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thydungeongal · 8 months

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Alright very brief dice post today because I need to refresh my memory on where I left off last time but before I do I want to share the coolest tool known to RPG enjoyers.

I've also tagged all previous posts in this series as #maths and #diceposting if you're only just tuning in.

I have alluded to the fact that once da maths get too complex it's time to start using more elegant tools than graph paper and tables. The tables are good when you're looking at two dice but beyond that you'd have to start constructing some 3D models or some shit and my computer sucks.

So instead I use a program called AnyDice. It's online, it's free (although it runs on donations: the servers that run this thing aren't free, and since it's such a beautiful tool I heartily recommend throwing at least a one-time donation its way), and it runs in the browser. It has its own quirks and there's a bit of a learning curve, but once you go through the articles and documentation and library of functions you will pick it up pretty quickly. It also supports making your own functions which is what I want to use today.

Assume a type of game where on an "attack" you roll "to hit" and if you succeed at the roll you then get to roll "damage" with different types of dice depending on your weapon. One could be faced with the possibility of comparing the damage done on a 2d6 to the damage done on a 1d12. Like so. (Also AnyDice supports exporting whatever you've done with it as links so others can see exactly what you were doing.)

This is the simplest example of what you can do with AnyDice and it supports everything I've said thus far: 1d12 results in a distribution where every result is equally likely. 2d6 results in a distribution where results in the middle are more likely. 2d6 does also have a higher average than 1d12 for very simple reasons: the lowest you can roll on 2d6 is 2 as opposed to the 1d12's 1.

But we can go deeper. What if you had an ability where on rolls of 1 or 2 you got to reroll the damage die (not getting to reroll 1 and 2 anymore after that) and you wanted to compare how it affected 2d6 and 1d12? Well that's pretty straightforward, we just need to make a function.

Here's a function that we can use for this purpose. It's basically a modified version of AnyDice's existing "explode" function (used for when a maximum result on a die "explodes," triggering another roll that is added to the value of the exploding roll) where the recursion of the explosion is cut off so that it doesn't keep rerolling 1 and 2 forever but simply rerolls them once but further results of 1 and 2 apply. I have also made an output statement to test that it works and with a single d6 it's actually easy to test that it works as intended: the probability of getting a 1 or a 2 is 1/3 and the probability of getting a 1 on the second roll is 1/6 (as it is for a second 2) and ⅓*⅙=1/18, which expressed in percentage ≈ 5.56. So the program works.

Now we can use this to compare 2d6 to 2d6 but rerolling 1s and 2s and 1d12 rerolling 1s and 2s. Like so.

So 2d6 was already better at a glance than a 1d12 but also getting to reroll 1s and 2s is substantially more effective on a weapon that uses 2d6. This is for a simple reason: not only are you rolling two dice so there are two chances to trigger the reroll, but also because you are rolling six-sided dice you are more likely to get those results of 1 and 2.

And that's just scratching the surface of what you can do with AnyDice. It supports conditional statements and functions within functions and a whole lot of other stuff. You could theoretically make a function where you first roll a d20 "to hit" and numbers that are high enough result in "damage" but rolls of 20 result in a "critical hit" and you could theoretically compare a guy who does 2d6 damage on a hit but gets to reroll 1s and 2s on the damage die against a guy who does 1d12 damage on a hit but does one extra die of damage on a critical hit.

So yeah, AnyDice rules. It's something I recommend to people who want to qualify their statements about RPG mechanics with actual numbers but also I think it's an invaluable tool for analyzing your own homebrews. With a bit of practice you can make it do all kinds of weird shit.

#long post #maths #diceposting

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spacereon · 1 year

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Nkoyo Asuni

STR: 11 DEX: 18 CON: 14 INT: 14 WIS: 13 CHA: 14

Class: Fast Hero 1

HP: 10 Defense: 19

Base Attack: +0 melee +4 ranged

Fort: +2 Ref: +5 Will: +1

Action Points: 5

Wealth: +1

Feats: Simple Weapons Proficiency, Personal Firearms Proficiency, Point-Blank Shot, Light Armor Proficiency

Occupation: Law Enforcement

Allegiances: The US of A!, The Agency, Good

Skills:

Balance (Dex): 8

Drive (Dex): 9

Knowledge (streetwise) (Int): 6

Listen (Wis): 5

Move Silently (Dex): 8

Profession (Wis): 5

Tumble (Dex): 8

Gear

Ruger Service Six (2d4, Crit. 20, Ballistic, Range 20 ft., ROF S, Mag. 6 cyl., Size Tiny, 1 lb)

Light undercover shirt (+2/+1, Max Dex. Bonus +7, Armor Penalty +0, 2 lbs)

The Agency

It's another episode of the long-running action show, as newcomer Nkoyo Asuni (played by Judy Ojo) finds herself in the midst of danger and deceit! The Agency has singled her out for recruitment, but can the young police officer overcome the secret test of mettle all new Agency Recruits must pass? And what happens when an old enemy of The Agency attempts to subvert the recruitment process for their own dark purposes? Find out this Thursday, at 7PM, on this channel!

