No we still need to design games around physical dice?

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 2:37 pm

Smartphones exist.

Tablet computers exist.

Dice roller apps exist.

With electronic assistance you can roll arbitrary numbers of dice of arbitrary size almost instantly. a (2*10^20)d(2*10^20) dice pool can be rolled and counted with exactly the same speed as a single d20. And while that's stupidly huge, it remains that games which use electronic tools are not bound by the limits of physical dice.

Ten years ago, you'd have to carry around a laptop to make the most of such apps, and that was still clunky. These days, almost everyone has a smartphone; it's practically required.

So why stick with the standard dice sizes? With electronic RNGs you can have arbitrary ranges and precise probabilities. Want someone to have exactly a 20% chance of success? You can do that. What them to have exactly a 47.3987% chance of success? You can do that to.

And, of course, it allows much bigger numbers without completely breaking the game, assuming that you use the right formulas. You can have characters that scale from single digit HP to millions of HP, from single digit damage to millions of points of damage per attack, without being forced to make a broken system.

And, of course, you can make an arbitrary number of rolls at once. Need to make resistance rolls for a ten characters characters caught in an explosion? Instead of rolling the dice ten times, you just tell your app to do that and press the button once, getting 10 results.

The dice are a cage, d6, d10, d20, but never d17, d9, or d255. Replace the physical RNG with an electronic one and your imagination is the only limit. You could change the RNG to fit the needs of your game, rather than shaping your game to fit the limitations of the RNG.

GreatGreyShrike · Post by **GreatGreyShrike** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 2:45 pm

It's not especially clear to me that the ability to roll arbitrary amounts of dice with arbitrary numbers of faces and do arbitrary manipulations to the results will help people

A) Understand what the expected results of an action are

and

B) Understand what sorts of numbers you need to surpass an arbitrary difficulty are.

I mean, I know what 3d6 does. It generates a fairly decent normally distributed curve centered around ~10.5. If I am told I am rolling 70d55 keep 42 highest, with multiples of n dice on a single number adding an additional +2^n to the roll for each of the results but rolls of 1-5 being rerolled and those results subtracted from my total results... I submit a computer could do that in a tiny fraction of a second, and I personally could write code to *make* a computer do that in like five minutes, but the results would be *totally fucking opaque to me* and without running a Monte Carlo simulation and histogramming the results I would have *no fucking clue what the results average would look like, or what sort of DC it could beat or surpass.

Just because we have the capability of making the RNG opaque and hard to understand and interact with and reason about, does not mean that actually doing so is a good idea.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 2:55 pm

GreatGreyShrike wrote:It's not especially clear to me that the ability to roll arbitrary amounts of dice with arbitrary numbers of faces and do arbitrary manipulations to the results will help people

A) Understand what the expected results of an action are

and

B) Understand what sorts of numbers you need to surpass an arbitrary difficulty are.

I mean, I know what 3d6 does. It generates a fairly decent normally distributed curve centered around ~10.5. If I am told I am rolling 70d55 keep 42 highest, with multiples of n dice on a single number adding an additional +2^n to the roll for each of the results but rolls of 1-5 being rerolled and those results subtracted from my total results... I submit a computer could do that in a tiny fraction of a second, and I personally could write code to *make* a computer do that in like five minutes, but the results would be *totally fucking opaque to me* and without running a Monte Carlo simulation and histogramming the results I would have *no fucking clue what the results average would look like, or what sort of DC it could beat or surpass.

Just because we have the capability of making the RNG opaque and hard to understand and interact with and reason about, does not mean that actually doing so is a good idea.

I'm not suggesting that you make the RNG opaque. I'm suggesting that you start with the probability curve that you want and work backwards to achieve it.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 2:55 pm

For me it is mostly aesthetics and not having the temptation of cell-phone distraction. If someone wants to use a dice roller program that's fine by me but I still prefer physical dice if only for the visual and tactile feedback.

Everyone at the table can watch a die roll without having to overtly audit someone's little handheld screen. *sigh* yes, I have played with people who would cheat their rolls before (now reformed, but early in the RPG learning they'd "accidentally misread" dice all the damn time).

I don't often come up with a case where I care about d255 or d17. If I needed a d(prime number) I'd use the next higher die and ignore the higher roll (d6 reroll 6's), which is fine for the rarity that that comes up.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 5:38 pm

1. The point of a TTRPG is that you are interacting face to face. Staring into a small screen damages that worse than rolling a die does.

