Will says a few things:

“How about an RPG involving magic where the success of the casted magic (in fact, the casting itself) relies not on the player rolling dice, but the player’s character rolling dice? This sort of breaks the fourth wall, but you could explain it away by making them need to be magical dice. Maybe the practitioners of such an art are called “dieslingers”. They could travel to the far reaches of the earth, righting wrongs in their own edgy, outcast way. This would probably end up being terribly tongue-in-cheek, but maybe that’s the point.”

Given the existence of things like Cardcaptors and Yu-Gi-Oh!, I think this would be accepted with a perfectly straight face by most of our demographic. By the same token, though, I’m not sure it’s enough to hang a game on. I think it could be cool as a Final Fantasy-style job / class; I may be thinking of FF Tactics’ “Calculator Mage” or whatever, but I like this better (and I think they were weak in implementation anyway). When I have a little more time I’m going to start a wiki for a group-design catchall RPG, and I think this would be neat to plug into it.

“What about a battling game where what dice you roll, and in what combinations, determines what kind of attacks you can throw at your opponent? There could be arithmetical modifiers depending on the situation which could allow you to multiply two results together or whatever to augment your attacks. You could keep track of that kind of thing with cards, but I don’t think the cards should dictate the attacks you could do - it would be the dice which had that control. Instead, you would have a set number of attacks you could do, but you would have to use dice rolls and interpretation thereof, in combination with the use of your limited modifier cards, to discover and make an attack.

The attack (or spell, or whatever) types themselves would be basically limitless - you might notice that you’ve rolled (amongst all your dice) your birthdate^2, so you use your Square Root modifier card to get your birthdate (in DDMMYYYY form), which allows you to take a modifier card at random from your opponent’s stack/deck/hand/whatever.”

I think this is awesome. Roll a big handful of dice and partition them however you want on a graph–columns for sums, rows for consecutive digits. Use them to activate the semi-fixed set of spells, homonculi and items you brought to the table, and both players draw from the same deck of number-mod cards. Once you’ve used a set of dice to power one of those spells / quasits / items, you put them back in your pool and reroll them. Or maybe you’re not allowed to reroll until you manage to use them (or draw the appropriate mod card)! That would be a powerful incentive to bring in a set of use cases that provides good coverage of your die results, but of course the rare ones would do the big damage. (Will, is this something like what you had in mind?)

Advantages: Combines game-opening resource management with in-game skill and luck. I imagine people who are good at Set would be good at this. Plus there’s a lot of good geeky number-crunching to be done.

Problem 1: Since I, at least, would be scared to spend dice hastily on a few Mild Fizzles and miss my chance at a Polyphemus Mono-Laser Ultrablast, I could see this game crawling along like bad Scrabble. How could we push mechanics that wouldn’t bog things down? Would using a chess timer be overkill?

Problem 2: What are the most interesting number sets to use here? “Your Birthday” and “Perfect Square” attacks are good, but is “Mersenne Prime” going too far afield? Or should we not worry about sets at all, including those two examples only as rare bonuses, and make most cards activate on “12 or 52″ or “Multipes of 5?”

Problem 3: And oh yeah, what kind of dice are you allowed to use? Do you spend cards to draw them from a common pool, or do you bring your own set? Hmm… do the dice you bring determine what attacks you’re allowed to bring, too? What are the limits? I think Kevan’s “x sides of dice” metric would work here, but it’d probably need to be closer to 100 sides.

Addendum: Just thought of something that could be cool–maybe in addition to cards and dice, each player has a fixed number of chips that he or she can bid in order to bring more dice into play from the pool. More bidding increases your power, but also increases the risk you take of losing it all at round’s end. The problem here is that one big bet could put you out of the game for good–it’d be hard to avoid victory / loss cycles after the first round. Anyone know a good way to combat that?

What I think would be cool is a game whose main mechanics are bluffing and diplomacy.

I mean, there are many fine games like Risk, in which diplomacy, making alliances and convincing people to war amongst themselves rather than with you, is absolutely crucial, and some variants of them even have special cards so you can bluff having “Death Mines” in your hand when you only have a shameful “Colony Influence,” but that bluffing is never really central to the game. And most heavy-bluffing games, such as poker or perudo or such, don’t really have much of an opportunity to engage in strategic alliances and such.

I’m thinking vaguely along the lines of Risk, except that instead of dice, you get a hand of five or seven cards or so. When determining if you take over a territory or not, the attacker and defender both play a card facedown, and simultaneously reveal them, high card winning.

