Try Something New: Do Away With Dice
November 5, 2015 by dracs
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I love rolling bucket o’ dice.
The set of rules called ‘To the Strongest’ by Simon Miller for the historical ancient and early medieval periods use playing cards instead of dice. Great set of rules played on a grid so no measuring either. You can do large games in a few hours yet still feel the game played right. BOW should get Simon onto the show to review these rules.
When your one of the Dice Gods chosen, it would be had to give them up.
the only dice-less game I’ve played is Amber and that was interesting, but at the same time, it has problems, the following review I’ve found is quite accurate: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10408.phtml
A Game of Thrones (the boardgame) from FFG is a dice less game that is very, very good. In fact, it’s one of my all time favourite games.
Yes the Tides Of Battle system and the way you use heroes/army strength etc is a very good way of simulating the way battles happen on a harder scale.
BB guns. Set up army men in the back yard. You can only stand where your men are set up. If you can hit the enemy, you have hit the enemy. If you miss, well, you miss. Diceless combat resolution. 😀
We threw rocks on the poor green army men, the battles raged in the sandbox.
See, ROCKS are like mortar shells. Really big rocks for howitzers. Dad’s blowtorch for napalm. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh . . .
and lots of visits to the dollar stores for reinforcements?
🙂
i have found systems where you roll a single die, especially D20 systems are horribly random. The best swordsman in the world misses a stationary I defended target 5% of the time (natural 1) and the worst swordsman in the world scores a hit on the best skilled and defended opponent 5% of the time as well. The easiest way to fix this is by rolling multiple dice per action/check. The more dice the better the probability will conform to the bell curve. The tricky part is finding a good balance between simple/fast rolling and balanced/complex rolling. As far as… Read more »
Dice less randomizers are something intriguing, I am experimenting with the idea two year now, its more difficult and intriguing that one can first see and trying to figure out how to make a system fit your needs needs some finesse in design.
I would point out to euro boardgames for some practical appliances of dice less systems.
Jenga is a nice mention, taking the randomisers altogether and putting dexterity in, like the disk flicking games.
I’m sorry but this is just plan blasphemy. Shame! 😛
Of course on a serious note the card mechanic can be fun but reality is game systems work well with dice involved on some level. Life is random probability which is a reason dice are a core chance mechanic. You can tailor the probability factor quite accurately just by changing the amount and type of dice.
Always fun to change things up now and then and if a diceless game suits you, all good. 🙂
Actually the card randomizer is just one and the deck of cards is the worse or laziest implementation of the deck randomizer in my opinion.
There are many ways to randomize your system before you go to the equally valid, deterministic combat, without using cards as a mechanism.
Try Horus Heresy by FFG, lovely bit o diceless fun.
I’ve only played Horus Heresy once. I played Imperium and had to wait almost two hours (setup + Chaos turn) before I got to do anything, then had very limited options before passing back to the Chaos player. My experience of the game was not favourable and I doubt very much I will ever play again!
Relic Knights comes to mind when I think of a Dice less game.
Likewise 🙂
The Marvel SAGA system, with cards. Nobilis. Amber DRPG. FATE with the Fate deck instead of Fate dice. And so on, and so forth… 🙂
I enjoy my dice but It’s fine to get out some cards or some other randomiser. Due to my RPG past I’m more of a polyhedral chap than huge handfuls of D6 40K style but it’s always nice to come back and chuck them around.
Reminds me of Hackmaster which always made me laugh with its convoluted dice warm-up rules and many other satires of old style AD&D.
I suspect along with rather a lot of us I have way too many “rolling randomisers”. 😎
There are many good compute rmoderated rules out there that don’t use dice
Best diceless skirmisher i know is Freebooters Fate (its more like poker, Guess what cards the other player holds).
Relic Knight is without dice too.
I have dice addiction can not do with out them
Are you insane? That’s based off the title, haven’t read the article yet.
that’s easy a coin toss 50/50 or as other posts say cards with face cards being special events? good and/or bad.
I have tried diceless gaming before, using cards can be good especially if you are aloud to build a hand up so you can choose where you do not so well. But I think Action points, or Houses of the Blooded style systems are just better. Where instead of replacing dice rolls you allow yourselves outs to bad dice rolls or you choose if you succeed or fail. I know choosing to fail is a new concept for a lot of people but I recommend looking up John Wick gaming he has a youtube channel, he shoots far less people… Read more »
Draw straws? or counters out of a bag kinda like bolt action you could set it up so that your “rolls” do actually even out over a match.
Why was this even a backstage thing it’s nothing great but
If you get rid of dice just log on to a computer instead, cards I found can be fun but all can be easy repulcated to have the actual connection tho dice what get you drawn in and loving to paint
At the minute I’m a player character in the Malifaux RPG, through the breach which uses the deck system. The thing that I’ve really noticed is that cards aren’t random, the probability if drawing a card changes as the pack is used up. This can be good or bad. In the last session we played the black joker (catastrophic fail) hadn’t come out all night. This started everyone building up the anticipation of it turning up. This is fine for Malifaux where that kind of demented paranoia is an intrinsic part of the game, but not sure it would work… Read more »
I too enjoy buckets of dice although I also enjoy card driven games such as Malifaux. I don’t understand the reasoning for tablet based strategy games where the dice rolls are performed ‘under the table’ as it were. I think it’s a good thing to explore different systems to create random outcomes but I’m sticking to my dice for the time being