The Most Shameful RPG Dice (2009)
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> This is also insane. Really, the justification for doing this is for very large probability tables.
That’s indeed crazy. As every Hackmaster [0] player knows, you need a D10,000 to roll for critical hit locations [1]. The severity range goes up to 24 btw. And there is a table for hacking, crunching and puncturing weapons each. Followed by 4 pages of skeletons, muscle structures and organs of a human to explain where all those locations are, exactly.
But what am I saying, maybe you rolled a fumble or mishap, in that case you do indeed need your d1,000 [2].
FWIW, this is a D&D 1st ed based game that has multiple possibilities of dying during character creation ;)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackMaster
(Sorry, that was just a joke.)
> Don't ask how magic works, I never figured that one out so I stuck with fighting characters.
I was playing a mage. I was also the only one who understood how magic worked. The only time I did something useful was the day I was sick, and they had my character use a quarterstaff to bash someone on their head -.-
Being the only one who gets the magic rules, playing a mage, should be quite power gamer move!
EDIT: The most useful spells I ever encountered were those forcing NPCs to do what you want, burn NPCs or make someone super fast.
Which is a requirement that should rather trivially be fulfilled by the HN audience. :-)
I think there was a time in my life when I had too much time it seems, as this was also my active kickboxing period with regular tournaments. Wouldn't miss those times!
Does gameplay actually end up feeling fun in practice?
Are the tables interesting themselves to lookup or is that just "the bad bit"?
Do you as a player, or anyone you've played with spend time scrutinising the tables for crafting better characters?
Are there interesting types of actions or manoeuvres that you can perform so you get more interesting strategic play?
Does combat feel like a duel for example?
I'm curious as I do sometimes sit down and write simulators for things like this and I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to source the books and see if this sort of complex branching decision-making actually provides some interesting gameplay =)...
EDIT: Any good crunchy book suggestions of stuff to look at which might be interesting to simulate?
There are more serious games that had lots of tables, like Rolemaster, and basically the idea is for the game system to generate a wide variety problems and situations for the players to deal with, in combat but also in encounters and such. This takes some load off the GM by providing a lot of variety without preparation, but also because these outcomes are generated by the rules, the players can't claim the GM is picking on them by imposing nasty consequences arbitrarily. It's just one school of game design though.
Is that fair?
Not sure what your position is on the other questions, if you've played a lot of either I mean.
The super-detailed tables mostly don’t matter. It’s not as if you’d know the shorter ones by heart, so you either look them up anyway, or you (what we did) have a small program on the GMs laptop.
As with most roleplaying games, almost everything lives and dies with the skill of your GM to make it work and to a lesser part with the skill of your players (and by skill I mean ability to get into a flow with everyone else)
Our first session ended in (Chaotic Neutral with a bit of evil) me accidentally killing the party fighter and him re-rolling a Paladin that did not like me. And I got critically hit by his thrown pebble after clapping at a funeral.
If you set aside the humor aspect, HM is a game that plays very similarly to 1e, but more fleshed out and with a lot of assorted improvements.
For example the infamous Harlot table where you could roll for the precise form of loose woman you encounter. A different time, for sure.
It seems like the nice thing you get here is that some people went and came up with a whole bunch of stuff that could happen which could be good fodder for "fail forward"[0] style outcomes?
- [0]: https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-mouse-guard-handles-failure...
There are games that democratize the power of the GM a bit. Very traditional RPGs are into putting pressure on the GM to be a one-man band for the players' entertainment, but the more "modern" ones share the authority, get the players involved in worldbuilding and/or expect the players to be proactive (rather than just respond to the GM)
That sounds epic.
The holy what?
DM: "Roll 1d100, open-ended."
Rolls 1d100 on the Plasma Critical hit table.
"you Large or Superlarge?"
"nope"
Rolls 66.
Give me your sheet.
As a sidenote, I'm not sure why a d216 hasn't ever been made -- that one feels like a fun (novelty) opportunity to replace 3d6 for attribute rolls.
[1]: https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/
[2]: https://goodman-games.com/blog/2020/01/06/support-lou-zocchi...
[3]: https://goodman-games.com/blog/2021/09/24/send-lou-zocchi-a-...
What do you care if someone likes odd dice? Or digging tunnels? Or dressing up in costumes? Or whatever else?
The worst ones are whole communities dedicated to bullying people (e.g. diwhy or cringetopia). We all do stupid things sometimes. I liked the time before someone would try to catch you on camera and internet-shame you for losing your temper, dressing funny, having a different opinion, or whatever else.
but it's ok for you to care about people who y?
where
x = like odd dice
and
y = makes fun about not further specified people liking odd dice
Serious question - what's the difference?
