The dice tell me ... nothing!

So, I have been chatting over in The Rhetorical Gamer's blog the last couple of weeks about dice and task resolution.  It became quickly obvious that we view gaming pretty radically differently.  So, he asked me to unpack some of my thoughts on this, with some concrete examples.  This is probably going to take me a couple of posts.

Today, why the heck do we even have dice in these games, anyway?