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What's dice, and how do you use it - and why? Ok, first of all I should specify as to why we use dice, first, and then get into the how's of doing it on Yahoo! chat - and finally the systems that we use for the dice Why Dice? Why Dice? Simple enough - Role-playing as I know it started with tabletop role-playing, where it started with that old staple, Dungeons & Dragons, and evolved and mutated as different companies came out with different games using different systems. One of those companies is White Wolf Games, which is the company that publishes the games that Fit into the World of Darkness setting. A lot of the players in WoD started out playing the games tabletop, and liked the systems - from the way the character sheets were structured (no random statistic generation like D&D - it's a fully customized sheet. You pick where the character is strong and weak - not the dice) to the way the dice themselves were rolled. From what I've heard, a bunch who have played tabletop but were playing in Yahoo! found out that dice was an available option - and finally got enough people together to play the game that it became somewhat of a regular room in the Entertainment and Arts section (because they were originally Ayenee players - some still do their fantasy characters in Ayenee, too) A lot of the Ayenee players who come into WoD complain about dice, saying that it "takes away all the skill" and that it "ruins the pure nature of rp" and other, far more disparaging remarks. Perhaps to them it does - but for myself and the others who prefer it, it has many merits, and no, the results are not fully random in the sense of being 50/50 chance of failing or succeeding - and even if it were, you'd have a much better chance of doing damage than in standard T1 combat anyways. (How many times have you seen T1 battles? How many of those resulted in death or clear victory? I think you get my point.) In WoD, you don't roll a single die and then decide whether the outcome was successful. Rather, you have what's called a "dice pool" that's based on how high your stats are for the required action - and you're the one who chooses what level your stats are at. If your character has high stats in something, they're good at it - and get more dice to roll, and thus thhe chance of a more successful attack than someone who sucks at it. Still, a lot of people loathe the very idea of dice, and don't want to play with them. Good news is that there's a simple solution for them - stay out of the WoD room, or any room that uses it. Simple, neat and tidy solution. After all - they wouldn't like it if I wandered into a regular Ayenee room and tried to force them to play with dice, right? So why should they think I and the other WoD players who do like dice are going to fall all over them with gratitude when they come into the rooms that we make and play in, and make such outright disparaging comments about our favorite conflict resolution methods? Yet that's exactly the situation I find at times. People walk into the room, all the players but them understand and like playing by the rules we follow - and yet that lone role-player who wanders in expects everyone to throw away the rules they enjoy playing with, just to accommodate the single newcomer. Ain't gonna happen - and it's unreasonable to expect it to. How do you use dice in Yahoo!? This is a much simpler question. So simple I've done an emote for cheetachat that covers all the required steps for activating and using dice. As I'm lazy, all I'm going to do is elaborate on it slightly so that it is a little more easily understood, breaking it down step-by-step.
More to come
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