Have any other GM's thought about this?

For those that don't know here's how it works (note: you will need a very mature RP group)

The GM sets the scene as usual, the players then describe what they are doing.

Interaction is handled as normal but the main difference comes during combat where in depth description becomed paramount.

the levels of success are based solely on the level of detail and any player that says "what?" when asked what they are doing losses there turn.

what do you think? does it have the capacity to work.?

My current GM has actually run a number of sessions of pure RP in the 40k universe and I took part in one of them. This was before he bought the Dark Heresy books, maybe even before he knew about them. To define our characters we got to pick one skill that we really excelled at and two or three (don't remember) that we were quite good at. When we used those skills we simply had a higher chance of succeeding. We also had fate points, and it was directly dependent on our befief in the emperor: little to no belief = 1 fp; moderate belief = 2 fp; high to fanatical belief = 3 fp. It was really fun and different but takes, as you say, maturity in the players and the GM, and here more than in any other RPG, since there are no real rules, the GM's word is law .

We've done something similiar at one point where there is no GM at all, where everyone tells a bit of the story, and antagonists are simply written in as part of the story. It requires a VERY mature group of people to work however, since it requires that people be actually willing to storytell that their characters got hurt if the situation dictates it.

VarniusEisen said:

Sure it can work. Of course maturity isn't the only thing you'll need in your players. You'll also need players who are interested in an unstructured style of play. Personally, that's where I think things are going to usually break down. Just because people are mature doesn't mean their imaginations work in the same way. I tend to think most such games would descend into chaos either due to immaturity or fundamental differences in view and style. There's a reason rpgs, or virtually any other kind of game for that matter, use rules: they help people interact constructively.

I do enjoy diceless role-play, but when I do I like to substitute the dice with something else, something that gives the player's more control over when they succeed or fail. In the past we've used cards, but I would rather use something else for Dark Heresy. I have considered giving the players 10 chits labeled 0-90 in increments of 10, with possibly an white chit for critical successes and a black chit for critical failures. The players spend the chits in place of dice rolling, and don't refresh their chits until all are spent or they spend a Fate point. The only snag comes with psyker powers. They might have to use dice anyway.

Diceless role playing is heretical. You must all report to the second sub-basement for immediate purification.

The nice thing about dice, which is the same nice thing about having a GM, is that everyone can be surprised.

Requete said:

Believe you me, whenever I'm running any kind of RPG I'm constantly surprised just by how the players interpret a clue, react to a situation, constructs a simple sollution to what I though would be a major problem, get impossibly stuck on the easiest of obstacles, or decides to brush aside the most important piece of information only to get stuck on the trivial, and always with no dices involved. With dices it's either success or fail, with human minds, it's always a guessing game.

My group and I have done it a few times and it can work really well with the right group. The only thing I tend to avoid with diceless play is combat. I tend to switch the sort of adventure every session; from all out action to investigation to a combination in one way or another. I've GM-ed two investigation adventures without any dice and we had loads of fun. Everything the players said out loud was in game and it lead to some crazy things. I used those adventures to give them a taste of the 40K-verse.