Think I'll stick with Star Wars dice
Is there a need for something like this, and I thought my brothers D30 was a joke
Facepalm!
Facepalm!
The Surgeon General recommends one not facepalm while holding the d120, as such circumstance may lead to face and/or hand injuries.
Torg, did you watch the vid? they showed a d60 also.
Big deal. That thing is only a year or two old. I'd rather roll old school. Really, really old school - like around 300 BC :
I think that was my first d20, Desslok.
300 BC had some of the best RPGs, I'll have you know! All you post-Jesus kids don't know you're born with all your modern tables and calculators and 'smart phones'! Papyrus > PDFs!
My idea of a 'tablet' is one actually made from stone! We had to use an abacus to calculate THACO, and we liked it!
Edited by MaeloraI think that was my first d20, Desslok.
300 BC had some of the best RPGs, I'll have you know! All you post-Jesus kids don't know you're born with all your modern tables and calculators and 'smart phones'! Papyrus > PDFs!
My idea of a 'tablet' is one actually made from stone! We had to use an abacus to calculate THACO, and we liked it!
The weapon tables were also much simpler, though I always thought that donkey jawbones were way too OP (undoubtedly due to the mythological connotations). Every campaign invariably started with everyone going off to hunt donkeys.
I think that was my first d20, Desslok.
300 BC had some of the best RPGs, I'll have you know! All you post-Jesus kids don't know you're born with all your modern tables and calculators and 'smart phones'! Papyrus > PDFs!
My idea of a 'tablet' is one actually made from stone! We had to use an abacus to calculate THACO, and we liked it!
The weapon tables were also much simpler, though I always thought that donkey jawbones were way too OP (undoubtedly due to the mythological connotations). Every campaign invariably started with everyone going off to hunt donkeys.
Only jawbones blessed by a god were worth anything. All the others were just decorative lawn mowers.
I think that was my first d20, Desslok.
300 BC had some of the best RPGs, I'll have you know! All you post-Jesus kids don't know you're born with all your modern tables and calculators and 'smart phones'! Papyrus > PDFs!
My idea of a 'tablet' is one actually made from stone! We had to use an abacus to calculate THACO, and we liked it!
Whoa! How did you get the abacus to count backwards!?
I think that was my first d20, Desslok.
300 BC had some of the best RPGs, I'll have you know! All you post-Jesus kids don't know you're born with all your modern tables and calculators and 'smart phones'! Papyrus > PDFs!
My idea of a 'tablet' is one actually made from stone! We had to use an abacus to calculate THACO, and we liked it!
Whoa! How did you get the abacus to count backwards!?
Move the beads the other direction.
I did pick up a d100 once as a novelty but I only used it once in game.
It easily skipped the DRZ, wiped out the mage, skittered into the party thief who was displaced 9 meters, then it proceeded to wipe out half of the orcs, knock down the Minotaur, ricochet off Robert's Mt' Dew (which spilled over) and then it skittered off the edge of the table, bouncing off of the DM's knee, out the gaming room and into the Living Room.
We eventually found it under the couch and I'd rolled a critical failure . . .
I think that was my first d20, Desslok.
300 BC had some of the best RPGs, I'll have you know! All you post-Jesus kids don't know you're born with all your modern tables and calculators and 'smart phones'! Papyrus > PDFs!
My idea of a 'tablet' is one actually made from stone! We had to use an abacus to calculate THACO, and we liked it!
I bet you guys didn't have much errata then!
Edited by R2builder
I bet you guys didn't have much errata then!
Oh, we had loads, but it just took ages for the pterodactyls to deliver it! They were much worse than the FailBoat we have today.
(Wait, was that 300 BC, or 150 million years BC? I always get those mixed up... Our calendar was even more stupid than the Star Wars one. All that build up to Year Zero and the Y0K scare that was gonna make all our abacus redundant...)
And back then... 'edition wars' weren't just people saying nasty things on the internet; they were actual wars .
I think that was my first d20, Desslok.
300 BC had some of the best RPGs, I'll have you know! All you post-Jesus kids don't know you're born with all your modern tables and calculators and 'smart phones'! Papyrus > PDFs!
My idea of a 'tablet' is one actually made from stone! We had to use an abacus to calculate THACO, and we liked it!
You kids and your THAC0s. Previous systems relied on the measurements of the god-king's body, cast into clay tablets that never really rolled well.
Edited by themenschI did pick up a d100 once as a novelty but I only used it once in game.
I never rolled one of those golfball-size d100s in an actual game, but I did try rolling them a few times to see how they worked. The biggest problem I had was deciding which face was actually up, so I chose to avoid them for actual game use.
The die I used with the largest number of faces was a d30. I had a DM with a D30 critical hit table. The only time we ever used it was when our party was in a confined room, they were mostly dead, and my character was on a flying carpet, firing down into a slowly rising pool of mercury where the conjured Mercury Dragon was reaching out of the pool and dragging party members down to their death. I was using a magical bow with an arrow of dragon slaying.
