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The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: bibliophile20 on February 02, 2011, 09:35:44 PM
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It has been observed by a friend of mine (who actually just stopped into town, thus prompting this thread) that the superstitions, rituals and beliefs gamers have about their dice practically border on an unorganized religion. ;) "Lucky" dice, "training" your dice, sadistic dice... the permutations are endless. Heck, I, personally, will occasionally incinerate one of my d10s to "encourage the rest" for the nWoD game I'm in (and it works ;D). One of my other friends threatens low performers with time in the microwave. Another lines up all of his d6s precisely with the table edge, with all of the dice in the same orientation (I threw in a die that had a different number arrangement into his pile once as a prank; that was entertaining). My Dresden group, before we bought the Dresden-dice premium sets, would roll each set in five-pack we had at the beginning of each session and give the lowest rolling set to me, the GM. And so on.
So, share the tales of those fun, bizarre and bemusing superstitions about our favorite purveyors of randomness, our dice. *sits back, munches on popcorn* This ought to be fun. :D
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My old D&D group would often say a phrase containing the word "mumbo" when they rolled dice. The exact phrase depended on their character and the situation.
It seemed to improve things for one of us, but nobody else got anything out of it.
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This is a pretty good book on the subject: http://gameplaywright.net/books/the-bones/
It even has an article from someone called Fred Hicks - whoever he is ;)
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Well, microwaving your dice isn't so much mumbo jumbo as it is causing the plastic to melt slightly and deform, changing the distribution of the plastic. You can do that to weight dice if you're careful, changing the probabilities of rolling certain numbers.
As for things I do, I like to have Fudge dice that have all the minuses oriented the same way relative to the plus sides. So I go right for the black or the white ones, since all of the others have variations on the orientation of the minuses.
I don't do this because I think it improves performance. I do this because I'm a bit neurotic and like symmetry.
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I am a MTG lover, and that's where I get all my d20s (fat pack!). Depending on the color and set origination of the dice, I mutter the name of a card while I roll it, usually a planeswalker... I have a Rise of the Elderazi one that loves Sarkov.
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I think the uglier the dice, the better they roll. I keep the hot pink dFs for myself. :)
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I'm all sorts of superstitious about my dice. Mainly because they're all out to kill me, and it's a matter of finding out which ones are on union break and are therefore not actively seeking to do the job. And I will NOT touch someone else's dice, because I have a long-standing, severe case of rollio and I don't want to infect perfectly good dice.
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I've known minor fights to break out because someone touched someone else's dice...
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I set mine regardless of game on the numbers desired and leave them there. Except to roll of course.
And I really do not like people touching them without permission.
A GURPS game last year I was forced to beat someone in to a vegatative state for repeatedly using my dice even after I explained the rules.
No not really. Yes. No Yes. No Maybe
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I have a friend that will do crazy stuff if someone touches one of his dice with bare flesh. He can't touch them himself after it has been contaminated, and hen he destroys them. another player puts all of his dice with desired side face up, while I prefer face down if I decide to organize them while playing. I tend to have bad luck with dice and blame it on the fact that I tend to be the dice bank when I have all my dice around (I have over a thousand) so my luck is used by others.
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We have a friend whose dice hate her and everyone else. We're discouraged from touching them only because of the fear that their bad luck will contaminate us.
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I think the uglier the dice, the better they roll. I keep the hot pink dFs for myself. :)
Day Glow Orange wins
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Always use my same 4 lucky dice
Clear ice blue
Black with blood splat numbers
Black with skulls
and one i got from a old game of clue ;D
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A few years ago a friend joined our gaming to fill in for his brother. He was very non-gamer, even though he enjoyed the games. He kept making fun of our dice-rituals; he was all probability and rationality. He recently left for the service and has become the most superstitious of us all.
it was fun watching the evolution of a mundane into a gamer, complete with dice issues.
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I am known in my gaming group for being unnaturally lucky with d6s. It is of course because I coach them and punish the wicked. If my dice roll bad I send them for purgatory. After a specified period they receive a chance for redemption if they fail they are sent to "Dice Hell" (Normally the microwave). That with some rotation normally you can weed out the under-performers.
