Responding to a "vent with allowed responses" thread, but figured this might spawn its own discussion and didn't want to hijack the vent thread.

I had a character who rolled really low a lot several years ago (the previous poster had described a character that, in 18 rolls, had rolled six 1's and two 2's.  Eventually I just gave up and started writing him as a combination of "Ernest P. Worrell" and "Steve Urkel", writing in that he got lucky during one of the rare moments when I'd actually roll well.

Some other people in the game expressed in OOC that they were upset that I was writing such a poor character, a character who was basically contributing nothing to the group, but I'd already posted in OOC that I was frustrated by the rolls too and was just trying to write something that was true to what was supposed to happen.

Like the fifth time you roll a grand total of eight on your attack roll, it may be time to stop writing about how your opponent is such an amazing dodge/parry master (especially when that particular opponent was literally a crippled kobold who could barely move), and start writing about how ineffective your character is.

"Did I do that?"  The character ignored the destroyed desk that had resulted from when he'd fallen and stabbed it seventeen times then thrown away his dagger (from a one).  He smirked at the crippled kobold in front of him, "Prepare for a chilling ray of frost, vile creature!"  He waved his hand and then saw a butterfly fly near his face.  A beautiful butterfly, with wings of gold and silver and amethyst wrapping around each other in a never-ending fractal spiral.  And as his attention turned to the butterfly he pointed his finger at it at just the wrong time and hit it squarely with his ray of frost.  An expression of horror slowly spread across his face as he realized what he'd done and turned to give his full attention to his real opponent.

I rolled a 4 with 1d20+2.

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OOC thread:

In OOC: Why'd you attack a butterfly?  Your character is worthless.  You're worthless -- play better.  You're supposed to attack the kobold.

Me: Look at my dice rolls, that's the 5th time I've tried to attack that same creature and failed miserably each time.  I'm starting to run out of ideas for how I can keep missing so badly.  I mean, it's not like I'm missing by one or two, I'm missing by a lot.  There has to be a reason for that.

---

Anyway, that was my somewhat frustrating experience.  How about the rest of you?  Who else has had a rotten string of bad luck rolls and how did you handle it?

I think you are handling it wonderfully. I wish more would play like that. You can game with me anytime.

I had a character once who was completely inept outside of combat. Didn't matter that he had a +7 to Perception, he would roll 1-4 every single time. In combat? He was untouchable. Every roll was a hit, and every damage roll was good. I don't remember how I handled that character, but I remember an interrogation came along and he just walked away. Sure, I have a +5. But I knew it was gonna be an epic fail.

Not my character, but there was one in my first Star Wars group...*mumble-mumble* years ago...she was a mercenary...but she couldn't hit the broad side of a Star Destroyer with a blaster...until she was wounded.  Once she got a die penalty for damage in battle?  She couldn't miss.  And it was totally NOT a character choice...it was astounding how consistent her dice were...

I GMed a game (RoleMaster) which had a Dwarf Cleric named Krepotkin. Only a 2% chance to fail a spell roll. He failed 25% on his first adventure. The rest of the group decided Krepotkin was Dwarvish for "Look out, he's casting a spell!!"

I agree! My rolls are generally low with d20 too, so you just have to roll with it the best you can. I think you (Genghis the Hutt) have a great attitude.

The last Pathfinder game I ran, only one roll in four that I made was actually ten or more.   Made for an interesting, if short lived, game.

20:14,  rolled 190 using 20d20 ((2,9,5,8,8,7,14,14,2,19, 1,11,7,11,14,12,1,20,17,8)).

This sequence is a probable as any other (as 20 20s). Just a point of interest. But RPOLers know things like this, which is why we all seldom buy lottery tickets.

Chaos theory kinda works against that. Research shows that probabilities only really hold up over long periods, and that generally good luck and bad luck occur in streaks.

What does chaos theory have to do with randomness? Chaos is the study of dynamic systems and their feedback mechanisms.

I'm not trying to be an apple, I honestly want to know more. Do you have any reference to this?

In reply to mole75 (msg # 10):

Chaos, by definition is Randomness.

Chaos in the everyday meaning might be just that. But chaos theory is the study of dynamic systems - often with coupled differential equations. It might be unpredictable on the short ther but it's not random.

Dice, whether physical or electronic simulations, are dynamic systems, so chaos theory does have some bearing on their outcome.