One is liking something that harms no one. The other is liking making fun of people who are harming no one, thus, to a minor extent, harming them.
It's a pretty large difference to be completely blind to.
There's two options:
1) You did something really dumb, and now you're internet-famous for having done something really dumb. I care about this even if it was something genuinely bad. I'd like that to be handled with a justice system and not a mob justice system.
2) You do something a lot of people find obnoxious. You're really into some obscure sci-fi show, obsessively like Bulgarian folk music, only wear purple clothing, want Hello Kitty on all of your merchandise, or hold some non-mainstream political view. No one is going to individually ruin your life over it, but collectively, everyone shames you a little bit. That can be super-damaging too.
I think we should be tolerant of most things that don't harm other people (the same goes geopolitically; if a foreign culture has different views on government / gender / religion / etc., we don't need to fix them). I don't think we should be tolerant of bullying (e.g. another country invading their neighbor).
There's also a big difference between condemning people and things. My comment was that I hate a page and forum. I can do that without hate or condemning the person who made the page or the users of those forums. A person isn't defined by one dumb action. The linked page goes out of their to be mean to individuals who buy dice like those, or design them. I would have no problem with a product review page which said "These are bad dice." Dice (and web pages) aren't sentient beings.
To sum it up in a meme: Let people enjoy things.
Sportballs is silly? Sure. Compare it to the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome? Sure. Calling people who like American football dumb? Not okay.
Watching football is as dumb as playing D&D, fixing cars, listening to music(1), etc. People get invested in things they like and can get just as "nerdy" about it as any programmer into designing programming languages.
1: I will make an exception for bagpipes. Pretty sure they were *designed* to be offensive. Which is why I get so much joy listening to them. ;)
I'm not sure what y means, but making fun of people for their hobby doesn't itself sound like a hobby, or else you have the tolerance paradox.
Using your imagination around the roll of a dice is the entire point of using dice in an rpg, if I just wanted to make this stuff up with no rules and no restrictions then I'd be writing a novel
Once I built a separate Battletech universe using the random event tables from the MW3 RPG. it was centered around one particular merc unit and span like 150 years. Was fun to interpret the random events to put them into context and build story around it.
This part really turned me off at first, but I thankfully kept reading to realize how tongue-in-cheek the whole writing was. I feel that the list could have been ordered better, to more easily establish the tone first.
What is wrong with using a word in this context?
I think you're just word policing and hall monitoring someone. I understand decorum and that there's a time and a place for different types/styles of language but I don't think the context of this article violates that at all in this forum.
They can contain dice that are specifically made for some badlysold or unsold boardgame, which just adds to the fun. A friend of mine has dice with undecipherable symbols on them.
Pre-COVID, I myself got very heavy metal dice. I didn't use them a lot, they're very pointy and I had the feeling they might damage my wooden table.
Are they tungsten? I nearly bought a pair of them but I figured I'd never roll them because of their weight.
3d34-2 is N(1,100)
Esoteric systems that wanted normal distributions could use that for statistics.
Have we seriously lost all humour? Goodness.
- Calling dice "retarded" because the writer doesn't like those particular dice
- Calling people who own gold dice "retarded", despite there being no evidence of disability that was previously known as "retardation"
Where's the joke? Can you please show me how it was funny in 2009? Can you explain how this humor is somehow notable enough to be highlighted on HN?
Beer? Or gunpowder? Or maybe even a hiding place!
> However, if you are too lazy to use your imagination to decide what alignment a character might be, then maybe role-playing isn’t for you. If you can’t make in your choice in your head whether Grongor the Dwarven Fighter likes to save women and children or save women and children for dinner, then I think the whole “story-telling adventure” thing is too taxing for you.
I dunno, I think it's more fun to explore all the options. Maybe Grongor is secretly evil, maybe Grongor is secretly good, maybe Grongor doesn't care and is just in it for the money.
One day, I need to build a rig to roll it ten thousand times and determine the output - I want to know how fair it is!
Edit: Nope, that’s 36, plus 0 and 00.
Still pretty damn funny I thought, if you can get past those two terrible and unfunny slips. I like the idea of not throwing out the whole thing when someone says something boneheaded.
F----t and derivatives, yes, that was on its way out even in my nowhere-near-the-coasts purple-county-in-a-red-state by the early '00s.
There are some interesting trends here. Spikes in searches seem to coincide with Mind of Mencia going on the air, Rosa's Law and a tweet from Ann Coulter directed at Obama.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
Yes, 4-sided dice are crazy in that they simply flop. An 8-sided die with the digits 1 to 4 repeated would be preferable.