DiceDream II: A Disjointed, Derivative Dumpster Fire
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| Closest thing I could find to a cover. Really lets you know what this "game" is about, yeah? |
I've already talked about Taylor Lane, but as a quick recap he's a pretentious pronouner that, in between moronic, insipid tweets where he asks a question or makes a statement that he rarely-if-ever responds to or defends, somehow produces even lower quality gaming material.
Case in point, DiceDream 2nd Edition—as in, ostensibly some sort of refinement or overhaul of the original—is a shallow, incomplete, Modernist vapidware game consisting largely of mechanics stolen from other games of only technically superior quality—they're still bad mechanics, just better than what Taylor could come up with solely by comparison—arranged in seemingly random order.
For example, it starts by explaining the usage die gimmick from one of those other Modernist hipster vapidware trash games (probably Troika or Mork Borg). It then explains inventory, which is of course slot-based because the theoretical intended audience can't be bothered to perform basic math (seriously, one of Taylor's exaggerated hit point gripes was that it involves "too much math").
After that you get Exhaustion (ie, hit points), weapon and armor categories, light source categories, ability checks, food, resting, fate points and aspects—it's just all over the fucking map.
Not that Fate Points or Aspects should ever be used, but they should be bundled with resolution mechanics, so players know how to do stuff, and handle things that interact with that. Items and rules for carrying items should also be grouped together.
Character creation, which starts on page 9, should be at the start or right after the game informs you how to do stuff. Death should be after combat, without reaction rolls shoehorned in between.
It's like Taylor observed a pattern in how rules are generally organized and deviated wildly purely out of spite, or perhaps desperately hoped that like Mork Borg's "art" and layout retards might praise it under the pretense of innovation or intent, as opposed to sheer incompetence.
Or maybe he just copied and pasted ideas from other sources as he found them, and left the draft document as-is.
In any case, tackling this disjointed mess (mostly) in order:
Usage dice are a terrible gimmick for morons that are too stupid to count, pushed and accepted by people dumb enough to believe that it's any sort of worthwhile innovation, and/or disingenuous, untalented hacks looking for anything to justify their vapidware game's existence.
In Taylor's case it's gotta be both, because he describes the traditional method of writing stuff down with a number next to it as "both boring and hard to keep track of".
In case you don't know how usage dice work, instead of saying you have, for example, twenty arrows or four days of food, these things have a die associated with them (ie, d12, d10, d8, etc), and when you use them you roll the die. If you get a one then it gets reduced by one step (so a d10 becomes a d8), and when you nat 1 on a d4 that means you have "one final and dramatic use left".
Taylor's asinine justification is that (beyond him being apparently too stupid to perform basic math), "in all the excitement of combat and all the confusion of a Dungeon, no one can be quite sure what their resources are."
Not knowing what your resources are doesn't mean they just magically vanish. Just because I don't know precisely what food I have in my pantry doesn't mean some of it disappears. In the heat of a conflict you might loose six arrows and forget to count, but when you check your quiver, unless some happened to fall out, or something happens to cause you to lose some, they get stolen or destroyed, you're going to have fourteen.
But what happens if you count your arrows? Does the GM just say, well, I guess you have a d10's worth? Going off the table, that could be anywhere from 18-28. What if you find an arrow? Is that just its own d4, now, even though you know it's clearly one? Can you combine them?
What happens if you give someone arrows? Here's an idea: just give everyone "one" arrow, so they then have d4 arrows, which means they can fire that one arrow multiple times (at least twice), somehow, as there's only a 25% chance it will still retain "a single dramatic use".
Taylor does explain what happens if you exceed the 40 item mark (which is a d12), but oddly uses potions as an example of what you do if you have "48 uses of a potion" (as opposed to an item that you could reasonably expect an adventurer to have 48 of): you have both a d12 and a d6 die. He points out that this would be "quite a bit of weight to carry", even though in actual games that would be something like around 5-10 pounds.
And that's assuming it's individual potions, even though a single potion would have a d4 die (that's what you use for "up to 4" of something), meaning it could be used multiple times. So it could just be a few flanks worth, and not a heap of smaller vials. But then, I have no idea how you'd even buy individual healing potions since, at the least, food and light are simply assigned usage dice based on how much you spend.
The usage die is merely an inelegant gimmick that adds unnecessary, uninteresting, illogical abstraction to something that doesn't benefit from it. It is different for it's own sake, not because the game was missing something, or something was off about how inventory is traditionally handled. It enhances or fixes nothing, the rule equivalent to shiny, jingling keys. Something for stupid, easily distracted people that, like Taylor, find writing "torches 5" and then marking one off each time one is used up an onerous task.