It would be stretching it to call a rolling die a dynamic system. At least in the way it's used in chaos theory. Normally you'd need to have several differential equations that influence each other. So if you rolled the die on a trampoline you might get a chaotic system but otherwise you wouldn't.

The way that electronic dice works is by using an algorithm and often use the time on the computer as the variable. If that was a dynamic system then the outcome of the algorithm would change the time. Since we don't see that many time traveling computers it's a safe bet that it doesn't.

OK to be fair that is a bit of an oversimplification. You could easily program a RNG to produce a chaotic behavior. But that would be  a really bad RNG.

Devil's advocate:

Physical dice could technically edge into the arena of a dynamic system if you consider the effects of physical wear over many thousands upon thousands of rolls.  Nearly all mathematical calculations performed for probability assume a "fair die", i.e. one that's mechanically sound/perfect.

I don't know how you could form the equation but theoretically there should be some equations which consider the effect off all past rolls on the current probability.

Some really old school roleplayers have d20s that are so worn they are no longer fair dice and will regularly favor a handful of possible values, depending on the wear pattern.  That makes sense if you think about it, it's basically a plastic orb to begin with and the sides are usually small so it takes relatively little wear to mess with them.

Casinos replace their dice pretty often for that reason.

You are right that wear and tear or even a badly made die can favour certain values. But that's not what is understood as chaotic behaviour (at least not when talking about the scientific field of chaos theory.) Such a die would still have a very simple set of equations that govern it's motions.

Of course taken over a long stretch of time the previous wear on the die would influence the rolls in the future. But that would still not be considered dynamic in the sense of chaos theory (at least not how I understand it).

There are wonderful examples of chaos theory in play with weather patterns, fluctuation of populations of animals and such. The big difference between random events and chaotic events is that you have a chance of predicting the later whereas the former is by nature random. That's why you can predict how a population of animals grows or declines but you'll never have any way of predicting when an atom decays (other than their statistic probabilities).

As I understand it, applying chaos theory to dice rolling would be more about constantly shifting variables like the particular speed and direction of spin a die gets as it's released from your hand, variations in the surface you're rolling on (a hard tabletop doesn't have many, but carpet can throw different angles into a bounce, and if you're rolling into a box top or such held on your lap, the slope of the surface can change by a few degrees from roll to roll, or even during the roll), whether or not you're having the dice rebound off a surface after the initial 'toss', etc...  They're pretty minimal variables, practically insignificant...but enough to affect the dice results.  And the possible results with most dice are such a small range that, statistically, there's little or no change in the degree of randomness you get from rolling under 'chaotic' circumstances versus the random results generated by a computer.

In reply to Genghis the Hutt (msg # 1):

Getting back on track. I had character that recently died. He was level 1, and hit once in his career. He was critically hit, from  hull HP to dying. My other character (first of two in solo) tried to heal him with the heal skill. Couldn't do it. Needed a 10, a 55% on each roll. Couldn't do it. So poor guy who was critically hit died, just wasted away.

I put meaning into it. The GM gave outs and I wanted the dice to mean something.

As for the "Did I do that?" probably not. If you want realism, no, it was your opponent's defense. If you want narrative, again, probably not. Many video game and movies show blocks and dodges, a good hit is often the only one that turns the tide.

I know dodging and armor can be repetitive, but that's the whole point. If a kobold has a good dex, or is wearing armor, that's what's doing it. Sadly, it's probably just that.

But in D&D the numbers can be construed however you want them to be. If the group wants defensive narrative, then yeah, that's probably it. If they want offensive narrative, then yeah, go for it. If they want circumstantial narrative, that can work too.

I tend to think of 1st level characters like junior year high school students. They suck, and by suck, I mean they are the equivalent of putting a junior varsity wrestler on the mat, or a junior in a band on the stage. Even the gifted ones aren't much to look on.

I had a character in one of my games like that. Sorcerer who stood in front of the group's monk, took his first hit (a crit), and insta-died.

That group was plagued by bad luck, though. An Ogre sneaked up on the rogue during the night. The rogue had something stupid like +9 to Perception. After that, the group kept their eyes out for more ninja Ogres.

I was rather referring to what has been found in studying the world with chaos theory. The universe is one big chaotic system after all.

