Dice telling a story

Yes, more Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay...

When the system was presented before, it stated that the dice told a story. I was skeptical then but after a few test rolls, I can see what they might have meant.

The thing is, they give you a sample of how to interpret the dice rolls into the story that just don't work for me. It gives you a sample of dice and explains how you might narrate the attack whether it was a neutral, aggressive or conservative stance. The example is okay, but it was picking out every success, fail, boons, bane and other symbols of the dice to create a narrative.

While there is nothing wrong with that in theory, it would require the GM to easily look at the dice of each player, examining, processing and then constructive a quick narrative.

This seems like a lot of work, which is entirely unnecessary. The action cards themselves provide some interesting visuals that we can process. It seems no need to focus in on the dice themselves and point out every symbol that was rolled to create a narrative.

It doesn't matter to me, because I'm pretty damn good at coming up with my own narratives, to keep combat interesting and visual (hopefully).

But I was throwing some dice around and did see the potential for this: dice as a narrative mechanic.

I was toying around with a Fear roll. Test-Dwarf had a 3 Willpower, so I would roll 3 Dice. A standard Fear rating seems to be 2, so that's two challenge dice.

Now I ran into some interesting rolls. There was your standard pass/fail test rolls. But there were other results that started to, gosh darn it, narrate the scene for me (or us as the players). If you fail your Fear test, you take Stress point. If you get 2 Banes you get the Frightened Status.

On one roll, where the Test-Dwarf was heavy in an Aggressive Stance, he managed to roll enough Successes (so no Stress) BUT rolled both a Recharge icon and enough Banes to gain the Frightened Status. So from this roll, we know that the Test-Dwarf refuses to let his mind run rampant with fear (the no Stress part) BUT we know that some part of the Test-Dwarf is afraid of it, as his hand trembles (the Frightened status). The Recharge icon means he's hesitating so instead of Stress, an important maneuver may have slipped his mind.

One another roll, I ended up Succeeding in the roll but got the Recharge token and getting a Chaos Star. in this particular scenario, I was using the Location card as it dictated that on a Chaos Star, the character trips on something and takes a wound. This says to me that the Test-Dwarf was startled, backed up, tripped on something, hurting his ankle AND his pride. He stands back up and feels embarrassed at his momentary foolishness which represents the Recharge token.

So it was very neat to see how the dice actually could start helping out the story.

Whether this process stands the test of time, we'll see. It didn't take long in my D&D 4th edition test games for the players to resort to: "I attack" instead of announced with pride their uber-cool power (note this is after using the same At-Will power several times in a row). No doubt there will be times when the GM's narration tank is running dry and dice and action cards won't help.