TF Views

Dominic wrote: Dom
-amazed Honey Bears trusts me at all....

Who says I do?

In all seriousness, I'm hoping this style of play doesn't require hours and hours of attention and micro-management, what with me moving house and looking for new work soon.

Gomess wrote:In all seriousness, I'm hoping this style of play doesn't require hours and hours of attention and micro-management, what with me moving house and looking for new work soon.

It doesn't. Not once the rules are in place. All the micro-management and most of the attention is the DM's job.

Dice rolls can also be used to determine whether or not you notice things in the setting. Like if you walking through a corridor missing a dice roll on something like an observation check means that you failed to notice the enemy minicon trying to disguise itself as a light fixture. Or something. It would basically go something like this:

Gomess: I'm walking down the corridor.
Dom: Roll a D20 (20 sided dice)
Gomess: 16
Dom: As you're strolling through the corridor you notice a light fixture that wasn't there before. What do you do?
Gomess: Is it portable? Can I move it?
Dom: Yes.
Gomess: I'll take it with me to the bridge and have Perceptor have a look at it.

Wait, wait, surely I have to suggest to Dom that I'd want to take a cursory glance at my surroundings? Wouldn't it be a bit much for him to tell us to roll a... 20-sided die?! jesus! to roll a die every time one of us walks down a corridor?

Gomess wrote:Wait, wait, surely I have to suggest to Dom that I'd want to take a cursory glance at my surroundings? Wouldn't it be a bit much for him to tell us to roll a... 20-sided die?! jesus! to roll a die every time one of us walks down a corridor?

Not necessarily, because it's assumed that you're already looking at your surroundings. The dice roll is to determine how much attention you're paying, and is generally only used when there IS something unusual to notice. If there was nothing worth paying attention to, there would be no dice roll, and you'd just walk down the corridor.

Spoony tells a tale of a DM who ran an old Alice In Wonderland-themed adventure where the Cheshire Cat was using a charm spell on them. He just talked to the players and rolled a dice casually, when in reality he was just rolling to see if they were strong enough to break it. (Spoony caught on and cast countersong, which any Bard can use without failing or dice checks, apparently.

...I'm just gonna have to see some of this stuff in action, I think. Can my character come in later than the rest or something? =/

Onslaught Six wrote:Spoony tells a tale of a DM who ran an old Alice In Wonderland-themed adventure where the Cheshire Cat was using a charm spell on them. He just talked to the players and rolled a dice casually, when in reality he was just rolling to see if they were strong enough to break it. (Spoony caught on and cast countersong, which any Bard can use without failing or dice checks, apparently.

That's really neat.

Doing things in this strict sense like this helps avoid character arguments. For example, if Dom says, "You walk into a room," and you say, "I walk forward," and Dom says, "There's a trapdoor there, you fall and die," you might say, "That's fucking bullshit, my character is smart enough to have seen the trapdoor."

The way it would work in this case is Dom might say, "You walk into a room, and there's something here to be suspicious of, so roll to see if you notice it." Then your Intelligence rating (or something) would determine how many dice (or how many sides) you roll. (The differences between these bits are very important depending on the gaming system; there are entire subsects of Dungeons & Dragons dedicated to using different numbered and sided dice. Paranoia and many other West End RPGs, for example, were all dedicated to using regular household D6 exclusively.) For sake of argument, let's say you roll a 20-sided dice and your Intelligence is 10, you need to roll more than a 10 on the 20-sided dice to pass the check. If you roll a 9, you don't see the trap and fall and die. If you roll an 11 or a 15 or a 12, you see it and can avoid it. This way you can't say, "Bullshit, my guy would have seen that." No, he wouldn't have--and the dice proved it.