If you consider the probabilities of a d6, then over X number of rolls, you should get about 1/6th of the rolls landing on each number. For a million rolls this is actually quite close, but as X gets smaller, particularly below a dozen, then it doesn't hold true very well.

Take a look at the line of d20 results posted above my last remark (msg #8). Not very evenly distributed even though probability would suggest a mostly even distribution. Despite only 20 rolls you actually have two results that each came up trice. The first 6 results were all below 10 and most of the results clustered around 8 with 14 and 11 bringing the majority. Of the remaining results, half were 1-2 while the others were scattered and only 3 of the 20 rolls were 15 or more even though in theory five rolls should have been 15 or more.

This effect is what I was referring to.

Within this aspect of results drifting so far from probability for any short streak of results, is where really strange things happen that are easily attributed to things unexplained by science. Whether it be chance, fate, divine intervention, or something else entirely, strange patterns appear that probability suggests as very unlikely, yet happen all the time.

For example, in my very first campaign, I had a sorcerer and when rolling for magic spells, I always used my sparkling d4s, because they always rolled well for magic, but always rolled poorly for anything else, and none of my other d4s rolled well for magic damage.

Probability says this is possible but very unlikely. Think about it, over a few hundred rolls, the only high rolls had a very strong correlation to something that could not physically impact the results.

The chances are astronomical that it would work out such that from a pool of dice only specific ones should roll high and only when the narrative met certain conditions, yet such patterns are common and so far unexplainable (except by religion).

Double post for some reason. Sorry.
This message was last edited by the user at 15:04, Tue 26 June 2018.

Because a bad string of rolls can come at any time, I try to focus on games that are fun even if the PCs are losing. Combat usually isn't such a situation, because fun itself is often at stake, in the form of the characters themselves. That doesn't have to be the case, though.

Also, some games have things for characters to do that don't require them to hit. For instance, leaders and defenders in 4th Edition D&D always have a baseline amount of effectiveness, even if they never hit any targets. And almost every character has at least one heavy hitting power that does something even on a miss.

Also, I try to play games in which things like hitting and missing and damaging are more abstract. A roll that's a miss can be described as heroic, rather than foolish. There's often little reason why a miss on the dice can't be described as a hit in the game. If it doesn't actually change or make progress toward any new state, well, so what? The target shrugs off that hit, but clearly can't keep that up forever.

Nope. Sorry but this is a tiny, tiny sample. Run the dice roller a 1000 times or 10000 times. The results won't be perfectly even but they will tend towards an even distribution. At various times there might be runs of certain numbers or clusters but it shouldn't mean anything in the long term.

Depending upon the peculiarities of random number generation software and hardware on the RPOL server the result of any previous die roll should have zero effect upon any subsequent die roll. It might look like there is a pattern but this is because humans are good at seeing cause and effect... too good in fact and so our brains keep on seeing it when it isn't there. Our brains make up a reality to suit us.

Also remember that you are sharing this die roll mechanism with people in your own game and in fact every other person on this server so there are often many other die rolls occurring in between your last die roll and your next.

As for Chaos theory, if we were talking about a perfectly random dice roller then Chaos theory has zero effect. Where Chaos Theory would have an impact would be in considering other factors, as discussed above, where you were rolling dice on a table. Things like wear and tear on the dice, the way the dice were being thrown, which face of the die was facing up when the dice were thrown, the friction of the surface onto which the dice were being thrown and so on. Other than that there is no feedback that derives purely from the previous result of a dice onto the next result that will occur when the dice is rolled again.

As for role-playing, as GM I tend to allow for a little fudging in order to make the story interesting. I dislike having the players know what they need to hit and can allow for some partial effects appropriate to the combat.

Did you read my post? The fact that it is a tiny sample and not a large sample, is a massive part of it.

Also, there is no such thing as truly random, it is always a result of a chaotic system. It just seems random because we can't even know all the exact inputs much less calculate the result.

As for the site's rng, I don't know for sure what Jase uses, but if it is a common one, or worse, the default for java/c++/etc, then it is well known for having skewed results in the first handful of results. Regardless, all rngs are not truly random.

Besides, if you reread my post, you'll realize that this,

is exactly a point I addressed. Of course, I didn't make assumptions about the source of those patterns. And taking the "scientific" view (that isn't actually scientific) is still an assumption.