2. Smartphones are also phones. Gaming with people who are on-call for shifts or who have concerns about the babysitter handling emergencies requires them to maintain availability.

3. Gamer attics / basements are notoriously bad for outlets and recharging devices. Sure if you're in a room at the unversity library those are all swanky with modern outlets and complimentary charging stations

4. Dierollers do not generate random numbers - they generate pseudorandom numbers. This can have interesting unforeseen consequences (max damage of BFG in Doom) and is at least potentially exploitable.

5. Fuck you whippersnappers and your screen dependency.

mlangsdorf · Post by **mlangsdorf** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 5:55 pm

I play online (as well as f2f) and the ability to roll a d7 or a d17 or whatever is useful to the GM: if an effect has to be randomized among a group of enemies, you can just pick the exact value.

That convenience aside, I'd like some idea of how likely I am to succeed in a task, and complicated die rolling schemes make that difficult. And there's a limit to how precise I think the die roller needs to be: I could roll d10000 to generate a 34.335% chance of success, but general a d20 or d30 is fine.

Sakuya Izayoi · Post by **Sakuya Izayoi** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 7:56 pm

What a phone would do better than dice for me is simulating things. Like, you draw a castle on it and it calculates the cost and construction time. Or, you have a Star Trek ship and the PCs are working various duty stations, and from there it can procedurally generate ship events that happen when you're not dealing with a monster of the week. Or taking all the table lookup porn in Harnmaster and Pendragon and the like and actually making something functional out of those messes.

K · Post by K » Sat Jan 31, 2015 11:29 pm

Honestly, I'm not even convinced that dice are a sufficiently interesting tool for injecting randomization and drama into an RPG.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 11:30 pm

My electronic devices are too busy being used to reduce the use of hard copy paper print outs of rules these days.

Using them to ALSO fuck the basic roll mechanic over until no mere human could calculate it or comprehend it is impossible simply because they already don't have time for anything else.

Such a pity...

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 2:06 pm

K wrote:Honestly, I'm not even convinced that dice are a sufficiently interesting tool for injecting randomization and drama into an RPG.

How about using cats as a randomizer?

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 5:49 pm

We've ban all use of electronic devices at the table, specifically because of the irresistible distraction they pose.
Forcing the use of an electronic dice roller forces people to interact with that distracting device. While some people have the discipline to just use the dice roller, most don't. Incentivizing, and even enforcing, the use of distractions is just plain bad.
If you need infinite granularity in your RNG, it's time to bust out the video games.

infected slut princess · Sun Feb 01, 2015 8:35 pm

Dicking around on smartphones for your RNG is a fucking terrible idea and anyone suggesting that... well, they should be really ashamed. I can only think that they have no often played real RPGs with real people at real tables.

Rolling physical dice is fun! Especially a d20 or a fistful of dice. That's just awesome. That moment of suspense when you're watching the die bounce around before landing on a result is totally sweet.

Electronic RNGs to account for weird-ass probabilities ("i must, without too much fuss and difficulty, precisely account for the 23.76599% chance my character's punch will knock-out some dude") are just stupid. Go play a computer game.

rapa-nui · Post by **rapa-nui** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 11:52 pm

What Josh said.

K · Post by K » Mon Feb 02, 2015 12:00 am

hyzmarca wrote:
K wrote:Honestly, I'm not even convinced that dice are a sufficiently interesting tool for injecting randomization and drama into an RPG.
How about using cats as a randomizer?

I'm actually a fan of blind bluff or bidding set-ups. Even card-draw is better than dice.

I don't like cats because those would really only be useful for random number generation.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Mon Feb 02, 2015 1:43 am

Yes. Also, we need to continue to publish actual books made of paper. Because there are situations where pdfs simply aren't as useful, especially around a gaming table. Granted, electronic files are also pretty handy at times - but you can't really loan them out as easily.

infected slut princess · Mon Feb 02, 2015 2:18 am

But you can copy them and email them to people. If they don't have computers it's definitely a problem

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Feb 02, 2015 5:55 am

I like the physical sensation of rolling dice, that's a large part of the tabletop experience. Though play-by-post on tgd has also been enjoyable with Ancient History being an excellent host.