To dice or not to dice?

faraday

So in asking how writers come up with this, what I hope is that through example players can be encouraged to think of themselves as writers of the story and not players of a character.

I can't speak to comic book writing specifically, but certainly in general fiction writing, you don't bust out a RPG handbook, make up a protagonist, and roll dice to figure out what happens to them.

But when writing a story (be it a comic book or a novel) you are writing a story. You may have whole team involved (as @Roz described), each with their own ideas and agendas, but (hopefully) you're all marching toward a unified vision. You have lots of meetings to plan things out, review and revise drafts, etc. It's a lengthy, collaborative process.

That is very different from a MU*. For starters, you have a whole bunch of players each wanting to tell a different story - one where their character is the main protagonist. Many players are resistant to planning things out in advance, preferring an experience more like improv acting. So decisions have to be made quickly on-the-spot. There is no revision process (barring the extreme, dreaded retcon).

So sure, in principle I agree that players should put story over stats. I am very happy when players can just work things out amogst themselves without resorting to code or rolls. But when conflicts arise, I think it's beneficial to have a way for them to be resolved speedily and impartially.

Dice systems are neither perfect nor absolutely essential, but I for one find them quite handy.

Arkandel

I don't care a lot about dice other than in combat but I do like the framework of a stated system - which necessitates actions using those stats, and the most common way to do it is through rolling dice.

To elaborate, whenever I've played in completely statless MU* I didn't like how wide open they were. Sure, I can make a character who's a telepath but what are his limits? Can he read only surface thoughts? Memories? Influence them? Rewrite them? If he can teleport does knowing the destination matter? Does the distance? is it possible to block teleportation and how effectively?

I don't mean to necessarily extrapolate based on my personal preferences but I think that's how a number of players do it. They play the World of Darkness, for instance, even if they rarely roll for things unless they have to in order to use the common framework for How Powers Work. If you have Obfuscate 3 you know exactly what dots 1-3 do; it won't let you make buildings disappear. So I won't roll for the damn thing every time (or require other people do so), but only when needed; is someone else actively using Auspex at the time my PC sneaks around? Then let's find out what happens.

I'd say one out of maybe ten scenes of mine actually require rolling unless there's a ST present. But when they do, having the option comes very handy, and even when they do the rest of the system is always needed.

Thenomain

@faraday

Part of what makes improv work is sharing and switching out who takes the lead. Without this social contract, there is no way to determine if Squirrel Girl gets to defeat Dr. Doom. By stats alone, this should never happen. Except for an act of pure randomness via Brownian Motion and rules for exploding dice, that is.

Besides, there is a collaborative process. You're participating in one right now, and the other happens around the writer's table in the form of "you can't do that!" and "nun uh!" and "that power doesn't work that way because of that one time in Amazing Squirrel Girl #114 on page 7 in the first panel!" versus "well in the Dr. Doom Millenial Special he second story with Reed's twin kids that power worked exactly that way!"

Hyperbole to make a point, that the process is different but we deal with similar needs to share concepts as, say, a writer negotiating three decades of material by other authors as well as pressure from the publisher and the artist and other would-be editors.

It's not a 1:1 relation, but I bet we could still get some powerful tips from comic creators on how to balance statless systems.

Apos

@Thenomain You have some really good points there, and while I could only speculate on how comic book writers try to balance out the continuity of their shared stories, you're right in that there are some really interesting parallels.

Like for them, they have to weigh what makes for the more interesting outcome and appealing story to their readers versus a more internally consistent outcome that might make a story impossible or a too predictable with a weaker narrative.

I think that definitely has some pretty close similarities between a GM on a MU (particularly a statless consent one) that is trying to keep the different storylines consistent and coherent versus individual players that want to take them in different directions and make the sandbox less and less plausible to have overlap.

Roz

Really, you could kind of think of each comic book writer as an individual player with all their titles kind of competing with the other titles for which characters they can use and who they can kill off and what giant changes they can make. And the editorial team is the staff trying to keep everybody playing together in a manner that is generally collaborative and matching with the overall theme and narrative of the universe.