Proceed with caution when telling someone that something they believe about random number generation is due to small sample size, confirmation bias, or anything else mundane. Belief in supernatural influence on random results may seem funny or quirky but I've seen it taken very seriously.

Hmm... the discussion has sparked a possibly interesting long-term experiment in probability.

As some have already pointed out, there are nuanced definitions of Chaos (as opposed to chaos), some philosophical, some mythological, and some mathematical.

With that, I've said all I intend to until after the thousandth roll is done and the numbers are crunched.  (When will I find the time...)

This might take a while, folks.  See ya!

I'd be interested in reading details about this, if someone has a source. Searching seems to just bring up questions about how to skew results deliberately for whatever reason.

If it's a well-known issue, I imagine there are well-known ways to address it, and I'd like to understand those.

The problem with probabilities is that they're only good over large sample sets.  Individual runs of data can be very good or bad with the dice.

For instance, I made a two-weapon ranger for a 4e Darksun game (which used a "weapons break on a 1" rule of some description - I don't recall if you rolled a second time to confirm it or not).  I proceeded to roll terribly in the first combat, broke both weapons, and then died.  According to probability, that was a very unlikely chain of events, but it definitely happened and left me a bit annoyed.

In another (less personal) example, Red Markets uses 2d10 to generate results.  Results of 11, 33, 55, 77, and 99 are critical failures.  During the playtesting of the game, there was a session where the players rolled so many critical failures that the creator declared they "broke math" and started to doubt the dice mechanic entirely.

So... probability is useful.  Probability is what you design characters to.  Heck, probability is something the GM should be well aware of when calling for rolls.  However, it's not necessarily what you're going to experience in a given session.

Which is one reason I like systems that let you barter something for success, regardless of the dice.  Fate/karma/moxie/benny points are an obvious example.  Other games that let you "succeed at a cost" are another.  From an objective point of view, such systems are just better because dice sometimes decide to take the story completely off the rails (beyond what's acceptable to the group, anyway).

There are two optional rules. For one of them, if you roll a 1, the weapon breaks. For the other, if you roll a 1, you may choose to re-roll the attack; after the re-roll the weapon breaks (a metal weapon only breaks on a natural roll of 1-5).


Yes, just about anything is better than "you miss; nothing happens." Even D&D gets this a little with how it makes certain things (major spells in just about every edition, and all daily powers in 4th Edition) do something on a miss. They get that some misses are just too painful.

People definitely need to know what they're putting at stake with dice rolls, though. If a particular roll or run of rolls could "take the story completely off the rails," then there's probably a better way to arrange that story, assuming the table doesn't want to use a completely different system, or just reconsider what's necessary to roll for.

Well, to just grab an example, imagine the big battle at the end of the campaign.  It's succeed or the world ends.  Those are the stakes the group has been playing toward the entire campaign and then... no one can roll above a 3 the entire fight.  It isn't a big heroic struggle where they fall just short... it's just pathetic.  No one leaves the table feeling good about the session and it probably sours perceptions of the entire campaign.  Even if the GM steps in with some sort of fiat and allows for a "heroic sacrifice" at the end to put a decent ending on the story, it only sort of mitigates the disaster.

I felt that way about that ranger, though my next character had a much longer career.  I don't feel that way about a number of other deaths and TPKs I've been through, though.  For instance, a 9 month long Ravenloft game I was playing face to face just met a TPK due to bad player choices (not die rolls) and I'm perfectly fine with that.

It's not a big heroic struggle, until it is. If that is put entirely in the hands of the dice, then it very well might not be a big heroic struggle, and deciding a priori that it will be is asking for trouble. It might go the other way too: the characters roll well, and the enemy rolls poorly, making the fight a complete pushover.

The problem is not the dice system, but the presupposition incompatible with the dice system.


I can well imagine. None of that should be staked on dice rolls.


Fortunately, there are other options than that, even without changing systems (and even under another system some of those options should probably be considered).

Basically, one has to understand what they're getting into, and not presuppose that any particular random generation system (or really any set of rules, but particularly ones with random outcomes) is going to deliver a desired outcome over something as short as a single scene or situation or evening. One simply has to be able to accept an extremely unlikely cluster of rolls. If they can't, they have no business rolling the dice.


Okay, though choosing not to take into account the possibility of bad dice rolls is also bad player choice.

The discussion of improbabilities reminds me of another story...