Inventory, like all these modernist vapidware trash games is slot based. You have slots equal to Strength, and all one-handed items take up a slot, while two-handed items take up two, actual weight and convenience be damned. For example, an arming sword would take up one slot, as would a dagger, even though a dagger weighs around two-thirds less and is smaller.
A spear would also take up one slot, even though it is heaver than either a dagger or arming sword, and both far longer and more inconvenient to carry about. "Heavy armor" takes up three slots, even though it weighs nearly ten times more than what you would consider to be light armor.
I should note that in this system, a person with a Strength of 3 could wear plate armor without any issues whatsoever. In fact, a knight would only need a Strength of around 7—ie, several points below the expected average of a typical person—in order to wade in combat without any penalties (assuming plate armor, shield, primary weapon, and a few backups).
Something else I just thought of: a character with a Strength of 2 could carry the world's largest gold bar, despite it weighing well over 500 pounds, since it could be held in two hands.
As with usage dice, it adds more abstraction and fixes nothing. The only thing it accomplishes is that it speeds things up, somewhat, but that's not nearly worth the senseless drawbacks. I also think it just further dumbs down players, but given that Taylor has a hard time performing basic math I can see why he'd want to drag other people down to his, ahem, intellectual
Ironically Dungeon World handles this better, by assigning things a weight. Not in pounds, or fractions of a pound, but in units of, say, 1-5. So a dagger might have a weight of 1, a sword weight 2, a big sword weight 3. I think plate armor had a weight of 4. So, it still doesn't come close to matching up with reality, but it's faster and makes slightly more sense.
Bad mechanic, but still superior to what Taylor could come up with or copy from someone else. If you wanted to simplify it/dumb it down, go with the Dungeon World method but add more variety to the weights, so you don't have a sword weighing nearly as much as plate.
Really though you should just stick with the traditional method, and if you want to make it a bit more realistic give some items a kind of "bulk/cumbersome" weight addition that reflects how annoying they can be to carry.
Like if you've ever carried a really big ladder: it has a weight, but it's very unwieldy, and would be a pain in the ass to cart around through the wilderness. This added weight wouldn't apply if it is being transported on a cart or wagon, giving characters an incentive to bring them along to hold containers, polearms, etc.
Directly from the PDF, Exhaustion reflects how tired and wounded you are. So, largely how people interpret hit points. I guess it's certainly something that Taylor bothered to rename it at all, though it's an odd choice given that it also reflects physical damage. But how is it different? What makes it superior to hit points?
Nothing.
Regardless of "class" or Constitution, everyone dies after suffering 21 damage, and whenever you venture to the surface you are immediately fully healed, every single time. Which makes it even stupider than 5th Edition D&D's full-heal-on-a-nap rule, because at least there you have to rest for awhile, there's some sort of related activity that must be completed.
Here? Just go into the dungeon, explore a bit, fight some stuff, head back to the surface, and you're instantly refreshed and all your wounds regenerate. I suppose this also means that you're effectively immune to damage, as it would constantly reset to 0.
I want to point out Taylor's hypocrisy (and I go into way more detail on this post): he pretends to hate hit points in "almost every TTRPG in which it is used", but his hit point ripoff is basically the same, he just renames it, and makes it incredibly easy to recover it. I guess "too much math" is okay, but only if you're playing his unfinished vapidware trash.
I'm going to skip ahead a bit to talk about combat, because it's related and about as retarded: you only ever suffer 1, 2, or 3 damage, regardless as to what you are fighting, making things far more predictable than D&D, assuming the players even know the damage that a given monster can inflict with all of its available options (assuming they even know what all of its available options are).
In combat you roll a red d8 and a black d8. Don't know why Taylor bothers color-coding them, as not everyone is going to have a red and black d8, and frankly it doesn't matter: GM could just roll one, players the other, and compare the results. Or take turns rolling one. Just don't, you know, throw two identical d8s into a cup or other container, so you can't tell who rolled which.
You add 1 to the dice based on various factors, such as if the character level beats the monster's, if they use a "combat-relevant" magic item or spell, use an Aspect, etc. The black die gets bonuses if the monster level is higher, the characters are outnumbered, negative Aspects, etc. You then compare the totals to determine vaguely what happens.
Here's the table:
This means that you could confront a big-ass dragon and slay it in a single turn, regardless of your level and its Hit Dice. And, unless you're the sort that values participation trophies, it wouldn't even be satisfying because it comes down largely to luck. I don't even think it would be especially difficult, given that an ancient red dragon would be rolling something like 1d8+3 (adding +1 for size, higher HD, and special attacks) versus the party's 1d8+1 for being outnumbered, plus another 1 for every magic user and Aspect they could add into the mix.
As for the various table results, what does emotional validation have to do with whether a hireling sticks around? What happens if you don't have any hirelings? What happens if you were cheering them all on in an identical fashion? I like how they just flee into the dungeon, no matter what's going on, what you're fighting, how many characters/monsters are standing.
