Pen-and-paper role-playing games involve rolling dice to determine outcomes and sometimes (OK, almost always), said dice hate you and everything you stand for. It’s time to pay them back for their sinister ways and what better method to use than shaming?
A post on the Tumblr blog “Schneiltzle” kicked things off with the above gem. If you can’t see the image it’s basically a 20-sided die (commonly referred to as a d20) with the following message:
I left my owner on fire for five turns and proceeded to fail a save against petrification.
Which sounds about right. Inspired by this tale of polyhedral woe, this thread popped up over at Screenburn featuring additional accusatory postings.
[clear]
Of course, there was this more rational contribution.
I’m not convinced. I know my dice scheme my downfall while hiding in their carry pouch.
Dice shaming [Tumblr, via Neatorama]
Photos: Bishoop47 / LonoXIII / Ian Davison
Comments
15 responses to “Dice Shaming Must Become A Thing”
That last one is clearly delusional and that die is just waiting for the right moment to strike.
I agree — it’s been left sitting with the 1 face-up! I’m sure on a sub-atomic level that’s giving it an infinitesimal predisposition to rolling critical failures.
I thought it was just chaotic neutral.
Any sort of RNG system has true malice weaved within it by the cosmos, the RNG is a force beyond human comprehension and yet we wield it with such flippantly
Luckily most systems use pseudo random number generators (since they have known entropy characteristics). That way you’ve only got to deal with pseudo-malice.
PRNGs are worse, the people implementing them are playing god
I think most people expect a shuffle bag (http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/shuffle-bags-making-random-feel-more-random–gamedev-1249) rather than pure randomness from games, despite demanding the latter. That way you preserve the chance factor while adding “fairness”.
A good example is Catan’s event deck, which has dice rolls printed on the cards.
The terminology in that article is pretty horrible. It uses statistical terms like “even distribution” to talk about small sample sizes. You’d only expect the distribution to smooth out after an extremely large number of samples.
Shuffling may be appropriate for some game mechanics, but it has its own problems. If you shuffle N items and have dealt out N-1, then you know exactly what the last item is.
But it is still, in the end, an RNG and still therefore evil and full of malice.
I have no idea what half these comments mean. ;_;
Don’t despair! This might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game_terms
RNG stands for “Random Number Generation” systems, like most of the mmoRPGs are using for (example) calculating damage output. RNG is the unholy grail for gaming designing, some programmers avoid it, some others overuse it, and some others are making a fake RNG (that’s Pseudo-Random Number Generation) to create a controllable suspense.
Ah, thank you both.
I don’t roll dice, I’m too afraid I’ll end up in the darkest timeline
I assumed this was going to be some sort of anti-Battlefield article… We must shame DICE for releasing such a terrible buggy piece of shit and calling it Battlefield 4.