Posts Tagged by dice

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I like big dice and I cannot lie You other GMs can’t deny That when an attack rolls up at a critical place,  And that 20’s in their face, You get sprung… With my most sincere apologies to Sir Mix-A-Lot, I like big dice when I’m GMing. No, not the monster ones that should sit on a shelf, but the 28mm “Jumbo” size. No, they don’t fit in most dice towers, nor do they transport as easily as their smaller brethren, nor do they come…

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I recently got to play two sessions of Marvel Heroic Roleplay (which rocks — it captures the feel of supers better than any other RPG I’ve played, including FASERIP Marvel; see Don’s recent article for more in that vein) and I used a trick to speed up my turns that I thought was worth sharing. While I was a player in this game, not the GM, the trick applies equally to GMs — and to games other than MHR. And it’s super-simple: Just color code…

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A while ago, I introduce the d10million, which is just a daily pill box full of d10s: This is fantastic for rolling multiple d10s simultaneously or for when you need a really big number, but by switching things up, you can do other things with your box o’dice. Ton O’Mooks: If you have a battle set up with a bunch of mooks, filling your dice box with the required dice to roll multiple attacks simultaneously can speed things up a lot.  Even if they have…

Martin’s recent article on inking his new GameScience dice naturally led to a spirited discussion about GameScience’s claims that their dice are the best dice available in terms of randomness, which quite naturally leads one to ask: “Is my favorite die fair? How can I tell?” One possibility is to perform a chi*-square goodness of fit test. This doesn’t include any difficult math, though it can be tedious without a spreadsheet program. The purpose of a goodness of fit test (often called simply a chi-square…

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Have you ever killed a PC through fiat? A while back I was running a street-level superheroes game. Realism (in as much as any game is “realistic”) was emphasized, to the point that no one wore spandex and vigilante activity would get you arrested if caught. We also started with none of the PCs knowing each other, as relationships were supposed to be forged in game. In what was going to be our last session, sloppy play on the part of one PC, Ryder, turned him…

This review has been a long time in the coming. I’ve had both of these books on my shelf for a while* and I’ve been sitting on doing the review for no real particular reason. Neither of these books were comp copies and this review is unsolicited. These are just two products that I’ve had for a while and wanted to review. Ok, lets talk about the books, and to talk about those we have to talk about GameplayWright Press. Back when I was first…

Have you ever had this happen at a game? “I roll to see if I know anything about ancient ankthyrian architecture and where they might have hidden a secret door. Crap, didn’t get it. Let me just try that again…” or how about? “Ok, I know I’ve rolled 8 times to try to force the door, but the 9th time is the charm!” or what about this golden oldie? “Ok, we want to avoid a fight. I’ll try to talk them down since I am…