Leo Stableford (One Monkey)

Leo is the weirdo who wrote the words to communicate the No Dice experience to the world at large.

He's always been into shiny and colourful objects so when he acquired D&D second edition at eight years of age his mind was filled with pictures of epic adventures in strange new worlds. He ran into two problems right away.

One was that the book, rather than detailing how to have fun interactive adventures with your peers, was filled with instructions on how to generate numbers using dice and weird skill trees. The other was that, because of this, no one wanted to play this game with him.

He got over this initial disappointment and wandered through time in acting, film making, radio DJing and novel writing. Eventually he made a return to the hobby whose obscurity had been such a bitter disappointment to him.

Then he started to think about how to fundamentally alter the focus of the hobby to make it into the game featured on this website.

That's about all anyone should need to know about this Monkey. (And if you wanted to know more you could always visit his journal.)

Justin Wyatt (Phantom Doodler)

Justin is the man who makes the pictures that make your imagination bleed creativity.

He loves gaming but isn't good with rules. Back in the eighties as a young, fresh-faced teenager he eagerly unwrapped the cellophane from his very first role playing game. Unfortunately the game in question was Rolemaster, a game famous for its dazzling complexity.

He promptly began memorizing the scads of rules, tables, charts and statistics that were de rigeur in the earlier systems. Forcing the information to bypass the goldfish filter and etch themselves into his brain was a task of Herculean proportions. Unfortunately the process didn't work exactly as it was supposed to. The rules arrived in his brain in some shape and then...

One of his players was obviously rather irked when the precious character he had spent several hours creating died barging down a door. Another hapless character was killed by a swarm of bees. The rules stated you had to split your defences between multiple targets, there were several hundred bees, and however impressive your defence score was dividing it by 700... well, you get the picture.

Yet, despite numerous GM cock ups, nearly 25 years later, Justin, now a more jaded, greyer gamer, decided to try out a new approach to role playing. When he met up with Leo and Suzanne, these two young upstarts had barely read an RPG, let alone several hundred, so how could they know about role playing? Heck they didn't even seem to have dice! Then Suzanne, with no previous GM experience, ran her scenario. This game had almost no rules because she seemed to have traded them in for bags of atmosphere. For the first time in his life, Justin lost himself completely in a character. He played a role.

And so Justin evolved. He isn't going back. He's even invented ingenious hacks to port his beloved Warhammer into No Dice, because he doesn't have to remember so many rules now; only the important ones that prevent door-related deaths.

Suzanne Jordan (Mrs Monkey)

Suzanne is the bedrock upon which the entire No Dice system is built. With her scenario "Traveller's Rest" she basically reinvented role playing in our eyes. All One Monkey did was give her ideas a lick of paint and shove them out the door.

Suzanne's in charge of our appointment book, our community presence and, when need be, our accounts. If you've got a problem with No Dice and nobody else can help then this is the lady to run to.

Until Suzanne became Mrs Monkey she had no interest in Role Playing as a hobby, although she loved a wide range of SF TV and is truly obsessed with heavy music and the world of wrestling. In other words she was a role player waiting to happen. Like many people, though, her patience with dice, arithmetic and table tops is limited at best.

She wanted to know why we had to use dice, why we had to sit at the table, why we couldn't chill out on a sofa with a cup of tea (or other beverage of choice). She wanted to know why there was so much violence and why the stories were always the same.

Then she reinvented the way it could be for us one glorious evening in 2008 and the rest is history. She's still writing games and we're all discovering the right way to play the games she writes when she's at her best. One day you may get to appreciate them too.

Mrs Monkey writes her games under her maiden name as a tribute to her father who was blessed only with daughters.