Controversial since they first burst onto the scene three decades ago, games that don’t use dice, cards or other randomisers have their firm fans – and others who won’t touch them. Ross, Greg and James go over how they work, how they evolved, where they function best, what the standout systems are, and their own personal experiences playing, designing and developing them.

Games discussed in this episode, in the order they’re mentioned:

• Amber Diceless Roleplay by Erick Wujcik (Phage Press, 1991), the first published diceless RPG.
• Pantheon and Other Roleplaying Games by Robin D. Laws (Hogshead Publishing, 2000), a set of GM-less narrative rules and five setting packs in a single 24-page book. Now thoroughly out of print, alas. 
• Nobilis by Jenna Moran (Hogshead Publishing, 2000). We mostly talk about the multi-award-winning second edition, but there is a wonderful third edition that is also worth your time and money.
• Bullwinkle & Rocky Role-Playing Party Game by Dave Cook and Warren Spector (TSR, 1988), TSR’s extraordinarily ahead of its time and almost totally forgotten glove-puppet RPG. The link goes to our friends at the Vintage RPG podcast’s episode on this curio.
• Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok by Andrew Valkauskas (Pendelhaven, 2013), Viking sagas at the end of the world, with a clever draw-bag mechanic.
• Everway by Jonathan Tweet (Wizards of the Coast, 1996), an ahead-of-its-time narrative game using beautiful bespoke art cards. This link goes to a free introduction to the 25th edition of the game.
• Dread by Epidiah Ravachol and Nat “woodelf” Barmore (The Impossible Dream, 2006), which we discussed a couple of episodes above.
• Theatrix by Anthony Gallela, David Berkman, Travis Eneix, and Andrew Finch (1995), an early set of diceless generic rules with strong narrativist tropes. 
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by LND’s James Wallis (Hogshead Publishing, 1998 and others), discussed at the end of Season 1 (S1 E13).
• Puppetland by John Tynes. This was originally self-published free on the web in 1994 and has had multiple editions, but one we talk about in the episode is the most recent, released by Arc Dream in 2016.
• Hillfolk by Robin D. Laws (Pelgrane Press, 2014), further develops many of the concepts from Pantheon into a wonderful set of rules for creating single-session stories. 
• In Spaaace! by Greg Stolze (2006), Greg’s own free-to-download diceless SF RPG. Go on, download it! It’s free!
• Interactive Fantasy issues 1-4 (various authors, Hogshead Publishing, 1994-5), the first attempt to seriously examine game narrative and storytelling systems. Now a free download from DriveThruRPG.
• Ten Candles by Stephen Dewey (Cavalry Games, 2015), which is not actually diceless but probably ought to be.
• Little Wars by H G Wells (1913), the first mass-market wargame from the early 20th century. One of the most readable sets of rules ever written, though occasionally reflecting the attitudes of its times, which is to say it’s egregiously sexist from pretty much the first paragraph onwards.
• Marvel Universe RPG by Dan Gelber, Jeffrey Simons, Evan Jones, Bill Jemas, and Mark D. Beazley (Marvel, 2003). Diceless, with CCG-like mechanics. Not available for sale any more, and quite rare.
• Villains and Vigilantes by Jeff Dee (FGU, 1979/1982), an early superhero system. I once said that if you were looking for a game where your PC can hurl mighty objects massive distances, this was the sort of object you would hurl.
• Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Petersen et al (Chaosium, 1981-present), discussed above in S2 E09. 
• Wanderhome by Jay Dragon (Possum Creek Games, 2021)
• Golden Sky Stories by Ryo Kamiya and Ewen Cluney (Star Line Publishing, 2011)
• Alice is Missing by Spenser Starke (Hunters Entertainment, 2020) 

Fiasco is Jason Morningstar’s brilliant and multi-award-winning game of simple schemes that go disastrously – and often hilariously – wrong. Not a conventional RPG, it set the agenda for a generation of storygames and almost broke through into the mainstream after a brilliant appearance on Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop a few years ago.

We analyse the game’s Coen Brothers-like structure, talk about its mechanics and influence, discuss whether we prefer the original edition or the more recent card-based version, and ponder the problems of publishing a game that’s hard to categorise.

