A system for forum games?

[hogarth]

I've seen PbPs disintegrate when the players accused the DM of dice fixing.

That's silly. The DM can ALWAYS rig the game in his favour, especially in a PbP; there's no way to prevent it.

[Kaelik]

I've seen PbPs disintegrate when the players accused the DM of dice fixing.

That's silly. The DM can ALWAYS rig the game in his favour, especially in a PbP; there's no way to prevent it.

But if you think the DM is lying about the dice every time you cast Finger of Death, and he denies it, you can just make him roll in front of the screen, and demand to see the fort save and all buffs to it for every creature after it dies.

If it's online, you can still demand the latter, but not the former, because you can never make him roll in plain sight.

So if you suspect him of being a lying douche, you can either play with a lying douche, or stop playing.

[Whatever]

Arguing with the DM about dice rolls is a really poor way to try to assert narrative agency. A better solution would be to skip the dice rolls entirely, and just let players have some direct input on the world and on the unfolding story.

Everyone is already at a computer, if they wanted to play a tactics minigame, they can just go do that instead. Drop the dice rolls, drop numeric stats, just have players write up useful descriptions of their characters, pick out what their characters are good at, and figure out the story as you go along. You don't need to spend 5 days showing that the players are stronger than some bandits, that's the kind of encounter that you could finish in a day if you didn't have to roll for initiative and advance it round by round. And the end result is the same: the players and DM write an awesome description of the characters beating up the bandits, end scene, on to whatever's next.

Is it really a problem to have your character win or lose just because you and the DM agree that's how things should go?

[Whatever]

The more I think about this, the more I'd rather play "Novel: the Writing" than "Dice: the Rolling."

Have two threads. One for discussing what's going to happen next, the other for writing it out all pretty-like. The DM would explain the next scene to the players, who would suggest both potential actions and potential resolutions. For example, in the form of "wouldn't it be awesome if...". Suggestions would not need to be limited to their own character, because nothing is set in stone at this point (the other players and the DM are free to object to suggestions, or ideally to propose revisions). The DM and the players would pick out the resolution they liked best, and get it written up.

I dunno, there's got to be guides to collaborative fiction for aspiring authors out there already, dig those up instead of trying to base this on 70s wargames.

[Vebyast]

The more I think about this, the more I'd rather play "Novel: the Writing" than "Dice: the Rolling."

[...]

I dunno, there's got to be guides to collaborative fiction for aspiring authors out there already, dig those up instead of trying to base this on 70s wargames.

I agree with you on the availability and suitability of collaborative writing, but at least for me it scratches a slightly different itch than gaming. I think of gaming as a kind of constrained optimization problem - the DM gives you a task expressed in the language of the game, and you have to find a way to complete that task using the system's rules.

Anyway, now that I think about it, the Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker might work pretty well. Just replace initiative with an asynchronous action submission, add a secure randomness generator, and you're done. Going to go move this thought over to the proper thread.

[RobbyPants]

If you don't trust the DM, the game's pretty much screwed, anyway. Even if the DM starts rolling out in front of the screen, those future die rolls have no bearing whatsoever on the past ones. It doesn't prove guilt or innocence at all. Worse yet, people who don't understand stats might take a drop in roll quality to be proof the DM was cheating.

Once you start down that road, the game's pretty much over.

[hogarth]

If you don't trust the DM, the game's pretty much screwed, anyway.

If you're fighting a creature with [GM fiat] hit points and an armor class of [GM fiat] with saving throws of [GM fiat] and [GM fiat] special attacks and defenses, removing the [GM fiat] from dice rolls is just a drop in the bucket.

[Kaelik]

If you don't trust the DM, the game's pretty much screwed, anyway. Even if the DM starts rolling out in front of the screen, those future die rolls have no bearing whatsoever on the past ones. It doesn't prove guilt or innocence at all. Worse yet, people who don't understand stats might take a drop in roll quality to be proof the DM was cheating.

Once you start down that road, the game's pretty much over.

It doesn't really matter whether those past rolls where fudged. That's a sunk cost. Whether you should keep playing now is dependent only on whether you are playing in a situation where you can have fun. It doesn't matter if in the past you weren't, because now you are.

Provided, as I said, that you can also see the creatures info afterwords, in order to continue confirmation that he is not dicking you.

There are degrees of trust, and I've never met a DM I trusted implicitly to never lie about a result, but I have met nothing but DMs I trust implicitly to not have loaded dice.

So if they roll in front of me, that means I can trust the dice results.

Most DMs I would trust them to present fair challenges behind the curtain, but if I thought there was an issue, insisting on seeing the challenges after the fact is one way to again, increase the amount you can trust them.