RPG Horror Story: Roll For....EVERYTHING!

0:21 Hello and the podcaster, role players and game masters to help level up your game. We are your dungeon masters. Jason Portiso, I'm Joe McCall and Jim Crocker. So today I was kind of digging around for a hard story we could tell. And it's not that I could to find one. I couldn't pick one, and there are a lot, and Joe, thankfully, you were like, well I got this one pulled up my thank god, someone made the decision for me. You gave me the like the bullet points of this and I had a reaction and you were like, but there's more and I might save it. So, Joe, I would love if you told us this now didn't actually happen. Yeah, it's a potential horror story.

1:02 It could be a future horror story in ter row. This is it's like the Omen or something. It's a prequel to horror story. It's got all the makings of a possible horror story. So Joe could be so kind. Sure, So this comes from our D and D you lennarbug ninety nine rights. He wants to roll for everything. Did it roll for that username? Maybe? I'm pretty sure I rolled for mine. So as we come to a close on a two year campaign. We were discussing who would want to be the next DM. It's been me for our current session. We decided to have everyone make a little teaser of their session. Since only I and one other person have been a DM for this group. The ideas on campaigns were fantastic. However, one person went into depth on how they wanted to run the campaign, and the group is kind of torn about it.

1:56 So I wanted to turn to a bigger group to hear pros and cons, and then we're gonna take that bigger group and bring it to a smaller group, right, us three? All right? The idea is the group essentially rolls for everything. Do you attack? Do you attack or do you stand down? Want to go left or right? Oh? Oh no. In my personal opinion, I believe it takes away from the freedom of the group as well as the DM. Honestly, it sounds like it would make it easier for the DM to control the group, make them go where you want them to, et cetera, especially not knowing what the DM has decided for the roles, and if it's not what they want, they can switch it up and that's that's it. Okay, first of all, please, I can do that without this, right, don'nut? I think this is new left or right? It's left and right are the same. Yeah, yeah, that's easy. How it's moving. Castle is over there now. So my first reaction was, oh, that's that's a terrible idea. That was verbatim my reaction. So I really want to know. And then I thought on it a little bit more and I was like, Okay, it could be interesting that you really let the dice tell the story. And I think that if if this person is the DM and they're they're saying like, hey, we're going to roll for that, I don't think they're going to use that as an opportunity to steam roll. I think that they really want to have the dice decide. So I just think it could be interesting because you're you're implementing an additional bit of chaos. Well yeah, so I just think

3:30 it could be interesting because how many times have you know, especially and maybe their group is like and I know in our session we have one player that really like goes out of their way to like not have conflict, and like that's fine and it's very interesting, but sometimes it's kind of boring. It's like, oh, that would have been such a good fight. So now you have this little bit of chaos you're gonna You're think of it as flipping a coin. You're gonna flip a coin. Are you gonna have conflict or not flip a coin? Mhm. I feel like this is the start of a new game. I feel like you're taking a lot of the because you know, to me, a lot of what makes see in the a viable game is the idea player agency, and like this is you know, I'm trying to find a way to where this doesn't just completely take all that away, and I can't. I can't find one. What I hear when I hear this is I hear kind of a cool idea for like a wild one shot or like you know, like like like rules that govern a particular dungeon or something like that. Right, you know, you go into the whatever to like you know, to the to the demi plane of chance or something like that like that, and this is what dictates what's going on. And I mean, I think we need to proceed from the idea that whatever DM is implementing this is doing so in good faith, right, you know, like you said that they're not gonna say, well, roll for that,

5:01 and then put the thing that they want to be there regardless of whether whether you roll, regardless of how that role comes up. It seems like it would be a hole. You'd have to have a whole ton of prep or you would need something like in the I don't know if you guys have ever looked at the Classic AD and D Dungeon Master's Guide. No, but there was a whole multi paid section there that was a random dungeon generator. Oh yeah, Oh, you could roll dungeons on the fly and it there's a random dungeon generator and it came with random monster generators. But you'd need some kind of procedure for generating that, or you would need, you know, prep for the dungeon. You'd have to lay the dungeon out and then when they got to that t intersection, you'd say, okay, roll to see which way you go, and there'd kind of be you'd agree that you're letting the dice decide that, and you know and that the agency that Jason is talking about, the agency is we know the rules of that dungeon, but we're going to go into it anyways and subject ourselves to those because we really want that treasure that's at the center of it. Right. Yeah, your version of player agency here is that they are accepting that they have no agency.

6:20 Well. Yeah, and as long as it's for a session or two, that might be a really fun thing, like a cool way to drop that in, you know, and maybe in this, in this particular dungeon for a session or two, your wild mage has a lot more control over what wild mage wild magic effect comes up or something like that, right, because it's you know, because you're in the dungeons, the demi plane of chance, and this is you know, normally it's it's all random, but because this is what you've skaped to your you know, your adventuring on, maybe there you know, you roll and you can choose the thing you get or the thing above it or the thing below it or something like that.