More information on Fiasco is at DriveThruRPG

Experience Points are a common game mechanic in tabletop roleplaying games, but what are they? From Dungeons & Dragons to the World of Darkness, a wide variety of games use experience points to measure character progression and improvement, but in increasingly different and intricate ways. We discuss how these mechanics affect characters, narrative and the dynamics of play, talk about favourite and least-favourite examples, and brainstorm ideas for alternative progression systems.

Some of the games and other cultural artefacts we mention in the podcast include:

• • FTL is an excellent SF roguelike computer game, where you captain a small craft fleeing a tyrannical rebel force in an often futile attempt to reach the comforting bosom of the Empire. Clever emergent narrative elements.
  • The Spawn of Fashan (Kirby Lee Davids, 1981) is a legendarily obscure and ineptly designed early RPG. Not actually as bad as legend states, but still pretty bad.
  • Role Playing Public Radio is Ross’s regular podcast, and if you enjoy LND and haven’t already given it a listen then you absolutely should.
  • Delta Green is the definitive game of modern Cthulhoid and conspiracy horror. We discussed it in s1 e05.
  • Unknown Armies is Greg’s game of modern magic, conspiracy horror and bad things that aren’t exactly Cthulhoid but are pretty damn squamous all the same. We discussed it in s1 e12.
  • Dungeons & Dragons (various editions) is a popular beat combo, originally formed in Liverpool in the early 1960s.
  • World of Warcraft signed with Jive Records in 1997 and the success of her first two studio albums, Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops I Did It Again (2000), made her the best-selling teenage artist of all time.
  • Dragonball Z is a cartoon, a form of entertainment whereby drawn static images are manipulated to create moving images of young men beating the snot out of each other.
  • The Wikipedia article on experience points that we mentioned. Author unknown but this is pretty good, particularly on the way computer games have manipulated the idea of XP beyond anything in tabletop RPGs.
  • I have many opinions on the Final Fantasy series but this margin is too small to contain them.
  • 7th Sea 2nd Edition is not ‘a swashbuckling game of caution and conservation’ as Greg suggests. It’s the most commercially successful fantasy take on three musketeers and fourdecks.
  • Robin Laws’ description of the difference between Iconic and Dramatic Characters appeared originally in the writer’s guidelines for the ‘New Hero’ series of short story anthologies, published by Stoneskin Press (part of Pelgrane Press). It’s reprinted in Robin’s blog here. In full disclosure, both Greg and James have stories in The New Hero volume 2 (ed. Robin Laws, 2013) which is worth your time.
  • Vampire the Masquerade, formed by Kurt Cobain in Seattle in 1987, was the most successful of the grunge bands of the 1990s, setting fashion and music trends around the world.
  • Unknown Armies… we did that one already this episode.
  • Phoenix Command was a notoriously ‘simulationist’ RPG with very detailed mechanics, particularly for combat, to the level that one of the designers left the world of RPGs and went off to be a rocket scientist for NASA. No longer officially available.
  • The Fugue system is the amnesia-based set of mechanics that James designed for his game Alas Vegas, including a system for gaining new skills and character background on the fly. Fugue is a free download and only about twenty pages. Go on.
  • Dying Breath, Greg’s forthcoming horror RPG. More details will follow as it comes closer to publication.
  • Termination Shock… I have completely forgotten what we said about Termination Shock, but any chance to mention Termination Shock is a good one.
  • Apocalypse World and PBtA, and the whole idea of getting experience points from failed rolls instead of success. This is something I (James) talk about a lot when I’m teaching boardgames because failure is what makes playtesting interesting: if you do not learn from your failure then you will never progress as a game designer, whereas if you just succeed, if nobody finds any problems with your game, then you may have a good design but you won’t learn anything. Should XP be a reward for success, or a demonstration of the character learning from in-game events? Anyway, we covered Apocalypse World in s1 e00, our pilot episode.
  • Dread, the Jenga-based game of teetering horror, was the subject of LND s2 e11, above
  • Dungeons & Dragons Immortals Set, written by Frank Mentzer and published in 1986, takes D&D characters from level 37 upwards to a state where they have transcended mere levels. As an example of the sort of stuff ion it, players can exchange their PCs’ experience points for Power Points at a rate of 10,000 to one. This may be the antecedant of Palladium’s much-mocked Megadamage concept.
  • If you want to understand gamification, the recent book You’ve Been Played by Adrian Hon is an up-to-date and timely examination of the use and misuse of the phenomenon by the co-creator of the ‘Zombies Run!’ fitness app. I (James) used to work with Adrian in the early days of his company Six to Start, he gets it.
  • Paranoia exists in multiple editions. The one we’re talking about in this episode is the 2016 reboot with card-based mechanics that was helmed by James Wallis, with Grant Howitt and Paul Dean.
  • The Skinner Box, better known as an operant conditioning chamber, was created by psychologist and behaviourist B F Skinner in the 1920s as a way to condition and observe particular behaviours in pigeons. Stories that he placed his infant son in a similar box are almost certainly untrue.
  • Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the latest album from Taylor Swift in a career that has grown continually in terms of its commercial and critical success, alongside remasters of previous works.
  • Oglaf is generally not safe for work.

