Are there any rpgs that once you roll dice, the dice go away, and become something else?
Fiasco does this(without the rolling part). Is there another game that also keeps tally of dice?
Once You Roll The Dice, You Lose The Dice
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I seem to recall In A Wicked Age doing something like this (your dice can be reduced or possibly go away) but I honestly don’t remember the rules well enough and can’t find my PDF. Maybe someone else remembers?
In a Wicked Age…. isn’t a good candidate for this. You can have your dice “reduced”, yes, but that has nothing to do with you rolling them - it’s a conflict outcome thing.
However, Swords without Master does this explicitly: there is only one set of dice, and as the players roll them, they pass them to each other.
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Bryant Durrell’s game Above the Earth is a superhero game where you have 100d6s to use, however you want. Whenever you want to act, you roll some number of dice. You choose how many. Bigger totals are better. But once you spend them, they’re gone entirely. (You can also spend dice to establish facts about the game world.)
So the whole game is a resource management thing. You can succeed at any task, but you have to decide which task is worth spending dice on to succeed.
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Also, I made a game called Longshot for Game Chef, years ago, that worked like that. You had a limited pool of dice that you could use. Once you spent them, they were gone. There were a few ways to get additional dice, but they required a difficult or unpleasant act of the player: confess to murder, become badly injured, etc.
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Not quite what you’re looking for, but Swords Without Master passes a single pair of dice around the table! After you roll, you pass the dice off to someone else, and that drives the flow of the game.
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Technoir Push dice : they are either rolled and discharged or spent. If you spend them, they become resource for the antagonists, and the cycle continues.
I have the impression that’s kind of centre to The Pool. You run the risk of losing dice in every roll, but that’s not guaranteed.
Tangentially, I’ve seen games in which you roll all your dice at the beginning of the session and have to spend the banked rolls throughout the session.
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Dogs in the Vineyard features this mechanic within the scope of every conflict: you roll your dice upfront, and then spend them as the conflict proceeds.
In a sense, your available dice act as your “strength” in the conflict as well as your “hit points” - once you run out of dice, you have lost.
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I have a courtroom drama RPG where you gradually generate die pools then roll them, and they go away. There’s a pool of Contempt Dice you get through objections, and then a pool of Verdict Dice you build with your arguments. At certain points you roll them and they generate an effect and then go away.
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As @TheRoleplayer said, the Pool does this a bit, and games based upon it. My mind immediately went to Lady Blackbird.
RISUS does this a bit as well, with losing ranks in dice per cliche.
Yeah, I thought of Lady Blackbird as well, but those dice are a rechargeable resource, so I’m not sure it’s quite the same?