RPGaDay 2016: Dice

Yep, we're doing this again this year. I will probably fall behind and do posts that cover several days' worth of RPGaDay 2016, but you'll see all my answers here eventually.

1. Real dice, dice app, diceless - how do you prefer to 'roll'?

I've written in these pages before about my love affair with dice.

I think a lot of gamers of my generation have always loved them, and that is partly down to them starting out as an obscure and secret thing that no one outside the nerdy confines of D&D knew about. To begin with, they were brown and poorly-formed things that you needed to colour in the numbers with a crayon to understand. Those were the fabled "mud dice" that came with early iterations of D&D box sets.


Later, they became shiny crystalline things, and even art objects, made of semi-precious stones or metal or wood. Something amazing.

I also like diceless games, by which I mean both games that use no dice at all (EVERWAY, my beloved!) and games that use a different kind of randomizer (such as PRIMETIME ADVENTURES and its card-driven conflict resolution system). They don't quite have the same thrill as a game that uses dice, but they're still good.

Dice apps don't do much for me, but I'm not a guy who owns a cellphone and uses it for everything under the sun. I like the dice system on Roll20, the virtual tabletop software I use to run my online games, but I like it best when I'm using the animated dice that roll overtop of the display -- as close to the actual tabletop experience as you can get.

2. Best Game Session Since August 2015?

There have been quite a few good ones, between the APOCALYPSE WORLD game we were playing last fall, SHADOWRUN: THE FORKS, and NOT FADE AWAY, but I'm going to go with the one I wrote about in these pages not so long ago.

Sometimes a game just hits its stride and everything is working like a well-oiled machine. I was very happy with that one.