For a long time, I take it for granted that rolling dice is part of the RPG experience. They tell you whether you succeed at a task, gives the degree of success and add unpredictability and suspense to the game. In theory, during my games, I find that sometimes rolling dice becomes a grinding task.
Now most core rulebooks would suggest that to roll dice only when necessary. However, this is not in the formal rules – it is like more of a rule of thumb. In Spirit of the Century,t hough the game is lighter than most, dice-rolling takes up most game-play time. True, the Fudge dice roll will ensure that over a long period of time, you will get +0 most of the time but because a game usually involves less than a hundred rolls, you get unexpected results.
Then I played Nobilis. As a GM, I feel strangely…empowered…and at a loss. Last time, whenever the player tries to do something, I set a target number, or apply a penalty (depending whether it is roll and add, or roll-under) then you see the dice roll and decide whether it succeed. In Nobilis, you use miracles. But what happened when a player does not use any miracle at all and try to use social skills to resolve a situation? I was very tempted to make them roll dice – except that this being Nobilis, I didn’t bring any dice.
When it comes to a diceless games, things tend to be black and white – either your miracle (or points bidded) is enough to overcome the challenge, or not. But during the game, where the players are trying to use social means to resolve a problem, I feel it is unfair that I do not give them success, or even partial success, because they do not use any special powers. Plus, they put up a compelling argument. The spirit of the game of Nobilis, after all, is to avoid direct use of force and supernatural powers to get what you want. So I ruled in the party’s favour and have to drop a cinematic “powers unleashed” confrontation (though they did well, I grant them that).
With the dice, I could easily delegated that to random numbers. Part of the responsibility goes to the dice. Sure, GMing guidelines say the GM could ‘fudge’ dice rolls now and then, but that’s not the point. The dice also justifies. “You rolled too low dude, sorry, no game”. It helps the GM to make decisions. That I appreciate.
However, as mentioned upfront, dice-rolling can become a chore. So I would like games that have dice-rolling as an optional part of the game, used only in dramatic situation. Sure, Unknown Armies state that there is no need to roll most of the time, but somehow that doesn’t apply to conflict resolution (character vs. character), which makes up bulk of a game anyway.
So when thinking about Qitai, the characters being Wuxia characters and all that, it would also feel strange to make them roll dices for every actions. I am toying with something like Nobilis and still retain the Fate Points aspect of SoTC. Here is what I have in mind so far.
- If a player’s skill level is equal or higher than the challenge’s level, it is an automatic success.
- In case of automatic success, the player can still roll the Fudge dice for style or to get better results
- If the player’s skill level is lower than the challenge, he will have to spend Fate points to roll the dice. The only thing different is that it is a 4d+ – it is a 0,0,+1,+1,+1,+1 distribution.
- In a stress situation (conflicts), both side will roll the normal 4dF, though the player can still spend a Fate Point to roll 4d+
- The player can instead choose, while tagging an Aspect, to spend 1 Fate point for a +1, 3 Fate Points for a +2 and 6 Fate Points for a +3. Of course, for each +1 he needs to tag one Aspect (and the maximum Aspects he can tag is of course 3) – this is without the need to roll (a normal tag would still give a +2 bonus, but will require a roll)
Hopefully, this would reduce the number of dice rolls needed for the game (the spending of Fate Points to get a flat bonus is pretty much like Nobilis) and at the same time, when the GM needs guidance from the dice, he got it too.
