How would a game go without dice?

[Goaty14]

Ok, just theoretically, if you had a game where any and all dice results always equaled half of their maximum? I.e all d20 rolls are 10s, all d12 rolls are 6, etc. Excluding "random decision" rolls such as random encounters, rod of wonder(s), miss chances, and wild magic zones, what sort of problems might a game have with such a rule in place? The general idea is that people end up spending less time calculating their to-hit vs AC and damage rolls so that the game goes faster.

Obviously some things would have to not exist (criticals, for example), and in a game the fighter will always hit some creatures, and the wizard will always get hit by some creatures, which makes the game more "absolute" in a way.

EDIT: Oh... it appears not. Erm, so then what rolls can be done this way without massively making the game horrible?

[JNAProductions]

Eh... Not a fan. At all. Maybe for damage rolls it could work, but that means literally EVERYTHING is a binary pass/fail, and more than that, there's nothing you can do to change it a lot of the time.

The system is VERY MUCH NOT designed for this.

[BowStreetRunner]

You're basically talking about something like Amber Diceless Roleplaying. Personally, I hated it. Everything was predetermined. There was never any point to trying to do a thing twice - if you fail the first time, you will always fail. Of course, if you succeed, you will always succeed and there isn't any challenge in it anymore. You need to keep the randomness in there somehow.

If you recall the 'Take 10' rules, there are plenty of times you can just skip the rolls to begin with. But there is a reason you can't use it on everything, and I believe it is a good reason.

[Reversefigure4]

Everything becomes very binary. Very binary.

3.5 is already predicated around the fact that certain things are likely to happen. Since Attack Bonus outstrips armor, a Fighter should regularly and consistently hit with their first attack on the majority of creatures under normal rules.

With this change, that goes beyond a high likelihood and becomes a certainty. Which means the outcome becomes largely locked in before the combat begins. If the Fighter has +5 to hit and deals 2d6 +3 damage, and the creature has an AC of 14 and 50 hit points, the fighter will hit it every time, guaranteed, for 10 points of static damage, assuredly killing it in 5 rounds. Since the creature will do the same to the Fighter, we can predict within the first blow who will win a standup one on one fight, guaranteed, at which point you might as well skip out the intervening rounds and cut to "You deal it 50 damage and kill it, it deals you 30 damage in the same timeframe".

Slight alterations become damning, since the same creature with an AC of 16 will now annihilate the Fighter (since the Fighter can't hit it, period) unless the Fighter can force a change of circumstance (such as a guaranteed flank every round). Within the first shot, the Fighter knows in a one on one fight there only option is to run away.

Skill checks fall into the same basket. DC15 Climb check? Simply announce that any characters with +5 Climb are at the top of the cliff, while the others can't ascend (indeed, you might as well announce such skill checks as "Anyone with +5 Climb may reach the top".

+6 Hide vs +5 Spot? You sneak successfully every time.

Spell Resistance 16? "Only casters with 6 levels may cast against this creature".

Theoretically, it works, but it makes for a very dull game.

[Zanos]

A d20 might have too flat a distribution for my tastes, but I think the opposite is much worse. Specifically with regards to combat, always passing or failing your save or always missing or hitting your attacks makes combat more of a stat check than anything else. Tactics are still relevant, but only up until they bring you back to always succeeding. It also means any bonuses you have a worthless unless they meet the threshold to always pass.

[Elkad]

We don't play for the averages. We play for the extremes.

Nobody remembers the string of middling rolls.
Nobody even remembers the crits vs trash mobs.

What you remember is the time you rolled a nat20, confirmed it, and one-shotted the BBEG in the first round.
Or, when the DM says "roll a touch attack to grab the princess as she falls past you", you only need a 2, and she zips right past 2 people as you both roll 1s.

[Andezzar]

A d20 might have too flat a distribution for my tastes, You may want to look into this variant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/bellCurveRolls.htm).

[Mordaedil]

A game sans rolls isn't a game, but it is what we call role playing.

[Eldariel]

You may want to look into this variant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/bellCurveRolls.htm).

It's a vast improvement but it does change a lot of how the game functions. It does make it incredibly unlikely for a Sorcerer to randomly beat a Barbarian in a Grapple though (we're talking about (1/6)^6 instead of (1/20)^2 or 1/46656 instead of 1/400) and it makes extreme rolls more impressive in general.