The first roll was a natural 20 on d20, so a possible crit — no big deal, so I didn’t see the need to have any of the other players look at the dice to confirm that it actually was a 20. The second roll was a natural 20 on a d20, so confirming the crit — this time, I did have one of the other players confirm it. The roll on the critical hit chart was 30 on a d30. So, according to the chart, the dragon died instantly — and that was the only way you could get an “instant death” result in that game. The odds of that happening are 1 in 12,000 ( 1 / 20 * 1 / 20 * 1 / 30 = 1 / 12,000 ).
When I rolled the d30 and saw what came up, I refused to touch the die or even read it out loud. I made another player look at it to confirm what I thought I had rolled — he just so happened to also be a Pastor in a church that didn’t have problems with members playing games like D&D, where they were heroes fighting evil. I figured the other players (and the GM) would actually believe me if it was the Pastor who confirmed what I had rolled.
The only part of the dragon that was visible at the time my character fired the arrow, was his arm. No one could figure out how we could get an “instant death” result on the hit of an arrow on its arm, especially since it was a magically conjured dragon and not “real”. But, the DM decided that the dice don’t lie, so that’s what it was.
That was pretty much the end of that campaign. No one could figure out how to proceed, once the BBEG of the campaign was killed so easily and so early in the game. That was also the last time I ever gamed with that group.
I think that was also the last time I ever rolled a super high value on a critical hit chart where we just took the result at face value and didn’t apply some logic to the result.
I haven't ever really figured out why flinging bits of plastic around is better than using an rng on a phone or tablet. Maybe in 300 BC, when telecommunication involved banging drums or smoke signals, it made sense.
Having dice as a backup for when you have a dead battery sorta makes sense but only if you also carry a rolodex and coins for a payphone for the same reasons.
I haven't ever really figured out why flinging bits of plastic around is better than using an rng on a phone or tablet. Maybe in 300 BC, when telecommunication involved banging drums or smoke signals, it made sense.
Having dice as a backup for when you have a dead battery sorta makes sense but only if you also carry a rolodex and coins for a payphone for the same reasons.
Depends on how much you trust the RNG of the device/app. Some dice apps just used a list of results that they read through in order. If the user caught on to that, then they'd know what the next result would be based on the recent results and could just roll the dice between real rolls to prep the app to have the result they want for their next real roll.
Depends on how much you trust the RNG of the device/app. Some dice apps just used a list of results that they read through in order. If the user caught on to that, then they'd know what the next result would be based on the recent results and could just roll the dice between real rolls to prep the app to have the result they want for their next real roll.I haven't ever really figured out why flinging bits of plastic around is better than using an rng on a phone or tablet. Maybe in 300 BC, when telecommunication involved banging drums or smoke signals, it made sense.
Having dice as a backup for when you have a dead battery sorta makes sense but only if you also carry a rolodex and coins for a payphone for the same reasons.
That would be some bad coding.
I'm pretty sure that even Las Vegas only allows their dice to be used for a limited time to avoid having trends in their rolling identified and used by gamblers. If Vegas can't get perfectly random results from their dice, I doubt we gamers are faring better.
Depends on how much you trust the RNG of the device/app. Some dice apps just used a list of results that they read through in order. If the user caught on to that, then they'd know what the next result would be based on the recent results and could just roll the dice between real rolls to prep the app to have the result they want for their next real roll.I haven't ever really figured out why flinging bits of plastic around is better than using an rng on a phone or tablet. Maybe in 300 BC, when telecommunication involved banging drums or smoke signals, it made sense.
Having dice as a backup for when you have a dead battery sorta makes sense but only if you also carry a rolodex and coins for a payphone for the same reasons.
That would be some bad coding.
I'm pretty sure that even Las Vegas only allows their dice to be used for a limited time to avoid having trends in their rolling identified and used by gamblers. If Vegas can't get perfectly random results from their dice, I doubt we gamers are faring better.
Actually they retire them out for new dice so that they remain random. Not so they don't become predictable. The corners and edges wear which makes them more likely to land on certain sides. So, for games like craps that rely on the dice having the "normal" triangle distribution of 2d6, the wear alters is off that shape. That alters the odds for the house which can mean losses at the tables.
So dice, at least of common manufacture, carry the same risks with their entropy or lack thereof. These can be checked for balance pretty easily, although I have yet to subject my FFG Star Wars dice to the test. I presume they'll have the same inherent manufacturing flaws as other mass-produced non-Pro-gambling-establishment dice.
So I own a d30 for Tales From the Floating Vagabond, and I have in fact owned a zoccihedron - sometimes dice are just cool for style over substance! The zocchihedron took forever to roll, often well off the playing surface, and the numbers were so small you'd have to get right up on it to see them. Now the D-total die, that's a truly ridiculous die. Yeah, I own one of those too. Perhaps I have a problem.