A friend of mine recently launched a simple dice rolling app for the iPhone. It's very straight forward; Select the number and type of dice to roll (one type at a time I think) and shake the phone to roll em.
He used it for a while in our weekly tabletop game and our various reactions to it were... typical? of long term roleplayers. Maybe it's a degree of grognardia (I certainly don't count myself as a true grognard.. a pretender at best), but I want to physically roll the dice. The pleasing sound as they tumble across the table top, the feel in your hand, and the all important naughty corner for when your dice desert you at a critical moment.
Like many roleplayers in my experience I have a lot of dice (not hundreds, but many) and I tend to use specific sets for different games. There are two beautiful Amethyst and Jade sets that were gifts and are used for AD&D 2E, my purple plastic 'gem' set used for Pathfinder, along with a dark green mottled set for the same, and so on.
The important thing is that my dice (and they are very much *my* dice - I don't like it when other people use my favoured sets) are physical artefacts of the game i'm playing. I can't imagine using an electronic dice roller as a player during a game.
As a ref I think that's different, but I'll save it for another time.
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Resource Management
There's an interesting post on Grognardia relating to ignoring rules and James Ms feelings on the matter:
The comments are particularly interesting, and from where the inspiration for this post arose. Aside from the observation that it's easier (more acceptable?) to ignore rules from an accreted system such as the very early editions of D&D than it is from a 'designed' system such as 3.5 or Pathfinder - a point that makes a lot of sense to me, there are a few comments relating to how people ignored the resource management aspects of the game.
I'm in two minds about this. These days we only manage to get 2-3 hours of gaming time each time we play, though we play most weeks and although the style of our two main GMs varies they share a common dislike for resource management detracting from the role-playing / game experience. From a stylistic point of view I can understand why. If you're running a high action, fast paced, pulpy feel adventure game then having to think about how many days trail rations you've got is an unwelcome intrusion on the pace. Another perspective is the faff that is the paperwork. After all it's a role-playing game, not a bean counting one.
But. At least some of these resources can be important and a source of dramatic tension and story in and of themselves. Light, Food, Encumbrance; they all have their place alongside the more generally monitored resources of HP, Healing, Spells, Special Abilities and so on. We just don't tend to make a big deal out of it. My feeling is that this is for two reasons, as hinted at above:
Admin is a pain, and slows things down.
If it gets in the way of moving the story along, remove the obstacle in the most effective way.
Of the two, I think the first one can/should be addressed. The latter is a stylistic choice in many ways - you simply assume the party has a torch, lantern, whatever. So is there a way of making the resource management easy and admin 'free'?
I'm thinking glass beads, or a lit candle that slowly burns out during the gaming session, or something like that.
The comments are particularly interesting, and from where the inspiration for this post arose. Aside from the observation that it's easier (more acceptable?) to ignore rules from an accreted system such as the very early editions of D&D than it is from a 'designed' system such as 3.5 or Pathfinder - a point that makes a lot of sense to me, there are a few comments relating to how people ignored the resource management aspects of the game.
I'm in two minds about this. These days we only manage to get 2-3 hours of gaming time each time we play, though we play most weeks and although the style of our two main GMs varies they share a common dislike for resource management detracting from the role-playing / game experience. From a stylistic point of view I can understand why. If you're running a high action, fast paced, pulpy feel adventure game then having to think about how many days trail rations you've got is an unwelcome intrusion on the pace. Another perspective is the faff that is the paperwork. After all it's a role-playing game, not a bean counting one.
But. At least some of these resources can be important and a source of dramatic tension and story in and of themselves. Light, Food, Encumbrance; they all have their place alongside the more generally monitored resources of HP, Healing, Spells, Special Abilities and so on. We just don't tend to make a big deal out of it. My feeling is that this is for two reasons, as hinted at above:
Admin is a pain, and slows things down.
If it gets in the way of moving the story along, remove the obstacle in the most effective way.
Of the two, I think the first one can/should be addressed. The latter is a stylistic choice in many ways - you simply assume the party has a torch, lantern, whatever. So is there a way of making the resource management easy and admin 'free'?
I'm thinking glass beads, or a lit candle that slowly burns out during the gaming session, or something like that.
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