drug" to Amber.  All you have to do is get your players to agree to play ONE session of the game. After that, they'll know how it runs, and odds are they'll be cool with it.  Its always worked that way for me.