I am working on some way to work mojo on Dice rollers but no luck so far. They still hate me.
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I used to have a green D6 that I'm pretty sure one of my players stole and destroyed. I used it as the Wild Die while playing/running Star Wars, the D6-based version from West End Games.
The players really, really hated that one die... Largely because I could get it to roll 6 virtually on command. Which is a 'bad' thing for the GM to do, since 6's on the Wild Die adds 6 to whatever the total rolled is, plus gets a re-roll. I recall one time the players ended up needing to beat a difficulty of something like 33 to Intimidate a guard, because I resisted using a skill of 2D (2 six-sided dice) and kept getting a 6 on the Wild Die.
The players knew the die wasn't loaded, because when they'd take it to try and jinx it, or use it for themselves as the Wild Die, it would without fail roll 1's, which meant that not only did the Wild Die roll not tally, it also cancelled out the highest non-Wild Die roll they had as well.
I miss that die.
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I have all kinds of rituals that I use:
I draw a circle, or a design or a picture of my character and place the dice on said drawing in a particular pattern. All desired numbers are face up.
Sometimes I try to "attune" my dice by carrying them in my pocket for the whole week between games.
I even once, before an important game, slept with my dice in a bag under my pillow.
I'm more into positive reinforcement than punishment. Good dice get to stay by my side and get certain priveledges, like getting a place on my mantel and such.
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See, my group consists of a mathematician, an engineer, an atheist, atheist's girlfriend, and a computer tech.
None of us have any dice superstitions. I, being a former magician (the slight of hand kind, not the wizard kind), have particular spots on the table that I like to roll them and like setting them and picking them up in certain ways (so I can bounce them off of beer bottles, etc.) in an attempt to improve performance. Being a former magician, this doesn't work as often as I'd like so I only do it when I really need that roll.
To prevent me from weighting the dice, we use a Chessex dice block and randomly dole out the dice.
Do those count as strange rituals? :P
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Aside from the "don't touch another player's dice without permission" most of my group doesn't have strange rituals for dice. Sure we switch dice if one rolls bad frequently but that's normal:)
We tend to have players who's sheer amount of bad dice luck draw all the negativity to their side of the table. We even have it figured out in case one misses a game. If James is there, he sucks up all the bad luck. If he's not there, then Julian does. Etc.
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I, being a former magician (the slight of hand kind, not the wizard kind), have particular spots on the table that I like to roll them and like setting them and picking them up in certain ways (so I can bounce them off of beer bottles, etc.) in an attempt to improve performance. Being a former magician, this doesn't work as often as I'd like so I only do it when I really need that roll.
To prevent me from weighting the dice, we use a Chessex dice block and randomly dole out the dice.
Do those count as strange rituals? :P
In my game, I would never let a former stage magician or sleight of hand guy roll their own dice. It's not that I don't trust someone like that it's just I don't trust someone like that...
Going off that, the people I've gamed with have lots of little traditions.
While we're on the subject, the groups I game with always play Ravenloft the same way, only DM rolls dice behind a DM's screen. Works of Cthulu too. Halloween gets fun....:D
In the groups I've gamed with, it's bad luck to roll on top of any kind of battle mat. Hex maps, square maps, doesn't matter.
We could be playing Cyberpunk 2020, which we always always always treat as, "Whatever you roll, happens..." (It's Cyberpunk) and if someone rolls on the battlemat we'll say, "Don't roll on the Mat! It's bad luck!"
One of my gaming buddies gave me a tradition of, if I can, I will buy a new set of dice for each character I play. It's their dice. The buddy that start the tradition actually refers to her dice by the character's name. "Come on Tanis!" *Rolls poorly* "Tanis is being stupid. Let's try Realtor."
If my character's dice start messing up, I might use another set if I feel I've "Miscast the role." I then scold my dice for not taking direction.
For the DFRPG I've broken this tradition because I have so many characters and because I ran first that I only really need one double sized set of Fate dice. But I also bought them from the Chessex booth at PAX so I consider them blessed by the Powers of Gaming That Be.
We also retire dice that tend to want to kill us. Too many ones, sorry little dice.