[Jormengand]

A game sans rolls isn't a game, but it is what we call role playing.

You can absolutely have a game without rolls. 3.5 in specific just isn't designed for it.

[Jack_Simth]

It's a vast improvement but it does change a lot of how the game functions. It does make it incredibly unlikely for a Sorcerer to randomly beat a Barbarian in a Grapple though (we're talking about (1/6)^6 instead of (1/20)^2 or 1/46656 instead of 1/400) and it makes extreme rolls more impressive in general.
Check me on this: Isn't that essentially what Zanos seems to want?

[Eldan]

So, what would a spell or item that gives you a flat 50% miss chance do? Would you just be immune to being hit, ever, or does it do nothing? What about bad weather?

[Eldariel]

Check me on this: Isn't that essentially what Zanos seems to want?

Aye, I was highlighting one of the advantages. There are disadvantages too though, particularly risky action becoming way more risky and those "roll a lucky crit"-moments that easily get engraved into your mind becoming quite rare.

[Zanos]

Check me on this: Isn't that essentially what Zanos seems to want?
Yeah I've used 3d6 rolls before. It's pretty good besides some edge cases.

[BowStreetRunner]

Yeah I've used 3d6 rolls before. It's pretty good besides some edge cases.
I actually played in a game with a DM who had custom 6-sided dice with 0-5 printed on the sides. Using 4d6 resulted in a 0-20 roll (with a 0 counting as a critical failure) and did smooth out the distributions as expected. You can do the same thing with 4d6-4 in place of a d20, if you don't have custom dice.

[Goaty14]

So, what would a spell or item that gives you a flat 50% miss chance do? Would you just be immune to being hit, ever, or does it do nothing? What about bad weather?


Excluding "random decision" rolls such as random encounters, rod of wonder(s), miss chances, and wild magic zones,

I mean, some things would inevitably require dice to function, but more or less speeding up combat.


Tactics are still relevant, but only up until they bring you back to always succeeding. It also means any bonuses you have a worthless unless they meet the threshold to always pass.

Not nesscessarily. Once you're up and above, you could consider dropping some of the more constraining tactics (i.e a buddy using aid another on your to-hit), or subtract more on your power attack/combat expertise/stone power, etc.

I get that the general consensus is "Yes, you could do that, except 3.5 isn't supposed to be that way and it'll be boring". So what sort of rolls could you do that with without changing too much about the game? I know you could avoid damage rolls, and what else?

[Eldan]

Personally, I like all of them.
Probably the first I'd eliminate is random hit point rolls when levelling up. A lot of groups apparently do that already, from what I gather here, though I kinda like them.
Going from there, I'd keep to hit rolls, but you could eliminate damage? A sword now deals 4 damage, a greatsword 7, etc.? It eliminates the chance of a glancing blow that only deals one damage, but it would be considerably less random, especially on things that throw handfuls of D6s. E.g. a high level fireball now deals 30 damage and a rogue has 3 points/2 levels of sneak attack bonus damage.

[Andezzar]

I actually played in a game with a DM who had custom 6-sided dice with 0-5 printed on the sides. Using 4d6 resulted in a 0-20 roll (with a 0 counting as a critical failure) and did smooth out the distributions as expected. You can do the same thing with 4d6-4 in place of a d20, if you don't have custom dice.Would rolls of 1 and 20 still have the standard consequences? What about rolls below 1, if you do not use the special dice?

[JyP]

You're basically talking about something like Amber Diceless Roleplaying. Personally, I hated it. Everything was predetermined. There was never any point to trying to do a thing twice - if you fail the first time, you will always fail. Of course, if you succeed, you will always succeed and there isn't any challenge in it anymore. You need to keep the randomness in there somehow.
Amber is definitely not for beginner DMs. A good example there would be whenever Corwin duels with Eric - he already knows that Eric was better than him on previous duels, but through subterfuge and psychologic attacks he is able to reverse the situation and win this 3rd duel. And you know what ? you have to rank yourself versus other players in 4 characteristics, Psyche, Strength, Endurance and Warfare. This is a textbook case where Corwin & Eric have high but close Warfare attributes, but Corwin switch from Warfare to Psyche to win...

