Posts Tagged by dice
| March 18, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Building on the idea of die drop tables and tools in Vornheim, I came up with a simple approach to quickly generating a region: the drop map. I had fantasy hexcrawls in mind when I wrote this, and the map I’ve created using this method is for that sort of game. There’s no reason you couldn’t fiddle with this in all sorts of ways to produce maps for larger/smaller regions, other genres, or even other kinds of maps entirely. It’s deliberately a lazy, quick, flexible…
| February 27, 2013 | Posted by Don Mappin |
In a nice bit of synergy, I composed this piece before Matt’s excellent article on Alan DeSmet’s GameScience Dice Analysis, so it continues the die theme nicely. Unfortunately, this article doesn’t have nearly the comprehensive analysis (or fancy charts) that Matt’s did. Soldier on, I say! The question — and potential solutions — posed today revolve around the sharing of dice: Friendly gesture to the unprepared or sacred taboo to never be discussed? It’s Only Weird if it Doesn’t Work Gamers are a superstitious lot,…
| February 26, 2013 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
Almost every gamer has seen Lou Zocchi’s classic pitch for GameScience dice, and if you haven’t yet and have the 20 minutes, click that link. It’s worth a watch. About 4 minutes into the first video, Zocchi references his picture of stacked dice, seen to the right. This picture has long been the major piece of proof that GameScience fans point to as proof of the superiority of their favorite dice. We can date that picture between 1981 and 1991 because the far left stack…
| October 8, 2012 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
Here’s a simple random dungeon generation method that uses only a sheet of graph paper, a pencil and the bucket of dice every gamer already owns. Lay out your paper, dump your bucket of dice on it, and remove all the dice that didn’t roll their max, while being careful to move those that did as little as possible. Wherever you had a die roll max, draw a room of that size. Thus rolling a 4 on a d4 results in a room of size…
| September 13, 2012 | Posted by Scott Martin |
Sometimes you need to remember to slow down and take a breath. Intermediate steps can provide a different sense of structured time. A scene is emphasized if it builds up and maintains dramatic focus. Unfortunately, exhortations to “play it out”, relying on the table to maintain dramatic narration and pacing, out often fall by the wayside. (How many of you have played in games where the rules recommend describing your actions in detail, but after a few sessions players report “I hit for seven damage”?)…
| August 29, 2012 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
Recently I had the pleasure of corresponding with the customer service division of Chessex. Their representative, Dustin, had the fastest response time of any customer service team I’ve ever dealt with, taking only ten minutes to respond to my query and responding even more quickly after that. Here’s what Dustin had to say, and I admit it rather took the wind out of my sails: “Chessex was named such because the owner was an old Chess player. He was nationally ranked at one point. Thus…
| August 8, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
If you’ve never been to Gencon, or another large gaming/geek convention, it’s really hard to get an idea for exactly what it feels like. When I went to my first Origins 7 or so years ago, I couldn’t even begin to conceive of what the experience was going to be. So, last year at Gencon I carted my camera around and captured as much footage as I could. I tried to get interviews with any attendees who would stand still long enough, and I got…