"Stand down! I will not ask you again!" The officer aimed her revolver at the mysterious figure, silhouetted against the crimson moon.

Without seeing his face, she knew he was smiling. "Miss Asuni, you must understand that you are involved in something much greater than you imagine..." He took one step back, a smidge away from falling twenty stories down. The wind blew menacingly.

"No!"

"And now, adieu!" He opened his arms, and let himself fall, as the police officer rushed to the edge.

"...Central, this is Officer Asuni, requesting an ambulance--- what? He is gone?"

And without her knowledge, she was already in the sights of another player...

I genuinely don't know why I own d20 Modern. I bought it, but I don't know what for - I sure as hell have never played it, I've barely given it a read or two, and d20 is so much not the kind of system to do high-flying modern-day action. That being said, I'll give d20 Modern this, it's actually got an introduction section - compared to D&D 3E, which gives you a very skippable single page before dumping you straight into character generation, this game gives you a reasonable introduction, telling you what RPGs are, what d20 Modern aims for in terms of themes and aesthetics, how basic rolls are done (you know, before you start tangling with the whole d20 rules shebang), even a game example. And given that all basic and advanced classes have 10 levels at most, there's an implied expectation that characters will end up multiclassing eventually, which opens up the system to many more character concepts than it would seem at first blush. But geez, the d20 cholesterol is strong in this one, with talent trees for the basic classes that go from the very useful (Dodge) to the ??? (oh yes I'd like to deal more damage to inert objects, by more damage I mean ignoring a tiny bit of object hardness) and the Wealth rolls are... look, I appreciate that they attempted at abstracting money because you shouldn't have to worry about individual dollars in a game of modern-day run and gun action, buuut poor Nkoyo ended up practically in the dumps just from getting a basic gun and armor. I mean, any reasonable GM would've just given her the stuff, but by the book it gets rough to acquire gear at low Wealth scores. Realistic, I guess????

#januarychargenchallenge

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gaming · 4 years

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Indie Game Spotlight: Wintermoor Tactics Club (@wintermoortc)

Get ready to roll a D20 in this week’s Indie Game Spotlight. Wintermoor Tactics Club is a narrative-driven tactics RPG set in a private boarding school in the 1980s, inspired by classic tactics RPGs and visual novels. It’s about a misfit tabletop games club trying to survive high school as they’re forced to fight in a mysterious high-stakes snowball tournament. The game is earnest and light-hearted in tone, with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor (they like to use the term “hygge,” if people are familiar with that).

We spoke with Kyla Fury, who works on the narrative, and Ryan Anderson, who created the combat design, about gameplay, characters, and more!

How does Wintermoor Tactics Club balance tactical combat and visual novel gameplay?

Kyla: We wanted to make sure the two types of gameplay would both support each other. You alternate between playing tabletop tactics games in your clubroom and exploring the campus, talking to other students, and helping them with their problems. Getting to know students is how you get new upgrades for your tactics team, and playing the tactics game is how you recruit new team members to progress with the story. We’re hoping there’s something for everyone: if you love story and characters, you can spend time exploring every nook and cranny on the campus. On the other hand, if you’re more about the tactics gameplay, then there are extra-challenging battles where you can really put your tactical skills to the test.

Who are some of the characters we can expect to meet?

Ryan: We tried to design each character’s abilities around something that reflects the kind of C&C character they would be most excited to play. For instance, Jacob’s character is all about repositioning enemies and allies to set up clever and unexpected plays. Alicia, on the other hand, plays a character that supports teammates from the backline while she waits for the perfect opportunity to call down a massive chain lightning attack.

Are there any specific influences that inspired the game?

Kyla: We were initially inspired by the snowball fight tutorial in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Our combat, however, is a little less like traditional long-form tactics games, and more similar to something like Into the Breach, where each turn can be predicted and puzzled out, so you never get taken out by an unexpected lucky dice roll. We wanted to make sure that this game would work as someone’s first tactics game if they’re not familiar with the genre, so we’ve tried not to be punishing in the way some of the more classic tactics games can be.

We were also hugely inspired by more narrative-heavy games, like Persona 4. We cared a lot about the idea of your abilities improving as you spend time with people and get to know them, and characters that really reveal their true colors over time.

