Instead, you set up a Jenga-style tower of blocks, and to accomplish certain tasks, you have to pull a certain number of blocks from the tower without collapsing it. Especially if you can find a way to make your friends laugh along the way.ĭread is a roleplaying game that doesn’t use dice at all. Sure, failure has consequences in any game, even silly ones, but if you’re in on the joke, then failure isn’t so bad. The caddy who grabbed you is clearly carrying a ninja on his back, not a bag of golf clubs.īut you must proceed as if you succeeded, no matter how ridiculous things get. So, say you’re using wujenitsu (ninja magic) to pretend to be a bag of golf clubs to sneak into a country club. One rule in the game that can lead to enjoyable chaos AND take the sting out of the traditional success/failure mechanic of roleplaying games is that you are instructed to act as if you never fail. In the game, you’re a ninja secretly delivering fast food. Ninja Burger is a humorous quickplay roleplaying game that uses standard six-sided dice. Naturally, this requires a little more creativity from both the player and the game runner, but together, you can tell some fantastic adventures. It opens up the narrative floodgates WAY beyond the success/failure binary option, and it has led to some of my absolute favorite moments in roleplaying. Or you can succeed, but with some consequence. You can fail at the task, but end up with something unexpected and advantageous still happening. You can have an overwhelming success, or an overwhelming failure, or many things in between. So, depending on the dice roll, it’s not just a success or a failure. Instead, they have symbols that represent success, failure, advantage, threat, triumph, and despair. There are different colored dice that represent different aspects of the game (your character’s ability to do something, the difficulty of the action they’re attempting, advantages and disadvantages to their action at the time, etc.), and the dice don’t have the traditional number values you’d expect. But others have a different approach that players might find more rewarding.įantasy Flight Games offers a Star Wars-themed roleplaying game that has one of my favorite dice systems. Some roleplaying games stick to the strict success/failure model. After all, if you had to beat a 15 and you rolled a 14, why should the result be the same as if you’d rolled a 2? The 14 is much closer, after all. But it can be frustrating for some players, new and old.

If you roll above a certain number, you succeeded.

In many RPGs, there’s a success/failure line.

In the simplest form, roleplaying games consist of you telling the gamemaster / dungeon master / game runner what you want to do, and the dice determining how it goes. I know that the dice and the rulebooks and all the numbers can be daunting for new players, but honestly, they’re just the laws of physics, fate, and chance given form. I love sitting at a table - or on a Zoom call - with friends and collectively creating an adventure in our imaginations. The simple act of telling a story with friends is rejuvenating for me. Roleplaying games are some of my absolute favorite pastimes.

Ninja puzzle games