Welcome Adventurer

So, this is about my design ideas and process. I'll be analysing common tropes, very specific and cool indie ideas and rules I come across or come up with.

Here's a starter, so you know what you got yourself into:

What do we use dice for? Over on bastionland.com Chris McDowall recently discussed the idea of diceless RPG systems, where you simply take a quick ruling instead of rolling some form of ability check to resolve actions. He concludes that using dice only as a means to resolve uncertainty in the fiction might be feasible.

Really, the OSR community has been preaching a variant of this discussion for years: Do not roll for every single action, only the ones that put you at some form or risk. Following Chris' logic, is this even needed?

No, but the resulting game relies heavily on a GM that takes consistent, logically seeming, rulings based on the established fiction, as well as players able to go along with this type of storytelling. This will again not work for everybody.

As always there is no right way about this. Personally, I like the OSR way better. It grounds the character's experience in success percentage against difficult odds. What else is this but asking the dice to resolve uncertainty in the fiction?

You just need to be careful in considering what is a risk that requires a roll, I think. As the GM, you also need to phrase things a certain way, to get your players to engage in creativity. 

• "There is a wide chasm with a chest on the other side." -> "Can I roll to jump it?"

versus

• "There is a chasm, too wide to jump, but you see a chest on the other side." -> "Guys...wasn't there a ladder in that old storage room down the passage?" etc

So, really to me, more than eschewing ability checks, you need to drive home to your players that there is a problem that needs brains and not just luck. And this comes down to how you phrase things, specifically you should engage in setting sharp constraints, like with the "too far to jump" before. Stop with the "the door does not open" and go for "it clearly looks like a door, but it has neither handle nor keyhole."

Enough said for today... See you soon, with a prototype design for my next space game, loosely based on Classic Traveller, FTL and Space Quest. Yup. Space Quest.