7:01 You know, I don't you can do whatever the heck you want with it. But there's some interesting stuff, like I think a campaign of this would get old fast. Yeah, and that's that's that's much of the story. Yeah. The premise of the story is that this was going to be a whole campaign. Yeah, and it just seems like like a new system, which is not wrong if it boarded ND go play something else. Yeah, to be fair, So I said, like my first reaction, my second reaction, my overall thought on this is like, yeah, I think I had to agree with Jim. I hadn't thought of it that way. But it's like that would that would get kind of old fast. I see it doing it a little bit. But like to your point, I still want as a player, I still want to have agency. I still want to be able to make the decision or to argue with the person that that says like, well let's try to avoid conflict. Well now we need to for whatever reason instead of just having dice decide everything. And one of the things that I know you and I have talked about is like having players role for everything when they don't really need to is annoying, Like it's just annoying.

8:03 It slows down the game like it it's just it's it's a little bit boring. So yeah, I tend to agree that how deep does that go? Like you know, the decision process, no kidding? Are you rolling for everything right? Or you know, because at some point there's there's God, there has to be decision making and stuff like this. Okay, I'm going to move all right, you know, roll to see whether role to see whether you take your move action or not. Okay, can already imagine it's a seven that means I get my move action. All right, I'm gonna go twenty five feet? How many feet you move? Like it? Like it just becomes comical at some point. So yeah, so let's let's say that this is the This is the advice I'm going to give is if you want to do that, if you want to proceed with that game, you first must for six months of your life, consult a magic eight ball for every every single decision, like am I gonna go to work today? Like because and see how you like that? Try not for a week you feel like, will this campaign be fun? Sheka appears unlikely. Are we gonna play today? Let me roll D twenty. I will say that this is actually not a terrible idea for tables like hours, which is full of people in the thirties and forties, and they can't always make it. Yeah, so someone's like, oh, hey, I got caught up at work.

9:28 I can't make here. You know, the kids we roll for and so it'say, listen, you don't have to be here. We'll just roll a bunch of extra dice so we'll see what your character does. And that's gonna be like Okay, great, call me let me know if I'm dead. Hey, sorry, yeah, this I thought it was just a fun thought experiment. I wanted to bring it to you guys, but the and to kind of like bring around to like, you know, trying to be some sort of advice show. If you get bored of D and D, you're allowed to plane on the system. This show is like, you know, we're going to talk about D and D because that's what we know. Jim knows a thousand other games, but but I don't, so Jim can talk about that on different show. But like a lot of what we talked about on the show is like things that you can take into any t THERAPG and like you can take a lot of the same concepts into it. If you want to do a game that there's one hundred percent random, there's probably some out there, Jim, do you know, do you know any of that are that random? Not top of my head, but certainly there are games that have a lot more randomness built into them. But you know, like if if you want to have games where you roll dice to see whether you know before every spell to see whether it works or not, those systems are out there for you if you want to try and track them down. I have some one shots where that's already part of the part of it. I think we randem Dave's Minotar Maze, and that was part of the whole thing, where like the maze itself, a random mazed generation is a great way to do this, to create something that is that gives the idea of like it's supernaturally confusing no matter how hard you try to map. Yeah, I

11:01 loant you to say for the maze itself, and that there was there was mechanics built in for a spell suppression, so you literalated roll to see if your spell went off. Oh no, And that's really that's a relliant That can be an interesting aspect of a campaign, Like if you're in a region where magic's gone haywire or something and you're rolling to see if your spell works and it has a ten percent chance of working or something, or you know, depending on where you are, what you do like that, Yeah, that could definitely after point out that like this example that you just gave and Jim's best example of how this could work, all imply that's for a short term, right yeah, yeah, like go in this one region or Jim for the for a one shot or for this one dungeon. I think it'd be cool for a one shot. So like, so my advice is like, try it for a one shot, maybe a two shot, do it as a as a single dungeon crawl. And if you're if you play in our group, but that's like three or four sessions, yeah, that's that's that's six months. And if your players aren't reaching across the table to strangle you, maybe maybe keep trying it. But yeah, this is I I gotta at least applaud the innovation, you know, or you could just say no, I don't feel like DM. Yeah, you're like it's a really long winded way to tell people that you really don't want to DM. Well that's right, or you know you almost want to, Like it's like, Anna, there'd be so much prep to your point, right, Jim, Yes, I'm kind of overthinking it. Yeah, I'm just going to DM too much. I would I would close on the on the on the fact that Mark Cuban is one of the most prolific entrepreneurs on the planet and a lot of his ideas failed, So just keep keep at it you'll find one

12:37 that makes you a billionaire. Actually, one of them are gonna stay. Yeah, that's what I got, Joe, thanks for that, and then that's going to do it for today. So thank you so much for listening to Hello Adventurers. Where your host Jason Portisa, Jim Crocker and Joe McFall producer or the engineer Jason Portiso. He is when an experi your orplanneurs with Kristen Broderick. You can reach out to us with any feedbackward suggestions, but emailing Hello Adventures podcast at gail dot com. Hello Adventures is a JTP audio product. I'm gonna keep getting that faster and faster and wrap this thing up. Goodbye bye, Hang on a second, Hang on a second, Adventurers. Okay, goodbye Adventurers. I'm so glad that he rolled them.