I’m curious about this game, but I am wary because I hear the GM doesn’t use dice. Is this true? I love my dice. I like using them.
I’m curious about this game, but I am wary because I hear the GM doesn’t use dice.
I’m curious about this game, but I am wary because I hear the GM doesn’t use dice.
It’s a pretty player-driven game in that the players roll the dice and you adjudicate what’s going on. Sort of. It’s largely cooperative after all.
Really the only reason you’d even need to touch your dice would to be to roll damage, but even that can easily be passed off to the players. (Then they have someone else to blame if they roll well!)
I can kind of get behind that. It wouldn’t be my first GM-lite indie game. I just really like chucking dice. :-\
I feel your pain, and I thought the same thing… Until the first time I made a player, with their failed action, roll damage against another player… Wow. Venom in the eyes and everything. Try it out. It’s actually more freeing for me.
Michael R give in to your curiosity! What do you have to lose?
You really don’t need to roll dice. I mean, it’s fun and stuff, but it’s actually pretty great to be able to stay eyes-on with the players instead of looking things up and consulting your roll results.
Adam Koebel I think you’re missing the point. It’s not about need. I want to roll dice. 🙂
Pavel Berlin But what about my d20s?
What’s stopping you from using your d20 as a damage die?
You can place it out on the table and use it like Nixon used a B-52, to demonstrate to the players what a crazy mofo you are.
I like your style, John Zo.
Technically, it’s against the rules for the GM to roll damage, unless the cowardly player specifically asks for it.
“Most damage is based on a die roll. When a player takes damage, tell them what to roll. You never need to touch the dice. If the player is too cowardly to find out their own fate, they can ask another player to roll for them.”
Huh. Sounds like I’ll be house ruling the heck out of some stuff if I do run this.
But, we’ll see.
Michael R try to understand and play the game as written before you hack it. There are things that are important and things that are less important, differentiating them requires having seen them in motion!
Michael R I’m like you Michael. Well, I was like you. Since a few sessions with my kids I’m not throwing dice anymore. And… it’s cool…
I mean , no withdrawal symptoms, no hallucinations, no delirium tremens, it just … happend…
That’s fair. And it’s what I usually do. I’m exploring alternatives to D&D while I wait for 5e, but each system I’ve explored so far tweaks with things I enjoy somehow.
DW is not gm-lite. If anything, it’s pretty heavy on DM.
Michael R I have been there – I fell off the train at 4e. Be aware that moving all the way over to a semi-story game like DW may be too big a shift for you and your players at first. Try something a little more trad first, like Savage Worlds for instance. This is comment based on own experience not any kind of judgement. DW is a favorite of mine, but it is a very different style of GMing which happens to fit my personal approach.
The great thing is that you don’t have to give up other games to play DW. So, no need to give up dice rolling altogether. Also, just to clear things up, DW is in now way GM lite. The GM has power.
James R You don’t have to give up, sure, but it’s getting harder for me as time goes by.
World of Dungeons has something called the Die of Fate. If you want to make something up to chance, you can roll a d6: low is bad, high is good. I use the HELL out of the die of fate even in ‘core’ Dungeon World.
Also, there are tables to roll on occasionally. I get a huge kick out of rolling up a random NPC with a percentile dice check on the Knacks and Instincts lists. When one of the players goes looking for some not-yet-established artisan or sage or whatever, it’s like I get a little unbirthday present with those couple of die rolls.
And Michael R, it’s not really GM lite. It’s fairly GM intensive. Its prep lite but your skills are needed at every turn.
So I’ve been thinking about this a lot! Note, Michael, I really dig the games I have been running for DW and ideas I have aren’t reflecting what I think DW lacks, I think it’s spot on, rather a different way to think about what DW delivers.
Please forgive the long winded response but I wanted to note I ran Apocalypse World wrong and it took running Dungeon World to understand the dynamics at large. Not knowing you I can’t make any assumptions other than the friendly advice of : this is not like gaming you have done before (unless you have successfully run Apocalypse Engine games or possibly a horde of its predecessors like The Mountain Witch, In A Wicked Age, Lady Black Bird, etc). Sit back and relearn how to GM again. It’s refreshing 🙂
I’ve been thinking about a mechanic that allows one element of a Front a set of moves that require rolls. It really is meant to drive things in less deterministic ways (sure the GM can do love letters to players, etc, but as Michael points out, it’s fun to roll dice and its a means to have some of the GMs prep manifest in front of the players (including Interference etc). More on my own post later, I suppose.
Finally, have you tried Burning Wheel? 😀
I guess you could play instead of DMing…
If you really enjoy rolling dice as a GM, run a game using the Savage Worlds RPG system. The exploding dice {Aces} make it a crazy, wild game engine for all genres.