These details matter in an actual RPG, where you have NPCs with personalities, but not in DD. No, like basic math that's apparently asking too much of the GM. So one bad roll? Your hireling just bolts whether or not it makes any goddamn sense. Whether or not it ensures their demise. Even if there's maybe one skeleton left, and victory is assured.
I like how you can choose which item gets "damaged beyond use". I'd just carry a glove or something. Maybe a piece of wood or rock. Let that get broken, and then grab another stick or rock. Carry multiples just in case.
Getting back to the sections I skipped over, light is of course ranked via usage dice, which also determines how many slots it takes, without any regard for what the light source is (which in an actual RPG would determine weight and how convenient it is to carry), how long it would actually last, and what it would reasonably cost.
For example, a d4 usage die of "light" costs 2 gold pieces, and will always take up one slot, regardless as to what it is. Torches and candles would both be incredibly cheap, we're talking copper pieces due to ease of manufacture, though you could get more candles for an equivalent price and they would take up less space. They'd also burn considerably longer (hours each compared to a torch's more realistic 30 minutes or less).
But in DiceDream, like so much else this doesn't matter. You shell out 2 entire gold pieces for some vague light source, go into a dungeon, and it doesn't matter if you bought candles or a lantern with oil: you make a few ability checks, get a bad roll on the Time die event table (which I'll get to in a bit), and it all apparently vanishes. And that's okay because this is a game for casual retards that cannot be bothered to even roughly track time.
For ability checks you normally roll 2d20, trying to get equal or below an ability score but above your hit poi— I mean exhaustion. You succeed if both fall in this range, but if you fail get to storygame a bit about how you made progress and then gain Advantage on the next attempt.
In an unexpected twist of logic, Advantage and Disadvantage both cancel each other out and stack, and if you have three or more you either auto-succeed or -fail respectively. Creating Advantage and failure give you tallies by ability scores, which is apparently how you "level up". I guess tallies are only arbitrarily bad when used to track gear.
Anyway, whenever he feels like it, or every single time you make an ability check that you didn't auto-pass or -fail, regardless of how much time the task would take, the GM rolls a Time die and checks this table to see what happens:
No clarification or example on ongoing effects, or minor location-specific effects. Doors can "fall" shut for some reason, but only if the Time die is at a d6, so players will know that there is absolutely no chance of that happening at the start (similarly, no chance for a random encounter until it's at least a d12). I like how result 8 doesn't just say "Major location-specific effect", as if it was that much harder to type.
In regards to doors: where does this occur? Everywhere? A single floor? Near where the characters are? How does this happen? Why do "propped" doors all have the exact same chance of remaining open, regardless of method used? I'm surprised that there isn't a chance for destroyed doors to reassemble themselves.
Besides regaining ALL lost Exhaustion the second you exit a dungeon environment, you can also rest inside the dungeon. When you do this, the GM just starts spamming the Time die: each time he does so you regain 1 Exhaustion, and you roll the usage die on your rations whenever you stop, or if the die gets rolled so many times it would reset to d4.
This is the only reason to eat, period. There aren't any rules for starvation or dehydration, and you also don't need to track water. Given the absurd shit Taylor says about money and languages, I am honestly surprised that he didn't specify that on the surface people are sustained by cosmic rays (which is why your Exhaustion resets to 0 immediately), and dungeons leech nutrients (but not water) from their bodies, so that's why you only need to eat underground.
Maybe that can get its own page in DD3E?
Oh, there's a bit at the end that says:
"The food is being consumed over the course of the resting period, but it's hard to tell how much until you are finished."
It's unclear if he means that it's unclear how long you rest until you stop, or unclear how much food you eat until you stop, but in either case this is retarded: in a dungeon environment, with limited food and light, you aren't going to just mindlessly shovel food in your mouth (or even necessarily stop to eat). Nor are you going to just sit down and somehow lose track of hours of time.
You don't accumulate Fate Points by being compelled by the GM, but by spending cash. Not even on them specifically: you just need to spend arbitrary amounts of cash to get them as an added bonus. The justification is that "fortune favors the bold and the interesting", so...I guess Taylor thinks that you are bold and interesting if you just spend money in arbitrary amounts.
People are somehow instinctively aware if money is fake, and that all of this is "why this pseudo-medieval economy even has a cash basis". Even though coins or tokens of some sort have been used for thousands of years, despite counterfeit money being a possibility, and all without the added transference of "spiritual power". I know Taylor thinks he's smart, but if you stop and think about it for even a moment this entire setup is phenomenally absurd.
First: why does the act of spending gold give you spiritual favor? Who or what is bestowing it? What does it get out of this exchange? I'm just imagining the moment the first person finally exchanged gold arbitrarily valued at 50 gp (at least), and suddenly gained a metaphysical token that they are not only aware of, but instinctively know was only received due to the gold exchange.