Our usual solution for retirement is to give the dice to someone else and 100% of the time, the dice will roll like god for their new owners. Traitors....
I also have the superstition that my dice need to have the failures rolled out of them so that karmically they will roll well. They start rolling 1's and 2's and 3's, the next one's going to be a 20. It doesn't always work....
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I stack my dice with the best numbers up at the table.
I have a friend who's dice famously hated him- so much so I let him used weighted dice because all it did was reset the odds slightly in his favour as they still came up 4 more than they did 6.
However he did keep his dice in a plastic coffin so we all considered it to be his own damn fault.
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I also have the superstition that my dice need to have the failures rolled out of them so that karmically they will roll well. They start rolling 1's and 2's and 3's, the next one's going to be a 20. It doesn't always work....
I do this too. You gotta give the dice a chance to shine!
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The only weird thing about me is that all of my dice come to me. I don't think I've bought a set since I started gaming. I won one at a con recently and a friend got me a set of copper ones for christmas. I got one in the mail from a great aunt, several from board games I no longer own, and there's one that I found on the street. I think that one likes me cause I took him in when he was a stray. ;)
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When playing D20 games I had a friend who would track how many 1's a specific 20 would roll. When it would roll three 1's in a row, or 5 in a game session, he would take it outside, with all the other D20's and a hammer. He would line up all the other dice 20 up and smash the offending die with a hammer right in front of them. He would then lecture the other dice that "this is what happens when you roll 1's". He would collect the pieces and put them in a dice tube and shake them over his other dice before he rolls.
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I am a MTG lover, and that's where I get all my d20s (fat pack!). Depending on the color and set origination of the dice, I mutter the name of a card while I roll it, usually a planeswalker... I have a Rise of the Elderazi one that loves Sarkov.
A a MTG player, local hobby shop employee, and gamer....I can say Spindown counters are not randomized the same as a D20. if erolled properly you can always get 16 or higher. I refuse to roll them to determine who goes first in magic and will not allow people to use them as D20's in any D20 gaming system. They aren't properly randomized.
Also our gaming group has a communal D20...we call it pinky. (yes it's pink, not a very creative name) it rolls Natural 20's frequently no matter who holds it. it isn't weighted to my knowledge. We have the purest form of fighter roll it in combat hoping for lots of criticals. We also ban the Gm from using it.
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I also play wargames - well, one at the moment (and for years). It's called World In Flames (WiF) and we use all the expansions - including Days of Decision III, Ships in Flames, Pilots in Flames, Africa in Flames, etc - and most of the optional rules (we don't use oil, but that's because of bookkeeping). And I think there's some parts of Leaders In Flames, Patton in Flames, American in Flames, and bit from the annuals that we don't use, but we use most of those rules and maps.
Our group has been playing more or less with the same people for a couple of decades. Since we only play every two weeks it usually takes 18 months or so to take the world from 1936 to the end of WWII.
To play the game we have 8 identical d10s. Completely identical in all ways. There are times when you want to roll low (naval searches, activating HQs, doing airstrikes to disrupted units), times you want to roll high (land combat, avoiding naval losses), and times when you roll 2d10s and want extreme results (air combat) and it's the same 8 d10s being passed around the room as needed. I would say table, but we have several tables in use (two big ones for Europe / Asia maps, one for America's, Africa, and Scandinavian maps, one for the political display, one for fleets and production - did I mention it is a big game?).
We have one player whose strategy is to roll what he needs. No, I'm serious - this is a huge wargame with a political overlay and his strategy is to be lucky - and about 75% of the time it works! If he needs to roll high then he'll roll high, if he needs to roll low he'll roll low. The thing is, while his rolls are usually extreme he'll have runs when he rolls the opposite of what he needs.
We have another player who the dice hate - he blows roll after rolls.
Everyone else is more or less average, but we do have a player who takes his rolls personally - as in bouncing dice off the wall when he rolls that 1 when he need a 4 or better to take a hex or rolling a 10 when he needed a 6 or better for his NAVs to find those unescorted convoys.
The only luck ritual we have is to get Mr. Lucky to roll the dice. Strangely enough, it works.
