[Design] Why random rolls?

[Curufea]

This is very true.  I'm a low-dice GM (which could be regarded as
odd, as I am GMing a Fantasy Hero campaign) - only because it slows
down the game.  As it is High Fantasy and the PCs are well above
average in their specialisations, I employ a HKAT (which I haven't
read, only played) style on most occasions.
That is - Unnamed NPCs or NPCs that aren't too important to the plot,
are fairly easily taken care of by the PCs, with little dicing
involved. 
Plot significant areas, peoples or occasions do require rolling.

I don't fudge dice for the simple reason that I like randomness and
hate guiding characters in plots.  If they kill my major NPC I was
hoping to have as an ongoing nemesis in the campaign (which they did)
- then I view it as an opportunity for me, as a GM to be creative and
come up with alternative plots.  
I'm a "Baron Munchausen"-type GM.

The closest I've come to guiding PCs in my game was having a prophet
turn up with knowledge they couldn't have obtained otherwise about
secrets/backgrounds, and dire predictions for the future.  The PCs
were still completely free to ignore the prophecies.  Although the
main reason I introduced this was to stimulate more possibilities for
character-based plots, and to annoy those that hate prophecies :)

Simple pleasures...


--- Carl Brown <catodon at whale-mail.com> wrote:

> "the narrativist one is that adding an element of chance 
> can be a useful creative technique (which is a weaker argument than
> 
> the other two, hence the relative popularity of diceless techniques
> 
> in narrativist games like Amber or Puppetland)."
> I would hold that this is not weaker anyone with any visual arts
> training knows the value of random elements in creative processes.
> I personally hardly ever 'fudge' die rolls as a ref, instead the
> combination of player input and random elements enriches the
> narative beyond what is generally possible in other media.


Peter Cobcroft
curufea at yahoo.com
Main: http://www.curufea.com/


		
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