[Jormengand]

So, some interesting practical thoughts:

- Average damage is probably fine.
- Average skill checks is fine, but you would need to have more possible DCs for a lot of skills. Knowledge is fine, because any knowledge DC greater than 10 is possible, but there's no current difference between a +10 to OL checks and a +14 to OL checks because the only existent OL DCs are 20, 25, 30 and 40.
- Average attack rolls isn't fine but there's a way around this: you can have attacks always hit but do a reduced percentage damage depending on how likely they are to hit. For example, you could have a +18 vs AC 20 deal 95% of the listed damage, and a +0 vs AC 20 deal 5% of the listed damage.
- Miss chance can become damage division in the same way - concealment reduces any damage you'd take by 20%.
- Average stats is already the idea behind the elite array, and point buy works anyway.
- Average hit points is not only possible, but what a lot of people actually do.
- Truenamers end up with a certain number of sure-shot utterances and then immediately go from definite success to definite failure.
- Saves are weird. Reflex half can be dealt with similarly to hits (the probability that you would have passed the reflex save is halved and then applied as a reduction) but others... ???

As an example, if you have to fire a CL 10 fireball through a narrow gap (+5 to hit AC 8) and then your opponent needs to make a reflex save (+8 against DC 19) and you're standing near the gap with a +3 to reflex, then the fireball will do 75% (half chance of halving the damage) of 90% (10% chance that you'll miss the gap) of 35 damage to the opponent (23 damage) and 87.5% (quarter chance of halvine the damage) of 10% (10% chance that you'll miss the gap) of 35 damage to you (3 damage).

I think, fundamentally, you would have to rewrite any spell which allowed a save for something other than half damage. Certainly, a spell that allowed a will save to negate a -20 penalty for something could give you a penalty equal to your chance out of 20 of failing the will save, and you could do something fairly similar with kill spells (take current HP + 10, multiply it by the chance of failing the save, take the average damage dealt on a passed save, multiply it by the chance of passing the save, and add them. A 50-hit-point fighter with a 50% chance to save against CL 10 finger of death would take 60*0.5 + 20.5*0.5 = 40 damage. Working out what sleep does - maybe nonlethal damage based on your chance to pass the save? - requires a proper homebrew.

[BowStreetRunner]

Would rolls of 1 and 20 still have the standard consequences? What about rolls below 1, if you do not use the special dice?
Whether you have dice with 0-5 printed and do 4d6, or dice with 1-6 printed and do 4d6-4, your total will come out to a number between 0-20. 1 is no longer an automatic failure for any rolls (0 becomes an auto fail). Everything else remains the same.

[Zombulian]

You may want to look into this variant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/bellCurveRolls.htm).

I really like this actually. It would also curb my distaste for crit fumbles because a level 16 fighter's fumble rate on a full attack would go from 20% to less than 2%.

I'm considering this for an e6 game. Is that a good idea or would it just make an already fairly gritty alt system unreasonably hard?

[heavyfuel]

You may want to look into this variant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/bellCurveRolls.htm).


I really like this actually. It would also curb my distaste for crit fumbles because a level 16 fighter's fumble rate on a full attack would go from 20% to less than 2%.

I'm considering this for an e6 game. Is that a good idea or would it just make an already fairly gritty alt system unreasonably hard?

I am a big defender of bell-curve rolls IF your players have good system mastery as rolling 3d6 instead of 1d20 is very unforgiving for both players and DMs.

Numerical bonuses account for so much. With 1d20, getting +1 to something means 5% more chance of success. With 3d6, it can mean as much as 12,5% more.

As a consequence, strategy and optimization account for more since you can't rely on luck. If you need a 15 to do something, you might as well not even try. The reverse is also true, and needing a 5 means success over 98% of time.

Similarly, positioning on the battlefield becomes paramount if you know for a fact the Barbarian will beat your 17 points of AC.

I wholeheartedly recommend 3d6 to anyone looking for a more strategically focused game

[Venger]

I am a big defender of bell-curve rolls IF your players have good system mastery as rolling 3d6 instead of 1d20 is very unforgiving for both players and DMs.

Numerical bonuses account for so much. With 1d20, getting +1 to something means 5% more chance of success. With 3d6, it can mean as much as 12,5% more.

As a consequence, strategy and optimization account for more since you can't rely on luck. If you need a 15 to do something, you might as well not even try. The reverse is also true, and needing a 5 means success over 98% of time.

Similarly, positioning on the battlefield becomes paramount if you know for a fact the Barbarian will beat your 17 points of AC.

