« Single Player Review Criteria | Main | Lack of Updates »
The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Tabletop Dice Luck
By Ravenhawk | October 3, 2007
I was doing the ol’ “Read random old blog posts in cool sounding blogs” thing today and came upon this post titled, Blessing of the Dice Gods. In it, the author notes the effects upon players when cool dice rolls happen at cool times.
In the tabletop game I’m currently involved in, the GM made an interesting house rule. I’d thought it was a normal house rule for him, but apparrently he just made it up for our campaign. His system is a D100 based system. Obviously, therefore extreme action comes down upon a roll of 1 or 100.
Added to this is the random factor of the 42 roll. When one rolls a 42, crazy stuff happens. What exactly the 42 means can vary greatly. A minor roll ending in a 42 could make the players run across a random villager, running as though for his life, screaming, who suddenly stops and calmly walks away, ignoring the existance of the party.
A dodge roll on the 42 can make you get hit in a dramatic, hardcore fashion, or perhaps the arrow flying at you suddenly turns into a bowl of petunias. (That one actually happened.)
The edition of the random 42 has added a good emotion wrench to our tabletop games. When someone rolls a 42, generally there are groans all around the table, looks of horror on the faces of the players and a grin of sadistic glee spreading across the face of our game master. 42’s aren’t always bad, but they’re not always good either, sometimes they can spell player death or a random large baddie encounter.
When the dice luck happens at good times, it can really bring good emotional effects to your players. By having another number which entails extremes of dice luck, you add one more point which can bring that rush of exhillaration/horror to the group.
If you’re not a Douglas Adams fan, you could substitute 42 for another number. Having it be somewhere in the middle is probably best as it creates a polarized effect for the dice luck. If you like having random effects in your system, it’s a fun rule to add.
Tags: Tabletop Games, Game Design, 42, D038D, D100, Dice Luck, Dungeons and Dragons, Games, House Rules, Role Playing Games, RPG
Topics: Tabletop Games, Game Design |
December 10th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I’ve never played a d100 game, but this makes me want to try it. Having a rule like that in a d20 would be a bit unbalancing.
December 11th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
It’s true that on a non-d100 based system, it would be much harder to balance as your number would likely come up more often. At the same time, the extremes of what happens with your roll can be adjusted to reflect that.
February 10th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
You could always state a reroll for the d20 to see if something crazy happens so then you get the probability of 1/400
March 25th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Our gaming group uses a d20 system (not the new TSR based system; we play an old-school, home-variant of 1st edition AD&D), and a 1 ALWAYS misses and a 20 ALWAYS hits…and if you roll a natural 19 or 20, the GM makes other rolls to see of you have a ‘critical hit’, which can be double damage, triple, or quadrupled damage, or just max normal damage. A 1 is also rolled again by the GM, and you can loose your weapon (if it is not secured to your hand somehow), hit a comrade or yourself, or even break the weapon.
On d100 rolls, we also have the same typoes of things for natural 01’s and natural 00’s. For example, when a mage is trying to learn a new spell, and they roll a 01, they sometimes get a cool ability, like able to control the diameter of a spell if it is normally not controlable. If the mage rolls a 00, there is a chance he can’t even read a scroll of that spelll. But if the mage misses the roll by 1 (for instance, if they have a 75% chance of learning the new spell, but roll a 76%), they can still learn the spell, there is just somethign…wrong with the way they cast it. For instance, we had a mage who missed Fireball by one, and he could still cast it…but it ALWAYS went off at his feet. Another mage missed learning Unseen Servant by 1, and whenever he casts it, it’s like a poltergeist is in the room, the unseen servant just throws things and wrecks the place!
April 30th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
My gaming group still uses random encounters - sometimes - roll 1d6; 1 means something happens (good, bad, some guy with a gun). 2-5 means nothing happens. 6 means… nothing happens yet. Three 6’s in a row (not counting any 1’s that creep in the mix) means something massive - campaign changing - happens. When running the game, we always plan for this & hope it doesn’t happen. This has resulted in character death, character’s trapped in suspended animation for hundreds of years, the Tarrasque woke up - name it.