This would allow for all the normal diplomacy of Risk, with much stronger bluffing elements. Are you attacking with a good card to try and take the territory over, or a weak card to get it out of your hand and get the other guy to waste an king? Has that guy, with only one card in his hand, wasted all his good cards, and thus only has a weak card, or has he been saving his best card all along just hoping someone would make that assumption? (I imagine redraws would occur only when you empty your hand)

Any thoughts? Or other ideas on how to make a completely different type game where both diplomacy and bluffing play a large factor?

It occurs to me that I haven’t really outlined any structure for this thing, and I should!

Here’s one neat way I think the Dispatch could work: Somebody posts a starter (eg the soupbone) via the submit story link over on the right. Those who like it comment with interesting directions it could go. If you agree that somebody else’s direction is interesting, you use the submission link to write up a treatment (eg the carrots): fill out the idea, give it some consideration, tell us why you think it’s cool and what’s still missing. Comment and post, iterate, iterate, iterate. If we feel like we’ve got something solid, we’ll wiki it! (Wiki coming soon.)

Of course, the comments are also useful for praise, criticism, table-talk and gossip, and the story-submission mechanic exists for links to material about collaboration, gaming or anything good and topical. I will be manually approving the stories submitted, but I don’t anticipate not doing so unless you’re talking about “this game wear ur all vampÿres & also manchester suxxs.” (Yes, go ahead and post this in the comments.) Finally, I’m aware that neither “soupbone” nor “carrot” is particularly graceful terminology; I see no reason why it couldn’t be different every time.

Is this an interesting model? In what directions could we take it?

Enabled per-comment hyperlinks, which should make things easier to follow. And to put them to good use…

Josh says:

“It’s an RPG, but the dice rolls themselves are arbitrary. On the middle of the table is a large target of concentric circles, and your performance is based on how near to the bullseye you get with your massive handfull of dice. Somehow managing to get all twenty of you d20 into the centre of the target (the size of a large coin, say) would probably destroy evil, all of it, with no saving throw.”

Kevan says:

“It’s marbles played with polyhedral dice - each player has a set of dice in their own colour, and they throw them into a circle to either knock opponents’ dice out, knock them onto different faces, or simply roll high scores in safe places. Whoever has the highest total values at the end is the winner.

Possibly some strategic dice-selection elements at the beginning, where lower-scoring D4s are more stable than D20s, but also less good at knocking other dice out. (Perhaps players start with 30 sides-worth of dice, of their choice.)”

Like I said in that thread, I think these are worth combining, under the mental tag of “tactile objects first, random numbers second.”

Here’s my pitch: Everybody brings his or her own set of dice; these dice must be all the same color, and that color must be unique in the group. When you roll, you have multiple objectives:

• Get a decent number.
• Knock a competing player’s high-scoring dice onto lower-scoring faces.
• Land your die in a more central ring, which means a higher multiplier or bonus.
• Knock a competing player’s dice out of those rings (or, alternately, help move a collaborating player’s dice further in).

I’m thinking maybe your effectiveness in the current situation, whatever that might be, is determined by your current-highest die / multiplier / bonus combination (rather than the sum of all your dice). This could help sharpen a players’ goals (”I regain control if I just knock out that one 8 in the second ring…”).

Advantages: Dice are fun to throw! Moreover, this would balance the old “randomness is king” RPG trope (and board game trope, for that matter) by making player skill a factor. The situation could be in constant flux as players pay [resource] to withdraw dice from the table, gamble more dice in an attempt to disable an opponent, et cetera.

Problem 1: As Kevan pointed out, the d4 would be a midget muscleman here–not a high scorer, but almost impossible to change faces. The d6 would have a similar advantage; you’d need something more unbalanced like the d8, d10 and d20 to get interesting rerolls. I’m inclined to suggest that this be played with the tubes of 10d10 that people buy for White Wolf games.

Problem 2: Anybody got a theme? Kevan’s “er, magically summoning demons into a chalk circle” is good, but why are we summoning demons? What are the consequences of failing your summoning (do they just poof, or escape and eat your pets)? Do the demons get to roll?

Probably some of you already saw this linked at Interconnected, but I think it’s excellent: a quick transcript of Raph Koster’s keynote address at the Game Developers Conference earlier this month. One of the premises: games are worthwhile and even didactic, not in their content (Grand Theft Auto) or intent (Reader Rabbit), but by their very nature.

“We tend to think of fun as being frivolous. The stuff that doesn’t matter. And this is the serious games cheer line: I’m here to tell you that fun is not only not frivolous but fundamental to human nature and required for survival. Therefore what we do is saving the human race from extinction. [laughs]”

Ken says:

“how about a gambling/rpg???

like, for instance, if you’re really about to get into a fight, you dont really have a concept of hit points. if theres a car about to hit you, you dont start hoping “gee, i hope this car isn’t capable of dealing more than 4d8 damage, or i’m probably screwed cause i only have 24 hit points available.”

somehow players would have to have hit points, but the amount they had could be hidden from them. could be interesting, yet somewhat hard to implement and/or control.”