Ryan: Into the Breach’s incredible combat was a great inspiration for how we approached things. Each turn presents an immediate set of choices, battles are short but decisive, and your mistakes are clear so you can try a different approach next time. In addition, the Mega Man series heavily influenced our approach to progression throughout the game. Their boss battles frequently feature abilities that you unlock by defeating them, turning the challenge itself into an exciting future reward.

Finally, as a kid I was a massive fan of Final Fantasy Tactics on Playstation. Easily my favorite part was that I could use creative combinations of abilities and characters to create unique approaches to battles. The upgrade system in Wintermoor is much more focused on giving you more options rather than directly increasing your power level, allowing you to tweak your favorite characters into new roles to fit how you want to play.

What are some of the themes in the game, and what inspired you to make a game about those themes?

Kyla: We wanted to make a game relevant to today, so we decided to make it about the internet. That may sound silly—especially for a game set in the early 80’s—but there’s a lot to say about how we communicate with each other in today’s digital world. We wanted to make a game about the sort of isolation that people can feel when they’re treated as an outsider (like being one of the only Black girls at a private boarding school, for instance), and the type of fanaticism that results from basing your entire identity on one thing. It’s really a game about trying to reach out to people. Internet culture promotes a very intense sort of tribalism that has a tendency to force everyone into viewing the world as a flawless “us” and an irredeemable “them.” We often forget that real people are more complicated than that; sometimes, we even forget that about ourselves. So the metaphor of school clubs forced to battle each other for domination felt like it resonated really well with many modern problems. We hope our players will feel that resonance with their own experiences as they go through the game.

Wintermoor Tactics Club is available for PC on Steam! The game will be releasing on Switch, Xbox, and PS4 later this year, or you can follow them here for more updates.

#Wintermoor Tactics #Indie Game Spotlight

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darken-wolf · 4 years

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Twisted Wonderland: Let’s play a game!

I’ve been wanting to try this after I talk about this with a few friends. Anyway, this is a DnD type of play. You send me a series of actions or questions for said chatacter(s) and I’ll make it into a story. It can be as random as will <insert characters name> get out of bed? Will <insert characters name> pass their test? Reader goes to answer a math problem. Diasomnia makes a campfire. Or as crazy as will reader yeet themselves out the window?

How am I going to do this? Dice roll. Do they fail? do they do okay, did my flawlessly successed in yeeting out the window and landed with a perfect form? I’ll be using my d20 for these rolls. :3 Now, the rules:

Rule:

Choose a character. It could be the reader, to one of the boys or even any of the teachers. your choice of one or two being affected of the outcome or even a full group. (i.e Ace and Ruggie, Leona and Azul, Crowley, Heartslabyul, Reader and Floyd, etc.)

A minimum of 3 actions/questions at least. Max 10. The more questions the longer the story

You can be as specific as you want or as simple. The choice is yours.

Make it as crazy as you want. I want to see how things lol

Example:

The Reader is in charge of the morning breakfast for Heartlabyul. As they start to cook, they get distracted by another student and they start talking. Do they succeed in making breakfast? Dice Roll: 11

Reader get sent to deliver a message to Diasomnia, they go for a shortcut instead of the normal route. Dice Roll: 3

Reader bump into Cater asking you to help pull a prank. You say yes and goes to help Cater. Dice Roll: 17

Everything will be based from the dice roll

You get to the kitchen and start to prepare breakfast for everyone. You had the ingrediants out and starts to prep. Your friend walks in, seeing you and they start talking. You gladly talk to them as you put everything in the oven and stove waiting for them to cook. As you talk to them, you slightly get a bit off track. You start to smell the food, making you realize you were cooking. You rush back to the food and finish the food with a slight color in it, but not terrible.

After breakfast Riddle tells you on your way to class to deliver a messaged to Mal. You had no choice but to accept, and takes the note. You head out of the dorm. It was a far distance away. You were going to be late for class if you didn’t hurry. You know if you take the shortcut it’ll be faster, so you did. You took the next right and followed the path. After a few minutes of walking you turn the next corner only to be a dead end. You scratch your head confused and go to retrace your steps only to get lost no able to get the Message to Malleus.

You missed your class and gave up trying to get the message to Mal. As you walk back to get to your next class you bump into Cater. You two talk for a little bit before Cater speaks of a prank he’s gonna pull on Vil. His smile on his face made you excited and you immediately agree to help. The prank was a success and you two laugh as you ran off not getting caught.

Let’s see what Crazy adventures everyone has shall we??

Reblog or catch me on Discord StynWolf#9161 with your questions and actions :3

#Twisted Wonderland #Twistedwonderland #Twisted Wonderland game

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theforbiddencandy · 6 years

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So. What do you look for in dice. When I choose, I get this....odd feeling when my hands reach for a set of dice. So usually I get those and I'm astonished on how high of an average roll I get. (i still get Nat 1's from time to time). It also happens when I'm using certain characters.

