/b/ Talk

No discussion about tabletop role-playing is complete without at least mentioning dice. The polyhedral objects used so frequently to determine success and failure alike are really quite simple. Any geometric shape with an even number of sides can be considered for die-hood.

The game store aficionado knows all too well the huge range of dice that are available, from four sided dice all the way to 100 sides and even beyond. The little blighters come in sizes varying from 2 millimeters across to the size of a good summer watermelon. Dice can be made from nearly any material and often are; just in the small gaming shop in Huntington, W.Va. I can find over one hundred colors in at least thirty materials. In some gaming centers (such as Dragon's Lair in Austin, Texas) there are entire counters devoted to dice and their containers. Many of these extreme sizes, shapes, or colors are gimmicks and collectibles, but they're so popular they're worth mentioning.

Why do so many games use dice? Think about that, for a moment. You have to come up with numbers for the spaces to move on a board, or the damage done by a weapon... do you let the player decide? How do you know what is what, without some chance involved? A die is nothing more than a percentage generator, and you can know what to expect out of it by knowing what its average roll will be. Assuming the dice are fair, it's a completely honest way of determining how far to move across the game board, or wether or not you succeeded in attacking your enemy.

Any die or dice that a player rolls will turn up the median score +1 for roughly 17% of the rolls. That is its average. As an example, let's say you roll two six-sided dice: 17% of the time, you should roll a score of seven. This is twice as likely to happen as rolling a four or a ten, and four times as likely as rolling a two or an eleven. Using these same standard deviations, you can calculate the percentages for any die or combination thereof that you would roll.

From a GM's standpoint, dice are important but still secondary to the story. All players with any experience can recall at least one time where they feel the GM cheated them out of a victory for one reason or another; most often that was for the good of the story. How can the players stop an apocalypse brought on by the evil cleric if they kill the villain months before he can research the spells from the book he just stole? Often, a GM will have to fudge things in the direction needed, which brings up the need to be good at solving disputes as well as writing adventures.

Nearly every game comes with some form of rolling table for determining everything from random encounters on the road to what odor a person has. A GM will spend more time rolling on these tables, or on tables which help determine the effects of particular actions than anything short of combat encounters. The dice can determine nearly everything, if you let them. All of this information needs to be recorded or memorized, which goes back to organizing the game.