Dust Diceless - One-Shot

Dust is a regularly shifting idea for a setting I have in my head. It's gonzo science fantasy with elements of post-apocalypse and western, and I keep revisiting it in slightly different ways, still trying to figure out what exactly I want it to be. The other night, I got to run some diceless FKR for my uni friends and prepared a few simple adventure hooks to build off from on the fly, using that setting. And two players wrote dramatized session reports, which is awesome! You can read them here and here in PDF.

Characters

• Daffy the Duck Barbarian makes a come back, we last saw him in Tomb of the Serpent Kings

• Garrett the Paramite Hunter, carrying a long rifle and a pheromone-filled paramite egg

• Marik the Wandering Gunslinger, with a hand-crafted revolver and a faithful unicorn steed

What Happened

The Land of Yz

 

Surrounded by the Boreal Desert, a dry ocean of sand so thin only giant crawler machine-bugs can cross it, the Land of Yz is a fertile, warm and dry valley surrounded by rocky mountains. Somewhere in that valley is the corpse of a massive bug, a large town called Carapace.

Carapace

We started the game in Carapace, with the PCs resting from their travels in an Inn called Central 3B, a hollowed-out and re-decorated missile or rocket ship from the Before-Times. The players decided they hadn't met yet, so I just gave them a few adventure hooks and let them figure out what to do next.

• At the town's entrance, they had seen wanted posters for a "Burning Giraffe", with a reward offered by the Cronen Family, a powerful local bloodline.

• A troop of wounded workers came back from the local salt mine, some of them missing limbs.

• A local scout came back in a hurry and let the barman know about a horde of Lapins at about a day's ride of here. They have raptors.

 

A Lapin, Art by Chris Huth

 

That last one caught their attention and they offered their help to the scout, called Mitzi. She'd pay them 10 thrones in advance (not a lot) and ask the town's meister to gather an appropriate reward but they needed to move asap.

Half a day later, they were in a desert canyon, nearing the Lapins. They stumbled upon a small band of them fighting a smaller group of blue-eyed nomads from the desert.

The Nomads

At this point, Daffy wanted to try and backstab one of the distracted Lapin, followed by the others. I made them roll for it. And we were all kind of bummed out when the perfectly good plan didn't work out - it felt kind of artificial to justify the results of dice when a clear outcome felt obvious from the players' actions and situation. I suggested we roll back and just go with the flow, diceless. That went much better, providing a more "realistic" feel to the scene. Rounds were more elastic, with "whoever should be next" going next instead of a more "you go, I go" rythm. Which turned all actions (not most, all!) into interesting, tactical decisions. At the very least you gotta explain what you're trying to achieve when swinging your sword at the enemy. One PC got blinded by a sand throw, and saved by another. I didn't use APIE Hits for this one, though I think I'll stick to these as I like having some clear guideline on how much damage one can sustain with what weapons.

After the fight, the surviving nomads thanked the party and told them that the Lapins horde attacked their caravan earlier, with Kaz the Ravenous at their head. Kaz is a brutish Cochon warlord, known for having devoured his boyfriend alive after an argument around body odor.

Kaz the Devourer

 

A few hours later, they reached the camp and devised a clever plan: Marik would get on high ground and take position as a sniper with Garrett's long rifle. Garrett would go unarmed as a distraction and try to seduce Kaz, while Mitzi and Daffy went from behind, sneaked in, cutting the throats of guards and eventually backstabbing Kaz while Garrett was undressing (it went just as planned, as the point was to have a quick one shot, the plan was good and we didn't have much time left). They found a chest full of gems in his tent and fled the scene before the corpses were noticed. As they rode into the sunset, they saw three giant six-legged lizards attack the camp and the Lapins dispersing and screaming.

 

Back to Carapace, the village's elder (or Meister), one named Ishmaël, offered his ancient family sword (made of titanite!)

Post-Session Thoughts

 

"I did a lot of roleplay already, but this one was particularly good. I really enjoyed it. Usually we use the dice, but without it it's different : it's more logical. We can do things without having any special skills. There are no randomisers to determine the outcome of events, we choose it"
-Garrett's player

"At first, we began to play with dices but quickly stop to play in a diceless way. Well, not totally diceless since the dices were used for things that aren’t in our control IRL, like the direction of the wind for example. The fact that it was a diceless game was more intuitive and I preferred this way of playing than with the dices that decide if, for example, when you try to sneak behind enemies but it fails because the dice says you walk on a piece of wood making enemies aware of your position, it doesn’t feel really intuitive. Letting the gamemaster decide if things are more likely to happen normally or fail is more “natural” to me. That was a good game in diceless, and I’m glad we played this way because when we began with dices, the decisions the dices were taking didn’t make any sense to me."
-Daffy's player

I'm experimenting with pacing a bit more using movie jargon - fast-forward, pause, rewind, etc.
I'm also being very overt about hooks and such, telling the players outright stuff like "ok so here's some leads" then going back to describing the environment. Not being coy about conventions most gamers recognize instantly allows for a faster paced game.