Monday, August 01, 2016

#RPGaDay, a month-long interjection into my regular blog

From http://www.brigadecon.org/rpgaday2016


Inspired by http://scmusing.blogspot.com/2016/08/rpgaday-dice-dice-baby.html

As any of my readers can tell, I play tabletop RPGs. And I have done since (dramatic pause) last century!

1st question: August 1: Do you prefer to use real dice, a dice application or program, or use a diceless system? 

I'd have to go real dice. I have gotten dice to 'match' a particular character, like green and brown ones for the earth cleric. Plus, I've played West End Star Wars, Shadowrun and Champions, all of which require literal bricks of d6s; not to mention White Wolf and Legend of the 5 Rings which both needed at least 10 d10s. When I was running Ironclaw at cons, I had a bag of dice to share with players. Each die type (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, no d20) was a different color, to make instruction easier ('you need to roll the blue and the red dice'). Not to mention, I have Fate Dice, too.

I currently have multiple bags of dice. There are several pretty dice, dice I bought because I just felt I needed new dice, specialized dice (see FATE games) and 'emergency dice' because I forgot my dice bag. In addition, some cons and stores have dice made with their logo on one of the faces.

Dice applications or programs don't give the same sensory input. And since I don't usually know the programmers, I don't know whether I can trust their work to be truly random.

I have very rarely played diceless systems, so I don't have a good feel for them. I have played games that used cards to supplement the dice. 

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