Taylor could have just had Fate Points work as normal. They're still dumb, but it makes more sense than spending cash. This feels like him trying to find some way to "make it his own", to seem like he's less of an untalented, uninspired hack who can't even make a good game copying the works of others.
Second: why the arbitrary 50 gp amount? Why does who or what is bestowing this favor care if you spend 25 gp here, and then 25 gp later? What if I buy ten things at the same time worth 5 gp each? Does that count?
Third: the prices are set by whoever is selling the item, based on supply, demand, manufacturing costs, what the customer is willing to pay, etc. So, what, is this just merely the result of 50 gold coins (or its equivalent) passing from one person's hands to another?
Fourth: there's no indication that you cannot immediately sell the item again. Or even back and forth. So, you sell a sock to someone for 50 gp, and then keep "selling it" back and forth to rack up infinite Fate Points. Hell, just keep 50 gp on hand at all times, go into a dungeon, sell a shoe round-robin style between everyone in the party until you get a bunch of Fate Points, and rinse and repeat whenever you run low.
Finally: what's to stop the elite from hoarding all the gold, and make the exchange of gold illegal? Instead dishing out a kind of fiat currency, whilst they just constantly circulate cash in 50 gp increments in order to rack up nigh-infinite fate points (and max out all their stats in the process).
I wonder why you would bother with coins at all, but the PDF specifies gold, so everything else? Silver? Platinum? Gemstones? Eh. They don't somehow grant you metaphysical luck tokens that you can somehow spend. Wonder where they go? Who or what is taking them? Why?
It's about as stupid as languages: everything speaks common so that "language is never an obstacle". Everything. Even dogs. However did children manage through most editions of Dungeons & Dragons, where language was occasionally an issue? This could have interesting world-building implications, but given that author I'm guessing it's because he's too stupid and impatient to deal with language barriers.
The entire section on hirelings reads like they're largely mindless automatons. Like a badly coded video game, or a board game: they are only one of two things. They always have minimal skills or more advanced specialties.
Peasants will never follow you into a dungeon for any reason (personal reasons be damned), and will run to the surface at the earliest opportunity, no matter where they are, what's going on, how they got here, etc, and will always take your stuff with them (even if it would make more sense to stash or drop it, so you'll stop pursuing them, perhaps).
Mercenaries always want one share of profits, and specialists always want two. They always want the same sign on bonus. They will never, ever-no-matter-what carry any of your gear, because they have their own undefined gear to carry. They will also never speak or make decisions, except I suppose to agree to come with you, accept payment, and deny helping you out in any other capacity beyond fighting or using their one skill.
In a board game I could accept sometimes bizarre rules and limitations, perhaps due to something resembling game balance, or because unlike a real roleplaying game the rules cannot account for (or permit) every single little thing a player might wish to do.
Like how in Zombicide if you use ranged weapons against a zone with characters and zombies, barring a special ability you must always target people first. But I can't see the logic or purpose of flat out stating that hirelings will never carry anything for you. Does it "break" anything? Even if they don't have anything? What if you pay them extra? What if doing so ensures their survival?
Anyway, if you die from getting injured or just being too tired, you choose a hireling, roll stats (meaning he could end up with wildly different capabilities), spend 100 gold that you may or may not have, and it's gear that the hireling magically had the entire time. Oh, and now the (former) hireling will suddenly speak and carry stuff for other characters.
(You can instead use a "dungeon denizen" as a new character, but for some reason only if there aren't any hirelings left.)
For leveling up, as long as you have a tally by a stat, you can spend Fate points equal to the difference of tallies and the stat's value. So, get at least one tally and then you can pay to level up. Or rather, buy a bunch of stuff (just pass the Fate Sock around), then spend all the luck you got for being so "bold and interesting". You can also add more Aspects and redo an existing one. Much better than developing your character through organic play.
The last part is a page that explains very roughly how to convert things from other games to this shit heap, but why bother? There is nothing DD does better or even more interesting than any official edition or clone, and there's nothing worth lifting and using elsewhere: about a quarter are terrible mechanics copied from other games, and whatever Taylor came up with to fill in the gaps is even worse.
You'd think he could have at least put in equipment and some monsters. After all he's already copied so much. Or even filled in some of the white space with more creative commons art. It's a truly pathetic second-draft vanity project, crudely cobbled by a conceited hack pretending to be (among other things) a game designer without any real passion or talent, who thinks having his name on itch.io is some sort of meaningful achievement.
Dungeons & Delvers on the other hand is made by actual gamers that actually give a fuck. It's an entire ruleset that doesn't shortchange you on content under the pretense of being "hyper-focused" (or "simple", or rules-lite). You also don't need to reference another game in order to use it.
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