At first I just liked the idea: the ref doesn’t roll any dice. I don’t know why, but knowing myself as I do I suspect it was just the novelty of it. I frequently ref games and I am always rolling. What if I didn’t? Was there a reason I had to roll?

My first experiment with player-side rollers was in an early test of some ideas for a second edition of Diaspora. I did it in the most obvious fashion: rather than have the ref roll for non-player characters, the ref would just set a difficulty value. It bombed. It was boring as hell. I shelved the idea.

Then I played some Powered By The Apocalypse games. And it works there. Hmm. What’s the difference?

Well one difference is deeply systemic: in Fate the game works by simulating everything with the same structure. Characters are roughly the same…