Dice systems are a blessing and a curse.
They provide insulation again the stereotypical powergamer that everyone's got stories about: The numbers are plain on who wins whichever exchange or action, and reneging on those make you look like a chump. The trouble with that, as mentioned, is that that's only reliable if the exchange is already able to go in one direction or the other. A trained soldier who served in the 1000 Year War and then across the Wall losing to a 14 year old kid with a knife? Yeah... Entirely possible in a /random system.
There are ways around that, kind of. One of the systems I was curious as to play with was where you play the numbers game with your results: /random, and then add those numbers together until you get a single digit number. So if someone rolls a 127, and someone else rolls a 932? 1+2+7= 9 versus 9+3+2=14, 1+4=5. 127 beats 932 when using arbitrary rules to reduce numbers to one digit. It helps level out the randomness while throwing an entirely new curve to the randomness. Mostly, it would exist to make low number rolls not be so poorly received.
I think it comes down to trust. The more I trust someone to cooperate to tell a story with me, the less concerned I am about using dice to keep things "fair." Freeform RP is preferable but not everyone wants to ever give up a single attack or exchange. There's no catch-all system for this kind of thing, you should really just communicate with your RP partners to discover a middle ground of what works for everyone.
They provide insulation again the stereotypical powergamer that everyone's got stories about: The numbers are plain on who wins whichever exchange or action, and reneging on those make you look like a chump. The trouble with that, as mentioned, is that that's only reliable if the exchange is already able to go in one direction or the other. A trained soldier who served in the 1000 Year War and then across the Wall losing to a 14 year old kid with a knife? Yeah... Entirely possible in a /random system.
There are ways around that, kind of. One of the systems I was curious as to play with was where you play the numbers game with your results: /random, and then add those numbers together until you get a single digit number. So if someone rolls a 127, and someone else rolls a 932? 1+2+7= 9 versus 9+3+2=14, 1+4=5. 127 beats 932 when using arbitrary rules to reduce numbers to one digit. It helps level out the randomness while throwing an entirely new curve to the randomness. Mostly, it would exist to make low number rolls not be so poorly received.
I think it comes down to trust. The more I trust someone to cooperate to tell a story with me, the less concerned I am about using dice to keep things "fair." Freeform RP is preferable but not everyone wants to ever give up a single attack or exchange. There's no catch-all system for this kind of thing, you should really just communicate with your RP partners to discover a middle ground of what works for everyone.
![[Image: yEROfKO.png]](http://i.imgur.com/yEROfKO.png)
