"Say yes or roll dice" is a story-gaming mantra. One way to interpret it: if the consequences of failure aren't interesting, why are you wasting time talking about this problem
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I've been playing a sporadic game of FUDGE for over a year now and it's a pretty good system for not getting in the way of role playing. FATE's very similar but with an kick-ass character creation system. Maybe when you're back here you can come sit on on a session or two.
This is a continuation of my initial (and quickly abandoned) "make failure interesting" point. I'm probably wrong, but you're players may only get excited when the dice come out because a goodly chunk of the creative input they have lies in the numbers on their character sheets and how those numbers inform die rolls. Regardless of why it's what your players want, make it so that every time the dice come out, you're excited, too.
The solution might not be to shy away from D&D's mechanical crunch, but to make the crunch more meaningful. The consequences shouldn't be whether or not they "find the tracks," or "climb this wall," or "beat up these monsters." How about good tracking lets the party set up an ambush and bad tracking means the kidnapped youth they're trying to rescue has been injured, as evidenced by the bloody scarf they find (I don't own Burning Wheel, but this may be an example straight from the book)? Give the dice teeth, let them shake things up a bit; you're not a machine so your story can change (in my opinion,
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Mm, an interesting point, and certainly one that's easier to adopt mid-campaign. I've found myself doing that naturally to some extent, just in coming up with flavor for the results of their rolls. Over the course of their first battle (which was just with a few cultist thugs that were not really a match for them), the enemies rolled consistently superbly, and as such have slowly morphed into much more dedicated and fanatical cultists than they started out. The necromancer, who has put much effort into making her magic difficult to resist, is convinced they must be warded from it, because they've made every difficult save she's thrown at them. It's getting harder to find meaningful flavor for what is essentially incredible luck, though. The answer is clearly "it's not luck", but I haven't come up with something more interesting yet
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The solution might not be to shy away from D&D's mechanical crunch, but to make the crunch more meaningful. The consequences shouldn't be whether or not they "find the tracks," or "climb this wall," or "beat up these monsters." How about good tracking lets the party set up an ambush and bad tracking means the kidnapped youth they're trying to rescue has been injured, as evidenced by the bloody scarf they find (I don't own Burning Wheel, but this may be an example straight from the book)? Give the dice teeth, let them shake things up a bit; you're not a machine so your story can change (in my opinion, ( ... )
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