A friend/former roommate of mine basically kit-bashed his own game together, cherry-picking aspects of several other systems that he liked, along with a few elements of his own devising.  One of those was his version of Luck.  It was, basically, a die pool hybridized with an attribute.  You could spend a Luck point in various ways, or he could have you roll in your Luck, 1d20...if you rolled lower than your Luck score, Fortune smiled upon you in some way...

When he first started using the system, there was also a rule that if you rolled a 1 on a Luck check, you gained a Luck point, buildingon the notion that those who rely on Luck tend to become lucky.  And, for most people, that worked out great...every session or two, someone might get a Luck point...

Then, one night, because of that rule, my character ended up starting the evening with a Luck of 12...and ended the night with a Luck of 18.  If it had been a standard D20 game, it would have been calamitous.  Next game session, he announced that the Gain Luck on a 1 rule now only applied until your Luck reached 15.  To the best of my knowledge, nobody else has actually gained enough Luck in any of his games for that rule to have any use...

Not sure where to find it now. It had come up in programming class ages ago, and the professor said that pretty much any pro will use a better rng than the standard library for anything important, such as games. Of course, cryptography requires an entirely more profound rng as well.

Given that, then, there's no reason to think that this site doesn't use a better generator. That and the fact that those who run this site were no doubt aware that people would be likely to question them over their methods. Sounds like it would be easy enough for them to obtain as good a random number generator as anyone here might need.

Yes.  On a number of occasions Jase has shown that the dice roller is, statistically, equal to real dice (tested over sets of a quarter of a million rolls, or more).

And still people complain that it rolls low.  Except when they need low numbers, when it rolls consistently high.  :)

It is a trait of the default rng for c++ (and I believe java) that the first few results favor low. The issue being only with small samples, seemingly having been missed when first implemented because the original programmers went for easy rather than good.

It is a problem that literally can't be discerned in large sample sizes. And if he simply tested it like we did in class, by seeding once and generating 250k numbers between 1 and 6, well that is most certainly not rigorous, nor sufficient, and known to specifically miss this issue.

I'll see if I can find it again in my book to post the reference.

Thanks, I'd really like to understand this. Not that I'm concerned about the rolls on this site, but I've heard this claim before.

Assuming it's true, though, and assuming the roller on this site suffered from the same defect, how would anyone be able to tell that a particular set of rolls were the result of it? Or is the idea that if there's reason to doubt the rolls, then a GM is justified in throwing out results that seem fishy to them?

Then it's probably just as well that neither of those is used here.  :)

Additionally, checking up on old threads it looks like I estimated low.  jase generally tests with sequences of rolls running in the tens of millions.  Additionally he has, in the past, made the testing code available to users, so that they can run their own test sequences, and analyse the results online.

So hundreds of millions of rolls by multiple users, with the result showing that the roller is as random as real dice rolled at a table.

Also, for all those people who used to complain about low rolls, he switched the results display over one time (without telling anybody), so that instead of displaying the roll it displayed (X-roll) where X was the die size+1.  For example,  a roll of 4 on a d20 was displayed as a "17", and a 17 showed as a "4".  If the roller was consistently rolling low, the displayed results should have been high...

People still whined that they kept getting low results.

Cool. I think, though I'm not sure, that this is simply a matter of faith for some. That's why I want to understand DarkLightHitomi's position and the reasons for it, and what it would mean if the roller weren't noticeably flawed.


Ah, stuff like that makes me smile.

In reply to bigbadron (msg # 37):

I do have a genuine question, which jase may or may not want secret. When you say it's like "real dice", do you mean to say it eventually favors certain dice for certain character aliases? If so, that would be quite astute, meta and crazy, but sort of cool!

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Spoiler for my pursuit of rigged dice: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
I rolled a die using a remote controlled lego tower. IT rolled roughly twenty times a minute, and after many, many, many attempts worked for weeks without the die falling out of the rig, or the rig powering down or getting caught. I did this over the period of 11 months with different dice. Sometimes together, sometimes apart. It rolled roughly 2.5 million rolls, between down time, margin of slightly faster rolls, and multiple dice being logged. In the end, I rolled them all about 1,000 times, by hand, to see a trend. Then put a total of four dice in the rig to roll for 2.5 years. After which the rig finally broke down, and I never deemed to replace it. It was in my room running non-stop, because I liked the sound of the fan, for sleeping and home noise, but eventually forgot about it. *chuckles* Then one day it just stopped, and I thought; what just happened. Apparently dust had just acculumated. Which is when I took the dice out. 

