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.
its late. i’m rambling.

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.

Idea 1:

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.

Idea 2:

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.

It would probably end up being a really niche market game - but then again, who cares?

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.)

(Very promising idea for a weblog, anyway - looks like an excellent way to play around with off-the-cuff game designs. Have you seen my Ludemetic Game Generator, out of interest?)

And oh, the theme. It’s a game about, er, magically summoning demons into a chalk circle.

Idea 3:

How about a roleplaying system where you use dice to Divine the I Ching in order to determine whether spells fail (or in what capacity they succeed)? Heck, you could make them divine the I Ching instead of making a check against the relevant stat. Maybe you could simplify it, or use a different divination method, but I just had this mental image of a person rolling a great many dice onto a table, staring at them intently for a short period of time, before pointing at a specific dice formation and stating: “I… uh, I think I open the door…”

Actually, maybe it would only work so much for the magic system.

Man, this is all great stuff! I’m going to save the cool ideas give them their own post (posts?) in a little while. I’ll use the comments section for individual responses.

Ken, the first thing I thought of when I read your post was Dogs in the Vineyard, partly because I’m obsessed with it and partly because it uses a poker mechanic–you See and Raise with dice. (Also I think you would like it.) Then I realized that the most obvious gambling mechanic with dice is craps, and I don’t know of any game that uses craps mechanics! Excellent!

Kevan and Josh, I was wondering if anybody would come up with a good way to use the tactile properties of dice rather than just the numbers. I couldn’t think of a good way to do that, but I knew it was in there. I think they’re worth combining, too.

And Kevan, I don’t think I’d seen the LGG, but I tried it just now and came up with “Godbid: (Religious, Spies/Secret Agents, Economic) and (Auction/Bidding, Unit Deployment, Area-Impulse).” That’s beautiful. I need to start a blogroll for this and put the Generator in it.

Will, all your ideas need posts of their own! I think you could do the I Ching with d8s or d4s, couldn’t you? But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it done, which is interesting. (And the “Square Root” card is awesome. Maybe all the cards are mathematical patterns–ahh, new post, new post…)

I think there’s definitely an element of elitist excitement in knowing how to play an incredibly complex game.

I’m pretty sure you can potentially divine the I Ching using any method at all, as long as your algorithm will only ever give you a result of 6, 7, 8, or 9. The dice divination method outlined at Wikipedia is really just a better version of the coin tossing method from the same article, which eliminates some of the random uncertainty caused by the shaking and flipping of the coins. You’re not looking at the numbers on the dice themselves, you’re only looking to see if they’re odd or even (like heads or tails).

It would be much more interesting if the numbers shown on the dice had more of an effect, but I’m not sure right now exactly how you’d do that. You wouldn’t want to make it too complex because one has to do it six times to work out the hexagram, and then one has to interpret the hexagram itself with regards to what one is trying to do in the game.

To me, “Dieslinger” connotes desperadoes facing off with dice, so it needs to have a standoff element. Each player has a number of dice of a particular color, which they can deploy against another player by putting their dice near that player. You can reallocate your dice in response to other players’ allocations against you. Your dice allocations represent how closely you’re watching someone and how quickly you could shoot them if you had to.

Eventually someone shouts “BANG!” and the standoff moves into the “hail of bullets” stage. Everyone rolls all the sets of dice the other players have allocated against them, as they were at the moment of “BANG!”. If your dice against someone roll higher than their dice against you, you’ve shot them. Otherwise, they’ve shot you. A tie means you shot each other or you both missed. You get a point for each bullet you take. Lowest score wins, either by riding off into the sunset or having the longest death scene.

I think this captures the psychology of the multi-party Mexican standoff pretty well. How do you allocate your attention? Where do you point your guns? How does this change as people have dialogue and reveal which side they’re really on and make deals with each other? Should you pull the trigger now or keep fortifying your position?

A game like this probably exists; it seems really basic to me.

Excellent. This may or may not be more amusingly hair-trigger if everyone else has to shout “BANG!” as well, with the first and last respectively getting a bonus and a penalty. And people blurting out bullets in response to someone else’s “But…”

It’s definitely better if everyone has to shout; that gives the game the aspect of standoffs it was missing, which was that the shooting inevitably starts by accident.

And, alternate name for my game: “Diceperado”.

AUGH

But the simultaneous nature of the game, of course, is awesome.