I wholeheartedly recommend 3d6 to anyone looking for a more strategically focused game

That's interesting. Could you tell me about how the 3d6 roll system makes the game more strategic? From the sounds of it, the best approach is (as usual) roll a t1 caster and do your best never to touch dice at all.

also how do crit threats work under the 3d6 roll system? is a normal range of 20 "18" then 19-20 is "17-18" and so on?

[heavyfuel]

That's interesting. Could you tell me about how the 3d6 roll system makes the game more strategic? From the sounds of it, the best approach is (as usual) roll a t1 caster and do your best never to touch dice at all.

I actually feel like this particular T1 advantage is lessened. Don't get me wrong, T1s are still at the top of the game. However, with 3d6, attacks and skills are more reliable, which helps lower tier classes more than high tier ones. You can also get away with lower investments in skills whose DCs are fixed/low, which again helps lower tier classes.

As for the first question, the game becomes more focused on strategy since targeting weaknesses are such a big deal and, therefore, covering these weaknesses is also more important. Feats and options you would've never considered are now more interesting. Feats like Iron Will, Dodge, and Weapon Focus go from "absolute garbage" to "decent if you have the slot to spare" (though personally I still buff them).

A word of warning though, you should expect basically every character to have numerical bonus feats that were already considered good (Improved Initiative and Knowledge Devotion for example) since they're now even more powerful.



also how do crit threats work under the 3d6 roll system? is a normal range of 20 "18" then 19-20 is "17-18" and so on?

That you need a bit of math if you want to keep them close to the original.

A crit of 20 (5%) should now be 16-18 (4.63%)
19-20 (10%) becomes 15-18 (9,26%)
18-20 (15%) becomes 14-18 (16,2%)
17-20 (20%) and larger threat ranges become 13-18 (25,92%)

Of course, you may want to fiddle with these numbers depending of how strong/weak you want crit-fishers to be.

[johnbragg]

That's interesting. Could you tell me about how the 3d6 roll system makes the game more strategic?

You need to roll a 14 before modifiers? Your d20 experience tells you that's a 1-in-3 chance, (7/20). On 3d6, you have a 16% chance of rolling a 14 or better.

Basically, the 3d6 bell curve means that the modifiers you add or subtract are a bigger part of the equation than the die roll itself.


From the sounds of it, the best approach is (as usual) roll a t1 caster and do your best never to touch dice at all.

also how do crit threats work under the 3d6 roll system? is a normal range of 20 "18" then 19-20 is "17-18" and so on?

House rules vary. I'd say that, since 16-18 has a 4.63% chance, that's close enough to say "nat 20". 15-18 has a 9.26% chance, so that works for a 19-20 critical range. 18-20 maps to 14+ (16%). Nothing maps especially well to ranges bigger than that.

http://anydice.com/

[johnbragg]

We just took a family road trip, and I brought a one-shot module just-in-case, but didn't bring dice. We do have a deck of cards in the car, so I noodled out how to improvise a system with no dice, just playing cards.

Draw two cards, add the values for your d20 roll. Which gives you a wonky version of the 2d10 curve, shifted to the right because you have 4 "10s" (10, J, Q, K--the face cards).

All non-d20 dice give half their value, or full value if you draw one face card. (So a d6 attack would do 3 points if you drew an 8 and a 9 to hit, or 6 points if you drew a 7 and a face card). Double damage if you draw two face cards. (So a d6 attack would do 12 damage).

Ended up not playing, but I want to see how that system feels--would it feel more bell-curvy or more swingy.

[Knaight]

3e absolutely isn't made for this, but it isn't quite as dire as it's being presented here. These cases of always hitting and always missing can be played with a bit, and this makes some niche strategies (fighting defensively, total defense, various non-flanking attack bonuses that you have to go out of your way to reach) worth more, along with creating some interesting space around range increments and the like.

[heavyfuel]

Thinking about it now, the CR system is also thrown completely out of the window, as anything of slightly lower CR will pose very little threat. They are very unlikely to hit, pass saves, or make you fail saves, while high CR creatures are very likely to always hit, always pass saves, and always make you fail saves.

[AvatarVecna]

Asking "will 3.5 run without die rolls" is like asking "will my car run without an engine": the answer to both is "only if you put a great deal of effort into making it work completely differently than it does now".