---

Dice, especially copper and plastic (the most common) favor a side after long enough of rolling. The best example is the platonic solid cube and the octohedron. This is why casinos give away their dice after enough rolls.

I have a d6 IRL that rolls "6" 5/12 times.  So just over 1/3 of the time. I have a couple d20s that roll high (12+) numbers just under 70% of the time. The d20's in fact were not rigged, they just naturally got that way, or if they were, they were rigged before I got them.

So my question, if does the dice roller actually "learn" by the alias used?

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Spoiler for if you think I'm a dirty cheater: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
Anyway, just out of my defense, I never used the rigged dice for anything but meta. The god form D&D Olidammarra used it in a game. I had a box of "charity" dice that players could use to "reroll" a bad roll if they would either donate to the game table (food, drinks, mapping, etc..) or when I was running for the LGS to get them revenue and myself free cards (as payment from the store for raising interest). So I never used them to "cheat" anyone but myself, or the one instance of the god of luck.

---

Anyway, many people actually think dice rollers are "bad" because of the very fact RL dice show favor.

I actually rolled 10,000 (tiny I know) rolls myself on RPoL a couple times, and just counted the net sum (though I DID record each die, THAT got tedious) with mean. So I know that the dice roller is actually quite accurate to a truly random roll. I think it rolled like 123k for all rolls total sum. Which is slightly above the regression to the mean. Which is to be expected (as in not exactly mean) with only 10,000 rolls.
This message was lightly edited by the user at 14:39, Wed 27 June 2018.

Only if said character alias sacrifices sufficient quantities of snack foods and non-alcoholic beverages to the dice gods, who squat on their mountain of 25 sided d20s, the fabled Mount WTF, and laugh every time some mortal rolls the exact number that he needs least.

I had a friend who bought a new set of dice for a little mini-con that we had.  They were big dice -- the d20 must have been at least 3" across.  Anyway, he kept rolling 1's all night, he just rolled poorly.  He was going to throw the dice away but I asked him to give them to me instead.  I took them home and rolled the d20 enough to determine where it was likely to roll -- 1's most often, but 17's some of the time.

Then when I was about to have a total party kill when I was running a table at a con, I'd break them out and talk about how I loved killing a party and how these were my kill dice.  Tended to be very exciting with either 1's or near crits.

Then afterward I'd tell the table this story. :)

I just wanted to pipe up here and note that streaks of luck have a profoundly greater impact on a PbP environment, where one roll is the culmination of a day's activity, and a "bad" streak of 2-10 rolls can last a week (or longer!), whereas that streak would be "burned out" by an hour's play at tabletop.  And especially, given the apparent quantity of high-rp, low-crunch games played, a bad roll with a good stat can go so far as to undermine a character concept.  (Did your smart character fail the one knowledge roll this week?  Heck, this month?)

No matter how perfect the dice, the extended, drawn-out psychological consequences of bad rolls, especially subsequent bad rolls, is especially stinging to us forum players.

This becomes a big issue in cheap "novelty" dice. I'm guessing it's poor quality manufacturing because there isn't a high demand for precision giant dice. My guess is these would fail the salt water test hard.

I read a reddit post about a guy who runs PFS and how his players would cheat by bringing in "loaded" dice. They would go to the big bins of dice and test them to find ones that hit 19s or 20s so he would have to have a glass of salt water and whenever someone rolled a crit on a die he would test it.

He had to test the dice repeatedly because they would try to do things like have a regular die, wait for it to get tested and then swap it out for an identical looking rigged die...

Cheaters gonna cheat I guess...


Found the thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathf..._full_comprehensive/

And I think this is the real issue for PbP. The dice roller is what it is and, whether we can comprehend big data or not, it is random.

So, how do we handle what seems like bad luck for an character, particularly in critical situations, when it just seems that they can't do anything right. Systems that have a single all or nothing pass score (rather than a sense of partial, total, or critical success, with a lower range for total fail) seem to be at the root of the problem.

Should we take die rolls away from players completely? Have the GMs roll, and fudge when necessary, and let the player know the result? Do players really want to be able to roll the dice themselves?

Technically, computers use an algorithm to generate random numbers.  As such, they're not really random.

