Old Dice

I'm moving house at the moment, and you know what that means - opening cardboard boxes that have been dragged down from the loft and examining the contents with a mixture of laughter, puzzlement (why did I keep this?) and nostalgia.

One thing that has emerged from this scraping-over and sifting-through of old mathoms is my first set of dice. These things were bought when I was about 13 (before that I borrowed friends' dice as quid pro quo for the fact that I had the AD&D 2nd edition books) and they were carried religiously around the town I grew up to a collection of living rooms, friend's bedrooms, and basements for games of D&D, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun and MERP. Since then they have travelled all around the world, until they wound up almost forgotten at the bottom of a large box which also contained other ancient relics from a bygone age: GURPS 3rd edition and Changeling: The Dreaming.

In Training Day the Denzel Washington character at one stage says to the Ethan Hawke one, "Any good narcotics officer must know and love narcotics." Well, I'm of the opinion that any good role player must know and love dice. Old friends, I salute you.

The appealingly retro sweet tin the dice are housed in, held together with sticky labels because at one stage I had so many dice crammed inside it wouldn't stay shut.

The inside of the tin. I could have sworn I had Warhammer 40,000 scatter dice and autofire dice as well, but they appear to be casualties of the dice tin's odysseys around the world.

The dice themselves. They are cheap and nasty, almost whorish gem dice with suspicious rolling actions and a weightless, soul-less, tacky feel. But time has given them character and significance.

Choose Your Weapon

Apropos of nothing, I thought I'd introduce you to some of "the boys". Apologies for the crappy quality of the lighting - I took these earlier at the local gaming club, which as well as being a wretched hive of scum and villainy is also very poorly lit. This helps members not to notice the thin layer of grime which covers everything in it.

This is "old pinky". He is a very poorly-made and cheap d12 I bought at The Yellow Submarine in, I think, Shinjuku South Exit. I hate having to roll this dice because it rolls further and longer than any I have seen in my gaming career. d12s are usually worse than other dice in this regard, but "old pinky" will roll for entire metres across a table top, fall off the far edge, continue rolling across the carpet, and head inexorably - almost deliberately - towards the heaviest and largest item of furniture in the room to lodge somewhere underneath it.

These are my elemental dice - earth, air, fire and water. These are probably the oldest dice I own: I got them when I was about 16. They're no Gamescience dice, but they have reasonably sharp edges and roll well; they also have a nice chunky feel that I appreciate - you feel as if the results will have import, which is of course as it should be.

This is "the horde" - a fuckload of d6s I bought mainly for the purposes of Burning Wheel dice pools. I like to line them up on the table and roll them in turn; those that score 4, 5 or 6 get recycled and return to the back of the line, but those that score 1, 2 or 3 have to go back to the dice bag and think about what they've done. When they've had some time to reconsider their positions they can come back into play.

This is my d8. There is nothing to say about my d8.

Fudge You

There are two attitudes towards dice which I, like, totally get:

1. Dice are sacrosanct. Whatever they say goes. You roll the bones and whatever comes up comes up and cannot be changed.

2. You don't use dice. Either the game is contrived so as you don't have to use them (Amber DRPG), or you just treat the exercise as one of cooperative storytelling - a group of friends sitting around and taking it in turns to say "what happens next". (Two old friends and I did this once in Salamanca's Plaza Mayor for an entire day, taking it in turns to say one word at a time. It's more fun than it sounds, trust me.)

There's a third attitude towards dice which I think is like, totally stupid:

3. You follow the form of dice rolling, and generally speaking accept the results, but fudge them when it doesn't suit. This never made any sense to me. If "story" is so important than you feel the need to fudge dice rolls to further it, then you really may as well just stop rolling the dice entirely and adopt attitude 2, above. (Which is fine, by the way.) On the other hand, if you actually want to leave what happens in the game up to the gods of randomness and fate, you really don't have any business meddling in the decisions of those gods and sullying the purity of the randomness, thereby destroying the suspense and excitement which playing a game provides.

Discuss.

Dice Man

These were posted earlier today at Grognardia, but just in case there are any readers of my blog who don't also visit that esteemed online resource (unlikely), here is a two part film about dice.