Richard
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One of my group had a die go turn against him. He later complained about trying to throw it away while crossing a bridge. It struck the concert railing, bounced back and landed in the back seat. His claim is the die rolls so bad, he couldn’t hit the dark of night with it.
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I appease my dice with oferings of human sacrifices, burnt offerings, and nachos.
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A a MTG player, local hobby shop employee, and gamer....I can say Spindown counters are not randomized the same as a D20. if erolled properly you can always get 16 or higher. I refuse to roll them to determine who goes first in magic and will not allow people to use them as D20's in any D20 gaming system. They aren't properly randomized.
Also our gaming group has a communal D20...we call it pinky. (yes it's pink, not a very creative name) it rolls Natural 20's frequently no matter who holds it. it isn't weighted to my knowledge. We have the purest form of fighter roll it in combat hoping for lots of criticals. We also ban the Gm from using it.
Exactly... Spindown dice can be "spun" on a roll and you're basically only going to get top 20-25% rolls. You can also roll along an axis for similar results. I've got one and no DM lets me roll it more than a handful of times before catching on.
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Hooboy where to start.
Well, in wargaming my roomate has the most absurd luck with any plain, white, run of the mill D6. So much so that when we were teens playing 40k, we went for a snack run mid-game, and came back to find his brothers (our game opposition) making a slipshod attempt to curse his dice with a half-arsed witchcraft ceremony, black candle and all. Never really worked, and he still uses the same kind of bland white dice, albeit a newer set; the old set mysteriously vanished.
Another buddy runs the most successful game store in our neck of the woods and fervently believes in "dice cooties". So much so that packaged dice sets are "no touchy" unless you're buying them. He doesn't want to be held responsible for anyone buying cootie infected dice. According to him and some other acquaintances, they once tried freezing (or maybe it was boiling...maybe both...I forget) some dice in the hopes of curing a cootie infected set, but alas the cooties are a hardy germ.
Recently I commandeered another gamer's flashing D20 in our D&D game for a few rolls. He'd been rolling great for the first few turns of the game. Once I started using it he couldn't get a roll above 10 with it to save his life. I relented and quit hijacking his die. It took about three or four turns before his flashy die recovered from the experience (at which point he then forgave me). Apparently I'm anathema to D20's.
Personally I'll set out more than a few of the required dice for the game and rotate until I find the ones that are immune to my taint.
Currently waiting to see how my own new flashy crit die performs in our next dungeon crawl.
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So, I had a good one last week, during the weekly Changeling: The Lost campaign session. I was wearing this shirt (http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/gaming/9d0b/) and had been rolling horribly all night; usually my dice are pretty cooperative--I incinerate one every so often to encourage the rest--but I had been rolling like crap all night. Finally, after my second zero-success roll in a roll when trying to harvest Glamour, I went to my bedroom, swapped out the shirt, and rolled again. Three successes. ::) :D And the dice kept rolling well for the rest of the night.
Now my friends who at that session are also in the Dresden game that I GM, so there's been debate on what effect that shirt might have on my FUDGE dice when I'm GMing. ;)
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I keep multiple sets of dice laid out (organized properly, of course). I do a roll-off at the beginning of the night to see who goes first. If I roll poorly more than twice in a row, I send that die back to its comrades for reeducation. If I roll HORRIBLY twice in a row, that whole family of dice gets sent to Siberia (the Dice Bag of Shame), not to have a chance to see the light again until the next gaming session. A 1 grants immediate dissenter-hood, whereas a 20 resets the count.
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I put my dice face up on their highest values. sometimes...it's ALL OF THEM. And I will bench bad dice and bring in fresh recruits. We have insisted GMs use dice that are notoriously crappy, and there have been GM's with dice that we feared.
Though I may have a dice burning just for fun.
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I roll each die several hundred times and record the results, and if the distribution is too far off from what is expected, I don't use that die.
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I roll each die several hundred times and record the results, and if the distribution is too far off from what is expected, I don't use that die.
But that COULD mean you've just rolled all the bad out of it!
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I put my dice face up on their highest values.
This? The dice gods view it as hubris. DANGER.
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I like to think of it as getting my dice to think positive. "See little guy? This is what you're capable of! REACH FOR THE STARS! Or at least the highest valued side."