Let's start with a super-simple problem that I guarantee will impact 90% of all combat encounters: initiative. If a combat starts, and any two individuals have exactly the same bonus and Dex (which isn't uncommon, particularly in the lower levels when there's less things impacting Initiative bonus and Dex mod), there's no RAW way to resolve that tie, because it normally goes "a tie between two totals is resolved by highest bonus, a tie between bonuses is then resolved by highest Dex mod, and a tie between Dex mods is resolved by a roll-off). This is slightly less problematic when the unresolveable tie is between two people on the same team, such as by having multiple monsters with the same statblock like a squad of guards or something (since you could just say they act in whatever order they want in regards to each other), but if people on different sides of the fight have such an unresolveable tie, deciding who goes first comes down to DM fiat that gives an advantage in the action economy to whoever the DM is favoring, which can make a major difference in the outcome and will inevitably look unfair to one side or the other unless the battle was already substantially tilted in favor of one side. The d20 takes the blame away from the DM, at the expense of making it possible for a slow person to react quickly for once and a fast person to react slowly; yeah, it feels kinda unfair to tell the dude with +17/total 18 that he goes after the dude with -1/total 19, but that's the way the dice go sometimes...and it feels less personal than when the DM has to decide which dude with +17 gets to go first this time (both have invested a great deal into initiative, and under this system one of them has to get shafted).

But let's move past initiative and onto weapons: where the base system largely differentiates weapons based on critical capabilities, now the only stats that matter are damage, wielding difficulty, and range/reach. Taking 10 on all attack rolls also has an interesting effect on hit chance: creatures with ridiculously low or high ACs won't be too different, but those with just slightly low/high AC will see their odds of getting hit change dramatically. A creature that normally gets hit by the Fighter on an 8 goes from getting hit 65% of the time to getting hit 100%, while one that the Fighter hits on a 12 goes from getting hit 45% of the time to getting hit 0% of the time. The CR of these monsters remains the same, but how challenging they are to defeat has changed dramatically. This same concept applies to creatures with slightly high/low saves or SR: just get it a little bit higher than average, and you're set for life.

One side effect of this weird change to the to-hit system is that Power Attack becomes a gigantic all-or-nothing gamble in the early rounds of the fight: normally, miscalculating how much penalty to take means being slightly less likely to hit than you expected, and means you're more likely to be dependent on crits for burst damage...but now, take the penalty a single -1 too far, and everything misses. Okay, whatever, Power Attack is normally a gamble anyway, what does it matter? Well, if the fight goes long enough for the PCs to figure out the enemy's exact AC, the exact opposite happens: now instead of taking a far greater risk than the base game, now the players won't be taking any risk at all. They know exactly what the enemy's AC is, and how much penalty to take so their DPR is maximized. The normal risk-vs-reward of Power Attack is thrown off a bit by the absence of crits, but is completely thrown off by the lack of random hit-chance.

Speaking of random hit-chance, miss chance does nothing in this system: a miss "chance" less than 50% means the MC never makes you miss, a miss "chance" more than 50% means the MC always makes you miss, and a miss "chance" of 50% will fall into one of those two camps, depending on whether this diceless system rounds up or down for such things.

Oh, and let's get into skills! Honestly, the biggest problem I see hear is that you can no long fudge the DCs for information-gathering checks that aren't opposed. I could see a game getting by with flat "you can do that, but you can't do that" for the vast majority of skill uses, and the DCs for skill uses are defined in the system thoroughly enough that the amount of DM fiat that could make things unfair is largely kept to a minimum. But any time the players have to "roll" Listen, Search, Spot, or a Knowledge skill that isn't opposed to another person's "roll", they're "rolling" against a DC the DM more or less makes up...and the DC the DM makes up determines if they have 0% chance of success or 100% chance of success, and that makes it incredibly easy to railroad the players even if you're not actively trying to do so. Let's suppose you have a bit of knowledge you want the players to have, so you set the DC at what you think is a reasonable 27 (a DC the group's bookworm makes quite often), but then you find out they don't actually have a good bonus in that particular knowledge check, although another PC who's normally not very book smart happens to have a few ranks there for RP purposes (say, a Paladin with Knowledge: Nobility 5 to aid his Diplomacy). In the normal system, the bookworm could flub the roll (with a 19 total), the paladin could roll well (for 24), and the DM could decide to fudge the DC and claim it was 23 or something to get things moving forward rather than spend half an hour laying breadcrumbs to a royal diary or something. But in diceless system, that only works if the bookworm has a worse bonus to it than the paladin; if they don't, and neither of them has enough bonus to reach the DC you thought they'd be able to make, you're stuck either breadcrumbing or retroactively declaring the DC was lower and you "forgot" that the bookworms was actually high enough. In both games, you're sort of cheating in the player's favor, but in the latter, it's harder to hide. And cheating in their favor cheapens their accomplishments and lessens the fun, where keeping the fun-train going was the point of even considering cheating on the DC in the first place. This same thing goes for any of the perception skills: oh, nobody in the group is good enough to notice this carefully-hidden and vital clue to the mystery? Guess we're ****ed then.