Like I said in the comments, this made me think of an RPG that uses craps mechanics the way some RPGs use card-game mechanics. I’m not aware of any published RPG that uses craps, because RPGs do such weird things with dice that they tend to consider six-sided dice and gambling passé. I’m sure someone has tried it at some point, but obviously it hasn’t made a big splash.

I think it could, though. I’m going to introduce a couple things real quick: how craps works (based on a five-minute read of the Wikipedia craps article) and task resolution vs. conflict resolution, which we’ll get to in a second.

In craps, you place a bet for or against the shooter. The shooter rolls two dice and hopes they come up as a total of 7 or 11. If they do, the “for” side wins. If they come up 2, 3 or 12, the “against” side wins. If they do neither, everybody takes note of the total (called the “point”) and the shooter keeps rolling. If the point comes up again before a 7 does, the “for” betting side wins. If the shooter rolls a 7 before rolling the point, the “against” side wins. The farther from 7 the point was, the greater the payoff.

There are a lot more weird rules about betting, but this is the essential mechanic. Obviously, if you can bet for or against somebody, there’s no advantage for the house; this is why most casinos “bar” either a 2 or 12 roll and keep all bets if that’s what’s rolled the first time. (Mean casinos bar a 3.)

To me, this mechanic seems tailor-made for conflict resolution. Vincent Baker explains this concept better than I can at Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore–scroll down to the fourth entry, and notice where I subconsciously got the name of this weblog–but it’s essentially this:

• Task resolution is success or failure, eg “do I leap across this pit?” or “do I hit him?”
• Conflict resolution is winning or losing, eg “do I beat you at tic-tac-toe (and therefore get your Skittles)?” or “does he run me over (and therefore injure or kill me)?”

There’s only one interesting side to task resolution; there are two interesting sides to conflict resolution. That’s why I think the opposed-betting mechanic of craps would be cool for it. One could consider it functionally equivalent to flipping a coin–except craps is more complicated, and so more fun to mess with.

First problem: the odds for the “against” side are actually a little better than those for the “for” side. Player Characters in an RPG should win more than half the time, unless they don’t want to; simply reversing the sides (”try not to roll a 7 or 11″) is counterintuitive, especially for somebody who already knows how to play craps.

Second problem: completely random mechanics produce completely random results. Both sides of a conflict should have more agency than they do in the standard craps model.

There may be a way to solve these problems simultaneously, with a good add-on mechanic. For instance, say that each side of the conflict has limited resources with which to buy bar points (normally the role of the casino). You can take 2 or 12 for free, and spend to bar out a 3 or 8 or whatever–the closer to 7, the higher the cost. The problem with that, in turn, is that bar points are useless after the first roll, and it once again becomes a matter of chance leaning toward the opposition.

How else can we make manipulating craps resolution interesting? Swapping out dice? Buying rerolls? Standing bonus or penalty points for every roll?

Stuff on this weblog that I post goes under my Creative Commons BY-SA license, which basically means stripping everything away from its natural copyright except “give proper credit” and “license any derivative work the same way.” Your comments don’t fall under this license, because they’re attributed to you (that’s “otherwise noted,” as it says at the bottom of the page). However, if I take what you say in the comments and turn it into a new post, it does go under the license–under both our names.

I think it’s a good thing to put work under the CC license. When other people can derive new ideas from the things you make, the value of both your work and theirs increases. The license doesn’t prevent you from making money off your ideas, and it doesn’t allow anyone to claim your work as their own.

Of course, how I feel isn’t necessarily how everyone feels, and I don’t want to prevent people from participating here because of copyright quibbles. So here are the ground rules:

1. If you post a comment, you can add a note like “I’d prefer you not repost this,” and I (or any other potential admin) will consider it hands-off except for other responses in the comment thread. You retain all natural copyright privileges. Otherwise it’s fair game for reposting.
   1. Reposts of ideas will always be attributed to their original author, and that part of the post is licensed by them, BY-SA.
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2. If you submit an entry via the “Submit Story” link, and it gets published here, it goes under a BY-SA license in your name.
   

You can read more stuff about copyright or the Creative Commons at their official sites, if this kind of thing interests you.

Otherwise, okay! Boring copyright stuff over! Let’s get back to talking about games.

I want to play a game called “Dieslinger.” I don’t know what it does yet! I don’t know how you play it! I know it involves dice, big handfuls of them; I know it has something to do with either combat or magic. I don’t know whether it’s an RPG or a dice/card game or a gambling game or what.

How do you play Dieslinger?