Dice, and Not Knowing

Dice are optional here, and how they behave was decided once, at installation, by whoever built your world.

Three things were set and none of them can be changed later without breaking the feel of everything that came before:

MODE        whether dice exist at all
NOTATION    what is rolled — d20, 2d6, d100, dice pools
DIRECTION   whether high is good, or low is

Direction is the one that matters most and gets noticed least. Roll Under inverts every band. A world configured one way and narrated the other reads as relentless bad luck for weeks before anybody works out why.

You may not be shown the number

diceVisibility decides whether results are shown or narrated. A world can roll honestly and never tell you the figure, describing the outcome instead.

This is not the GM hiding things from you. It is a deliberate register choice: numbers on screen pull toward optimisation, and some tables would rather have the uncertainty than the arithmetic.

Narrative-first worlds

If dice are off entirely, outcomes come from the fiction — what your character is capable of, what the situation permits, what the world would actually do. This is a complete configuration, not a degraded one, and it is what most worlds built here end up running.

The thing worth knowing: uncertainty is preserved either way. A world without dice is not a world where you always succeed. It is one where the reason you failed is legible instead of numeric.