Diceless RPing

SideAffects

Anyone have any good websites or recommendations for how to conduct great diceless RPing games? Things I can do with friends online, through Vent, Skype, etc. or even in person.

Tach

My friends and I used to do that- we had several good campaigns in different genres playing without dice.

The most important things, that I've found anyways, are:

1- know your subject matter. We did a Star Trek game- most of us were Trek nerds at one time or another, so we knew the universe, and the basic feel of things.

2- whomever is running it needs to be flexable, and a good storyteller. Sometimes, especially in battles or fights, things go south quickly unless the GM knows how to think on his/her feet- the story needs to adjust to player actions, not the other way around. Forcing stuff on to the players always makes them feel cheated.

3- Don't be afraid to do "pick a number from 1-10" to settle things like skill checks now and then. A bit of randomness does help.

4- If you have established rules, make sure everyone knows what they are, and follows them. Nothing is harder than if someone all of a sudden decides that they know how to shoot a crossbow, when they've been using a mace the whole time.

Don't know of too many online resources, but that's my personal advice for you. Good luck!

pogo mudder

get your buddys on hamatchi and fire up a multiplayer game of baldurs gate 2, you can pick it up nowadays for like 5 quid, and its definately worth playing with your friends if you haven't before

Evil Multifarious

a fun thing to do that's a lot of work is have every player's actions and words go through you, and you post them in a thread or email or something, so that the characters don't know who's a PC and who's an NPC.

this is great for a murder mystery kind of situation.

TrippyJing

Are you excluding any sort of number generator?

Scooter

If you're discounting dice because it's online, you can always use IRC dicebots or Invisible Castle.

Cruix

I did this a lot when I was younger. First in chatrooms with friends and others, and then later on I started a message board based RP. There are only really a couple of things you need to know if you want to do this.

If you're played D&D or other RPG systems using dice, you don't need to think about those things at all to be having a great time. Don't worry about stats for strength, defense, etc. You won't need any of that. There are a couple of ways to go about this, if you want to play a game in a world you made up, you should write up some things about your world for your players to read.

Above all, this kind of thing should be very fluid and very fun. It's not about how much damage your character does to the big bad guy, it's about what works to make the story entertaining. The fun thing about a diceless system is that you aren't constrained by anything and can really find the most entertaining ways to work through a story.

The best thing I can tell you if you're going to be running the game (and running a game in this kind of RP really just means you need to be controlling the interesting things going on, "Suddenly, there's an earthquake and .. ") these things should ultimately be about the characters in them. There should always be a story going on, but the fun in this kind of RP is the character stories in them. Everyone should have a good idea of who their character is before you start, and then you'll have a great time just letting everyone interact while the story progresses. A lot of drama will unfold from just this, if everyone is into it.

If you want to be strict about characters not being too powerful, knowing everything, etc., just specify that you want a lot of details in their backgrounds. As long as they can realistically explain why their character knows what they do, why they're trained in whatever they are, there shouldn't really be an issue.

Your biggest issue is going to be making sure everyone is just in it to have fun. It's almost impossible to run such a ruleless game with people who just want to be the most powerful character in the universe.

poshniallo

If you or your friends have ever read the books, there is a game called Amber Diceless RPG. It's an excellent game in it's own right, with the books flavour and the cleverness of the diceless mechanics.

If you haven't read the books, you should read them, and then go to the start of this post :P