Oh, and a final quick note: any effect (most commonly spells, I'll bet) that let you reattempt a save every round to throw off the initial effect would need to be rebalanced, because if you didn't make the initial save in Diceless, you won't make any of the subsequent ones either.

[StreamOfTheSky]

I always thought it'd be interesting to have a game where instead of a d20, each player has stack of cards, 1-20. They're shuffled and face down. The card you draw is your "roll," and you keep drawing until you use the last card, then you re-shuffle.

Forces an even distribution of each result.

[Venger]

Very thorough analysis. I do have a question. In your experience, do a lot of players take power attack without taking shock trooper?

[Goaty14]

I always thought it'd be interesting to have a game where instead of a d20, each player has stack of cards, 1-20. They're shuffled and face down. The card you draw is your "roll," and you keep drawing until you use the last card, then you re-shuffle.

Forces an even distribution of each result.

I like this, kudos to you.

[heavyfuel]

I always thought it'd be interesting to have a game where instead of a d20, each player has stack of cards, 1-20. They're shuffled and face down. The card you draw is your "roll," and you keep drawing until you use the last card, then you re-shuffle.

Forces an even distribution of each result.

Sounds very interesting but you'd likely need something to stop players from gaming (pun intended) the system by making useless rolls/draws to waste their bad cards.

Shuffling the deck automatically when you roll for initiative and forcing players to Take 10/20 outside of combat would help.

Sounds like fun to play

[Venger]

I always thought it'd be interesting to have a game where instead of a d20, each player has stack of cards, 1-20. They're shuffled and face down. The card you draw is your "roll," and you keep drawing until you use the last card, then you re-shuffle.

Forces an even distribution of each result.

I would be interested to see how this worked. It seems at first blush that even if your players weren't trying to "cheat" (can't really call it that) that it would be hard not to mentally keep track of how hot or cold your deck was when you'd depleted all the good cards.

[Knaight]

I would be interested to see how this worked. It seems at first blush that even if your players weren't trying to "cheat" (can't really call it that) that it would be hard not to mentally keep track of how hot or cold your deck was when you'd depleted all the good cards.


Sounds very interesting but you'd likely need something to stop players from gaming (pun intended) the system by making useless rolls/draws to waste their bad cards.

Generally part of the reason you'd use a system like this is to incorporate that sort of strategy - often with a deck and hand mechanic, where you can spend any card in your hand on any roll, and which cards go where is part of the strategy. Do you spend that 20 on an essential skill roll? Do you drop it on a massive power attack strike? Do you hold it in reserve for a save or die from something nasty?

[Venger]

Generally part of the reason you'd use a system like this is to incorporate that sort of strategy - often with a deck and hand mechanic, where you can spend any card in your hand on any roll, and which cards go where is part of the strategy. Do you spend that 20 on an essential skill roll? Do you drop it on a massive power attack strike? Do you hold it in reserve for a save or die from something nasty?

Sounds interesting, but you'd need a new set of meta rules rotating around cards, like mtg or similar.

Again, do you know people who habitually use power attack without shock trooper? I'm not asking as a challenge, I just don't see it much.

[Mordaedil]

You can absolutely have a game without rolls. 3.5 in specific just isn't designed for it.

Yes, my point is that if you take a game where rolling is the main mechanic of interacting with the game and then take the rolling out, it's no longer a game.

Role-playing sans the game part can be fun too.

[Knaight]

Again, do you know people who habitually use power attack without shock trooper? I'm not asking as a challenge, I just don't see it much.

There's a level range where that tends to happen, and that whole strategy becomes so much more viable when you know what you're rolling ahead of time.

