Brainstorm: Dramatic Dicework and the Fun in Choice

[Superfluous Crow]

Roll a die 20. You need to get more than 12 on the roll.

In the world of tabletop roleplaying and gaming, the d20 rules. Why this is, i cannot say. As far as gameplay goes, rolling a single die, every time, and compare it to a number is about as dull as it can get with dice involved.
Now, while it is true that the most important part of roleplaying games is the roleplaying itself, the way I see it a TTRPG consists of three things: 1 part acting, 1 part storytelling, and 1 part game. Even the game part has to be engaging if you aim for a truly great game.
So how do you make the classic concept of throwing dice interesting? Off the top of my mind it has to involve elements of choice, risk and surprise.

1. Choice: Repetition is dull. Every skill check is a new situation calling for a new approach. Every roll should involve a choice; how many dice do you want to sacrifice? What type of type do you want to use? What color?    
2. Risk: Not just a matter of whether you fail or succeed, risk goes hand in hand with choice: every choice you make must have its consequences. Maybe it lowers your success rate or your chance of succeeding is inversely proportionate to how well you succeed.  
3. Surprise: Finally, dice are randomizers and occasionally they should change the circumstances drastically. Fumbles/criticals and explosive/cascading dice (you roll the highest your roll again and add) accomplish this in a way. But there are probably lots of other ways.  

While this is all up to debate (for those who want to engage in it), what I really want to instigate is a revolution of how we use dice. To hell with dice pools and what have you. What can we really do with dice?

[Matt Larkin (author)]

What can we really do with dice?

Build pyramids.

Fire them from rubber bands.

Juggle them.

Ditch them entirely.

[Superfluous Crow]

Very constructive. :p
The purpose of this discussion was not whether to use freeform or not. This was a discussion on how to make a game (in this case a roleplaying game) more engaging. Saying ditch dice goes against the entire proposed trinity from my first post (game, story, act). And if you were just referring to the use of another randomizer then feel free to make suggestions in that area. Dice are just the most easily available and most often used.  

[Polycarp]

Saying "dice are dull," in my personal opinion, misses the point.  Some amount of randomness is important in roleplaying games because it introduces local suspense (as opposed to the overarching suspense of a good story).  I've never seen a system that did away with randomness without doing away with that sense of immediate uncertainty that is so important to the genre.

Once you've introduced that element of randomness, however, I couldn't really care less how exactly you create it.  d20?  Dice pool?  Flipping coins?  While there are technical merits and disadvantages to various systems of randomness, none of them can make a game dull or not dull.  The randomness itself is what spices things up, and so long as the system to determine that randomness rises above some basic level of usefulness it's not really important to me what that system is.  My interest in a game is derived from elsewhere.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

I generally find the greater the element of randomness in a game, the lower my enjoyment.

I can see the strategic decision of how much dice pool to use being an interesting of game design. I see dice pool as generally superior to single die both for its decision making aspect, and its skewing the probability curve towards a more normalized pattern.

But dice and cards are indeed the most basic form of randomizing for TT gaming.

[Superfluous Crow]

Once you've introduced that element of randomness, however, I couldn't really care less how exactly you create it.  d20?  Dice pool?  Flipping coins?  While there are technical merits and disadvantages to various systems of randomness, none of them can make a game dull or not dull.  The randomness itself is what spices things up, and so long as the system to determine that randomness rises above some basic level of usefulness it's not really important to me what that system is.  My interest in a game is derived from elsewhere.

Neither do i consider it to be a particularly important part, but it is a part. Why not attempt to get the best out of it?

[Polycarp]

I never said dice were dull?

Neither do i consider it to be a particularly important part, but it is a part. Why not attempt to get the best out of it?[/quote]
Alright.  What do you consider to be a superior dice-rolling system, out of the ones that presently exist?  Knowing that might give me a better idea of what you mean by "getting the best" out of a system.  I mean, some of the issues you bring up, for instance - like the problem of repetition - seem to me like good game design choices.  I remember D&D 2nd ed before d20 rolls became really standardized (just read the 2nd ed MM sometime) and it was a tremendous pain in the you-know-what to look up different rules and rolls for each creature.  Every situation calling for a new approach was exactly the problem.

I think it just needs to be considered that getting the best out of the system also runs the risk of bringing out the worst in the system.  At some point added dice-rolling complexity and options hinders rather than helps.

[Superfluous Crow]

While perhaps not an optimal system, i think tRoS's way of letting you pick how many dice you want to spend on defense as opposed to offense at least allows a certain amount of choice to influence the game.
Also, we have the new system ascent for "lesser shades of evil" (you can probably find a small excerpt of it somewhere). Here your skill determines a pool, but it is only the highest roll of this pool that counts. Alternatively, you can trade all your d6 in for a small pool of d10 (again, the highest die counts), or an even smaller pool of d20. Effectively, with a pool of d6 you have a higher chance of getting 5 or 6, but with a d10 you have a small chance of getting 7, 8, 9, or 10.  
It's all about removing the dieplay from the world of simple addition, and getting it involved with the players. They have to feel that they influence the system-gameplay (as opposed to the roleplaying-gameplay) as much as the randomizer does. If you just roll a d20 then it wasn't your fault; fate just conspired against you. If you chose exactly how you want to roll your dice then it is all on you and the choices you make should weigh somewhat heavier.

@Phoenix: I would also think that the "optimal system" would let chance influence in a more subtle way than a d20. I have a very lucky (or less than moral) player in my games, and it's incredibly annoying to see him waltz through it all with those incredibly high unbeatable rolls while the other players can barely get a hit in. Luck and chance should always be a factor, but if you involve them too much the game can grind to a halt.

EDIT: We also had some ideas running in the Visceral Baroque thread.
One could also imagine a sort of bargaining system where the player would trade in some kind of resource in order to buy dice for his rolls.