Traveller is a science-fiction roleplaying game of bold explorers and brave adventurers. Designed by Marc Miller, it was the first major SFRPG, remains a major title in the field, and has influenced everything from computer games to comics, film and TV series. But how’s the old ship holding together after forty-five years in spaaace?

Traveller development has forked, and there are several different editions available. We look at the most recent, the Traveller Core Rulebook Update 2022 from Mongoose Publishing, with mechanics designed by Gareth Hanrahan. Some of us like it, some of us don’t, some of us respect its legacy more than we want to play it, and all that makes for an entertaining conversation.

“If you came out of Star Wars going, ‘The Force? Pfft! I want to be Han Solo!’ then Traveller is your game.” – James 

More information on this edition of Traveller at DriveThruRPG; and for comparison here’s a link to the 5th edition of Traveller from Far Future Enterprises, the one created by Marc Miller, the game’s original designer. 

Footnote: at some point in the episode we say that The Expanse was based on a Traveller campaign, and that’s probably wrong. While sources indicate that the background and story of the SF series were developed as an RPG campaign, we can’t find any specific reference to the game system. Similarly, Marc Miller has said that Firefly was based on a Traveller campaign that Joss Whedon ran while at college in the 1980s, and while that’s a great story we haven’t been able to find anything to back that up either. Also you should watch The Expanse, it is basically an RPG campaign in space right down to players dropping out and their PCs mysteriously not showing up in the story any more.

James also talks about the game Elite, originally released in 1984 on the BBC Model B home computer. Genuinely amazing for the time (occluded wireframe graphics, realtime 3D starship combat, eight procedurally generated galaxies with 256 planets each – all running in 32K of memory), it remains a highwater mark in game design. It’s also upfront about its debt to Traveller. Here’s a short documentary of co-designer David Braben playing it and talking about it some years later.

Pendragon is the masterwork of a master-designer, the late Greg Stafford. This game of chivalric adventures in the world of King Arthur and his knights was a milestone in RPG design when it came out in 1985. Four decades and several mantelpieces of awards later, Chaosium has just released a starter set for 6th edition Pendragon, prior to the full rulebook in 2024. What will the team make of it, and does it still live up to its reputation as the most elegantly designed RPG ever published? 

Hole in the Sky is a celebrated peasant-funnel adventure for nothingth-level characters, using the Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) system: each player gets four largely useless characters with skills and equipment that may or may not be helpful, and ending the adventure with any of them still alive is considered a success. In this season finale episode Ross runs the adventure for Greg and James, plus a couple of special guests:

• The excellent Vee from Queen’s Court Games, best known for podcasts including ‘The All Night Society’ and ‘One-Shots and Other Mischief’;
• Game designer Gareth Hanrahan from Ireland. We’ve discussed a couple of games Gareth designed or co-designed this season (The Laundry Files and Mongoose Traveller, to name just two) and we’re delighted that he’s still talking to us.

Featuring bickering dwarves, an invisible bridge many miles long, a giant climbing pumpkin-thing, cannibalism, Greg doing voices, a hole in the sky, and a lot of peasants dying in increasingly ridiculous ways. Enjoy!

We discuss this adventure in Episode 0 of Season 3, as part of the promotion for our new Kickstarter, so if you enjoyed this then check that out.