I'm catching up on #RPGaDay2016. Today's prompts are: Aug 1-real dice, digital dice, or diceless system? and Aug 8-hardcover, softcover, or digital books?
I love the feel of well-made, wonderful physical objects. I must have weighty dice, or ones with interesting designs, and I'm a sucker for beautiful hardcovers (Maze of the Blue Medusa anyone?). Also, having a book at the table with bookmarks in is very handy as a reference.
That said, having dice and reference sheets on my phone is great, especially for pick-up games while out and about. But if I have an in-person game prepared in advance, nothing beats the semi-organized clutter of dice and papers and books at the game table.
I might change my mind once more PDFs have really good bookmarking and linking systems. It's easier to print out sheets and keep them in a file folder than to flip through a pdf and hope to get the right page with ctrl+f.
Most of the references I print out are random tables. I love randomizers of all kinds--dice, cards (playing, tarot, other oracle...), coins, tops, spinners. I like their unpredictability, I like giving them meaning and structure. I've played diceless systems before (and I don't mean like Minds Eye Theatre--I've LARPed Vampire and rock-paper-scissors is a great randomizer), online in free-form roleplaying chatrooms and PbP forums. They did not go anywhere. I think a randomizer is the quickest way to settle conflict resolution in a game, and descriptive, diceless systems I've seen have never satisfied. If someone could run a game of Amber or, like, The Window or something, that really showed me how if works that would be great. But til then, give me my tables and dice!