Dice Superstitions

Somebody has put up a thread about dice over at the rpg site. It's tongue-in-cheek stuff, but it says something interesting about gamer culture that I've often noticed: The prevalence of dice-related superstitions. Dice are a lot of fun - but at the same time there is a kind of fetishization of the little blighters that I think most of us share; we do not readily understand them (the results of a roll are a mystery - impossible to predict) and that fundamental uncertainty has a bewitching effect. In that respect we are like ancient tribesmen who dream up elaborate explanations for changes in the weather ("It's raining because Snake-on-the-Water cheated on his wife!"), because their true mechanics are unknown and unknowable.

My own superstition about dice is, as I posted in said thread: "When I buy new dice I have to integrate them into the gang by rolling them at least a dozen or so times in different combinations with my older ones. My dice are a team, and I won't tolerate non-team players." When I say 'at least a dozen or so times' I am probably cloaking the true shape of my neurosis - I actually roll my new and old dice together more like fifty times, the very day I buy them. If I don't do this, the new dice might not properly integrate, and this could ruin the chemistry of my dice rolling when it really matters. (If you think that's weird, you should meet my old DM Chris. His dice-superstition was to put his d20s in the freezer for a few hours "as an example to the others" if they consistently turned up poor results.)

I've done this for as long as I can remember. As with most such superstitions it probably got its start due to fluke (I happened to be rolling new and old dice together just before a particularly lucky session), and it is now maintained entirely due to terror. Terror that if I stop, there will be dire consequences for my gaming from now until kingdom come. Granted, I have had lucky and unlucky sessions since the superstition began. But if I stop performing the ritual, it might be the case that I never have a lucky day ever again.

I also believe that dice-related superstitions are one of the only, if not the only, situations in which Pascal's Wager really makes sense. You don't lose anything from such beliefs. Getting on the good side of the dice Gods costs nothing. Of course, you might be wrong; the superstition could be meaningless. But the potential ill-effects if it happens to be true and you ignore it are too terrible to contemplate.

Blaise Pascal says: Tell me of your superstitions.

3d6 - What True Heroes Are Made Of

Sham recently made a post on the idea of rolling 3d6 in order for stats in D&D. Apparently later in life he has come to see the attraction in it after having generally used the nefarious 4d6-and-drop method in the past. My thoughts on the matter have already been written about; suffice to say that I've pretty much always used the 3d6-in-order method, and agree wholeheartedly with Sham when he says:

I understand that in modern D&D, it is assumed that the player characters are indeed supposed to be superhuman. I don’t like it, I don’t buy it. I think pretty much everyone involved in my games appreciates the fallible hero theory, that true heroes are those that we as readers or players can relate to, who overcome the odds and along the way become heroes in their own right, regardless of shortcomings. Those very shortcomings that make them ultimately identifiable.

I shouldn't be too self-congratulatory though: I had no such high-minded reasons for sticking with the 3d6-in-order path right the way through my gaming career. Actually the main reason why I've always used that method is because my first DM (my friend's big brother) insisted on it - it generated pathetic characters who were easier for him to squash. Nevertheless, I'm glad I've sticked by "The Method", as I like to call it, because without it I never would have had the chance to play some truly memorable characters - like Hog the Dwarf with his Wisdom of 4 but Strength of 18/00, or Durkin the Mage with a Dexterity of 3: these were the stats dreams were made of. Without The Method I probably would also have never felt the genuine shock and awe that I did on the first (and only) occasion I ever fairly rolled up a set of stats to make a Ranger; Christ, that was a sweet moment. (Goose, the character in question, died in his first session - I'm not sure what that goes to show, but it definitely goes to show something.)

Thinking back on those characters calls to mind an odd period in my old gaming crew when we developed a penchant for naming characters after un-adventurer-like animals. Hog the Dwarf and Goose the Ranger were two; I wish I could remember some of the others. I think the process started because one of use made a character with a cheesy name like Wolf or Raven and the rest of us thought it would be fun to take the piss out of him. Which we did, mercilessly.

Anyway, in tribute, meet:

Walrus, the Dwarf Fighter!

STR: 18/67
INT: 8
WIS: 9
DEX: 13
CON: 11
CHR: 10

Not bad, eh? My dice mojo is strong today. Must be all that buttering-up of The Method earlier on. If only I had a game in which to trot out Walrus and see how much of a survivor he is. Sniffle.