[Crow_Nightfeath]

If I did that, attacks saves and other important rolls, usually ones done with the d20 would still be rolled. Though id be fine with average rolls on skill checks, also initiative. And I'd only use that if there wasn't really access to any dice aside from d20s or playing in a forum where it would take several posts just for a single attack.

[heavyfuel]

Generally part of the reason you'd use a system like this is to incorporate that sort of strategy - often with a deck and hand mechanic, where you can spend any card in your hand on any roll, and which cards go where is part of the strategy. Do you spend that 20 on an essential skill roll? Do you drop it on a massive power attack strike? Do you hold it in reserve for a save or die from something nasty?

While this might be the intention, StreamOfTheSky simply mentioned forced even distribution of values.

Having a hand mechanic is interesting by adding another layer of strategy, but allowing players to waste away their bad cards with ease would be too much for me, and I feel that players would abuse the allowed mechanics to always have good cards at the expense of time and flow.


Again, do you know people who habitually use power attack without shock trooper? I'm not asking as a challenge, I just don't see it much.

Personal experience says gishes with more attack bonus than they know what to do with are pretty common using power attack without Shock Trooper.

[Eldariel]

Again, do you know people who habitually use power attack without shock trooper? I'm not asking as a challenge, I just don't see it much.

The campaign journal in my signature features pretty constant PA use from my character without using Shock Trooper or similars.

[Zinarik]

I think people are being a bit narrow minded about this. While it’s not the way it was intended to be played and for some the rolls are part of the fun, it’s actually quite interesting to think about as an experiment.

It shifts the focus of most combats from charging in and hoping for the best to utilizing teamwork and tactics.
While in a normal game after a miss the player would just sigh and hope for a better result next time, now you have to change your strategy.


Let’s say Bob the Fighter and Billy the Rogue, both level one fight an orc. Bob has a +5 to attack and Billy a +4, while the orc is wearing plate armor:

“The orc stands in the middle of the room, it wears a suit of plate armor and a greataxe, it smirks at the inexperienced and noodle-armed adventurers thinking himself invincible”

The players know it has at least 19 AC, so Bob sets up a flank and readies an action to aid another when Billy gets into position to attack.

Billy charges into the flank, Bob auto-passes the aid another and with a +10 to hit total Billy strikes the orc, sneak attack!.

But oh no, the orc decides to go into total defense. Are they doomed? Is the orc now an immovable object?

Nope, just another sucker thinks Bob and proceeds to either trip or grapple the orc and they pummel it into submission.


Also attrition and resource management would play a bigger (or at least clearer) role. A spellcaster is most likely to have most of their spells succeed (at least at low level), but they have so many per day.

[Jack_Simth]

Also attrition and resource management would play a bigger (or at least clearer) role. A spellcaster is most likely to have most of their spells succeed (at least at low level), but they have so many per day.
There are ways around this. Reserve feats, for instance. Combine, say, Fiery Burst or Acidic Splatter with Minor Shapeshift on a Cleric with Heighten Spell and the appropriate domain. Summon Elemental also goes well.

[StreamOfTheSky]

I would be interested to see how this worked. It seems at first blush that even if your players weren't trying to "cheat" (can't really call it that) that it would be hard not to mentally keep track of how hot or cold your deck was when you'd depleted all the good cards.

See, I actually find the idea of the players keeping track mentally of what numbers are left to draw while in the midst of combat kind of tactically interesting. Naturally it would impact the decisions they make in regards to say...using per day or per encounter abilities that would be "wasted" if they fail an attack roll or such. If the player has mostly low digit cards left, he might become much more concerned about spells/effects requiring a saving throw, and so on...
So that's kind of a positive side effect to me.

Players trying to "cheat the system" (for lack of a better phrase) out of combat w/ lots of inconsequential d20 rolls to try and discard mostly low cards...or keep cycling deck re-shuffles till they do so... is certainly a concern. But I think as DM, I could spot that sort of behavior and nix it. And of course, taking 10 and 20 is still a thing (if I were a player, I'd want to use that whenever possible, lest I waste my nat 20 on something unimportant).
You could also have each player maintain two decks. One for combat-based d20 rolls only, the other deck for all other situations.

[Bohandas]

Depending on the tone of the game you might be able to do social skills like this. A lot of computer rpgs do