If you want to be technical, nothing is random. A die roll hits a number because of a million physics variables acting upon it from air resistance to material density of die and surface and angle of the roll and the momentum on the die etc. etc.

And yet, for all intents and purposes, it's a random enough generation of numbers that over large sets of data all numbers of equal probability of being rolled.

Same thing with an RNG generator. Unless it's a BAD RNG generator (which Jase has published datasets showing his isn't) then it's effectively random enough to qualify as just as random as anything else we use to generate random numbers.

Ha, without a Bigcrush score that says good, I don't consider a rng as anything more than adequate.

I don't know what he uses, but I'd want to see the BigCrush results before I call it "good."

That said, I don't really feel his rng needs to be better than what it is, though it'd be nice.
This message was last edited by the user at 04:28, Fri 29 June 2018.

In part, but other systems just sort of kick the can down the road. Characters have to be able to fail, and if they're able to then sometimes they will.

As I've probably said already, I think the root of the problem is that the usual ways to fail are uninteresting, at best. At worst, they make the character (and by extension the player) seem foolish. Death is a very common default way for characters to fail, and while a lot of people find ways to make the best of it, it has a lot of problems. What I've found is that if a group can find ways that the players don't mind failing, ways they'd still see as consequences that the characters would hate, but which the players would find interesting and engaging, then failure, and therefore the luck of the dice, matter a whole lot less.


Ugh, no don't hide and fudge. No one is a perfect liar and when the players realize what the GM is doing they're likely to be displeased.

That said, I bet we don't need randomness in RPGs at all. And I'm not talking complete free-form either. It's possible to have interesting, strategic games without randomness - chess, for instance. Although I don't know of any such, I bet there's a way to have RPGs that operate that way: moves and countermoves, and no randomness at all.

Sounds like someone needs some Burning Wheel.

This is why at least some new games (I'm specifically thinking about Delta Green here, but I've seen it elsewhere) have a big warning at the front that you should only roll dice when failure can be interesting.  While you'll never get around a few necessary cases where the fail state is "it didn't work", I prefer it when the PCs don't have to roll in most of those situations and just succeed.

You do still get into situations where absolutely no one is rolling well and the game goes in a weird direction you don't really want to play.  Which is why I also prefer games that have a safety mechanic to shore up against a streak of bad luck.

In reply to swordchucks (msg # 50):

Makes me think of the Gumshoe system, which makes finding "core clues" automatic. It's interpreting those clues that matters.

I don't need it, I hope. I borrowed the books once and almost couldn't close them quickly enough, though I did like what I saw of the abstract money system. I didn't know it didn't use random numbers, but that's probably not enough to entice me.

I should also have remembered that there's always Amber Diceless Roleplaying, but that always sounded rather kooky to me.


True. I'm surprised to hear that Delta Green says that, but good on them. Anyway, yeah, this is something try to apply to every game I play, and it has only improved my experiences.


Easily gotten around: "It didn't work, but as a result of your failure, you learn/notice/encounter this interesting thing...." The thing not working isn't boring; the thing not working and nothing coming of that is boring.


How? Why is that direction a possible one if no one wants to play it?

I personally prefer to roll on the table where the players can see, I now only use a GM screen for reference and to hide my notes/upcoming material.    Most players seem to prefer it that way, it seems.

For any roleplaying game, the GM's job is to make things interesting and to keep things mobile (to avoid roadblocks that prevent story moving forward, yet leaving it to the players to actually move things onward at their own pace).

That includes when the characters fail.

How many awesome movies are there where the main characters fail and fail and fail till they win? Lots.

For that matter, how often are protagonists common folks that are handling the problem because they are forced to or because no one else will?

To quote Red from Angry Birds "Now I see the fate of the world rests on idiots like me, and that's terrifying."

Far too many people are afraid to be something less than a hero, afraid to be the ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. GMs handling failure in such a poor way is probably a major cause of that.

Number 1 piece of advice for DnD, "Always fail forward."

This has gotten off track but I used to build convention LARPs for years and the rule we followed was rules of threes. If there was something vital to furthering the plot you needed to provide at least three ways of getting there because people miss things or fail to interpet all the time.

Same thing with secrets and information. If you want it to come in play you need three people to know it. Some people forget or hoarde information or dont understand what it means but chances are at least one player figures it out