The dice are having an evening off...


Gamer Life General Discussion


The PF RPG forums are filled with questions and presentations about power and usefulness of characters, builds that try to beat each other at dealing damage or noticing everything or bluffing anyone and theorectical one-trick-monkey-exercises. I think that's great. PF gives players book and books and books to work with and it's good to see players and GMs immerse themselves in these massive amounts of rules.

Apart from rolling dice and achieving something wit a successful roll, there's also a place for storytelling and ROLE-playing in PF. I know that sandbox campaigns leave more opportunity to walk and talk around and just interact and that published adventures tend to be a bit more linear (-I've got nothing against either published or freeform adventures-), but I like to think that roleplaying is not only about playing a character to advance a bunch of stats, is it?

Does anybody else have a session now and then where the dice have an evening off?

Just curious...

Sovereign Court

I run APs exclusively in PF and we have RP sessions regularly. Playstyle determines this for each group not published adventures, sandboxes, or game forums. You may want to look into the campaign journal and AP subsections of the forums for story oriented discussions.


It's not that I'm looking for more story or less rolling in my games, I was just wondering if there were many players that are giving their dice a night off every now and then.

You're most certainly right about it being a playstyle, less dependent on what kind of scenario (if any) drives the game, than dependimg on the players and GM.

But again, I was just wondering how common it is, because this doesn't seem to pop up in most of the forums. Most of the forums seems to be numbercrunching...


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I found it difficult to do with more than 2 players. But I have run really good games with two players and really good games with one player with absolutely no dice at all or very entire sessions without dice.

The more players, the more dice you need, the more often.

The fewest/lightest I was ever able to get away with at a full table was a dark conspiracy game with 5 players and everyone just brought a single d10 and maybe each used it half a dozen times in a 5 hour game.


As a GM, I have made lots of decisions without dice as to not interrupt the flow of the game. A party (or party member) notices something or doesn't, without a perception check. (Making the check actually can pull people out of character, as most players won't be able to help themselves thinking: maybe my character is supposed to see something right now...)

A proposal of what the party is trying to do, just works or doesn't without trying to invent a DC for something that there aren't rules for in any book. (Even if it could be more or less determined by combining numerous books.)

If the session is dice-light and story-heavy, suddenly calling for a roll can shake up the (flow of) story.
On the other hand, it can create suspense too, so rolling isn't necessarily bad. A GM should feel when it helps or hinders during a dice-light session...


To go slightly on a tangent, I recall a previous RPG message board where a new guy came in, believing the board was focused purely on powergaming and number crunching since all the topics were about rules with very little on rping.

Another user explained, however, that the reason rules were far more commonly discussed, was because they were easier to discuss. Rules provide a common framework that can be easily quantified and debated. Discussions about the roleplaying aspects, on the other hand, can't be so quantified, and there wasn't really much to discuss, outside of what ideas sounded cool.

Note that the Paizo forums are divided by game and further subdivided, so naturally those boards attract mostly rule discussions, given that's what they are meant for.

Now, back on topic:

I'm having a hard time visualizing a game without die rolling in which anything gets done. I'd have to watch/play in one of those games to really give an opinion. Conflict resolution, even the roleplaying parts, is rather dependent on the chance of failure, and thus die rolls. If there's nothing to roll for, there's no conflict.

Or do you just mean a night of players bouncing their personalities off each other? That can certainly be fun, though there's probably plot to be getting to...


Trigger Loaded wrote:

To go slightly on a tangent, I recall a previous RPG message board where a new guy came in, believing the board was focused purely on powergaming and number crunching since all the topics were about rules with very little on rping.

Another user explained, however, that the reason rules were far more commonly discussed, was because they were easier to discuss. Rules provide a common framework that can be easily quantified and debated. Discussions about the roleplaying aspects, on the other hand, can't be so quantified, and there wasn't really much to discuss, outside of what ideas sounded cool.

Note that the Paizo forums are divided by game and further subdivided, so naturally those boards attract mostly rule discussions, given that's what they are meant for.

Now, back on topic:

I'm having a hard time visualizing a game without die rolling in which anything gets done. I'd have to watch/play in one of those games to really give an opinion. Conflict resolution, even the roleplaying parts, is rather dependent on the chance of failure, and thus die rolls. If there's nothing to roll for, there's no conflict.

Or do you just mean a night of players bouncing their personalities off each other? That can certainly be fun, though there's probably plot to be getting to...

This is mostly my point about the more players you have, the more dice you need, the more often you roll. You can wing it on role play with one or two players. You can hand wave a bunch with three or even four players. With five and six players you have to run every single combat 100% by the mechanics with the grid. More than 7 and you have to do social encounters in initiative order.

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