What can I say, I’m all about that aesthetic ;P I want my dice to fit with the characters, but I usually test the dice beforehand (comparing D20 rolls or saltwater). Other than that I don’t really look for anything special.

#forbidden ask #masterwarden1994

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horror-game-fanatic · 3 years

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Weaponry (Survival Horror Manual)

It’s been a minute, I know!

So I have finally cracked how weapons work. This is still being refined, mind you, but its solid enough to put on paper.

So last we talked, I touched on the fact that instead of specific weapons, there will be categories of weapon types and the DM will have to come up with the specifics if they want the players to know they have anything other than a pistol or shotgun or melee weapon, etc. Now I have devised how each weapon category works.

So what we have is three attributes that goes with all the weapon categories. Save for special weapons, (which will be covered later), we have the basic groups:

Pistols

Shotguns

Rifles

Heavy

Special

Melee

Obviously this is just a basic list to get the game off the ground. They will be expanded upon and fleshed out as test playing commences. For the explanation of this system I wills tick with pistols for now. Before I begin, I want you to know that I am not taking a 5e tradition approach to damage, but rather a more buffed 3.5e approach. I want every weapon to feel substantial. A human being should not be able to take like six shots and keep going, or four dozen beatings to the head with a melee weapon and shrug it off like they’re Broly, okay? So as we explain the creature categories in later posts, take into consideration that they are enemies, not like us common folk. Look at the revamped Resident Evil 2; on normal difficulties a normal zombie can take two or three headshots before its put down. That's because it does not feel pain like a human, as well as the fact that the brain processes WAY differently than their living counterparts. A human on the other hand, can take one shot (MAYBE two, depending on where it was shot and what shot it), but lets be realistic here. That’s what we are going for after all. The odds are stacked against the players, at all time, or else its not survival horror, its not even survival. So something as simple as a pistol should definitely do more than a typical humans HP should ever be able to surpass. That way every fight, every encounter, every run in with even another NPC, could be life or death. The tension should always be constant and the stress should always be high.

And we all know what stress does in this system.

Alright, so lets go over my attributes. Each weapon will have three qualities:

Damage

Speed

Quality

Damage is how much dice you roll if your attack connects. A pistols damage is 4d6, which can be a max of 24 if you roll all 6′s. Rare, but it can happen. Speed is how fast your weapon fires during each Reaction. Since we have replaced rounds with Reactions, battle is a lot more fluid and can constantly change. Speed is increased by an increment of 4. The speed of a pistol is 10, so that means you can get two shots off per Reaction. If you went of standard D&D rules, a round takes six seconds. I am not trained in gun weaponry at all and even I know I can get more shots off in less than six seconds. Why we changed this old rule was for this reason. While you may have built of tension for your players through your atmosphere and general difficulty, everything would always slow down to the same old crawl of hitting once and then waiting and then attacking again and then waiting and then attacking again...

With a speed rating, combined with the Reaction control, you could potentially end a fight in your first go around, granted your Reaction is good and your attacks don’t miss. Think of playing The Last of Us. You really want to run through a warehouse filled with enemies and not be able to chain attacks? Six enemies up in this place and you have to enter and roll initiative for each one and then take damage from each one and piss off the rest and not come up with strategies an-- you get the idea. Try it before you knock it.

Quality is random. Unless otherwise stated by the DM, every weapon a player comes across should come with a roll of a dice. There are three tiers; low, common, and high. Since we have included the system that weapons can be upgradable, this idea really shines through. Every time a weapon is found or picked up, a dice should be rolled secretly. You, as a DM, will decide if the weapon fits into one of these three tiers.

Low - The weapon has a high misfire chance and only has one upgrade slot available.

Common - The misfire chance is lower but still there and it has two or three ways to upgrade.

High - While the misfire chance is really low, it is still present but it also has the highest possibilities for upgrades. Typically no more than four.

Going off the upgrade section just real quick, upgrades can come in several varieties such as speed reloaders, increased magazines, damage outputs, scopes, etc.

Once an upgrade is attached to a weapon, it can’t be taken off without a certain perk. One of he basic perks will allow players the ability to attach upgrades successfully, but a later perk will be needed to remove them. This will also potentially punish the player if they want to be more risky with their decisions and don’t take the perk and instead leave their fate to the dice. The speed and damage would be set, but depending on the place in the story and DM’s discretion, I’d say that some weapons would already have upgrades on them.

A weapons quality wouldn’t be a known fact at first glance either, unless you have a specific perk, until you actually use the weapon. It might be dirty, it might be busted, or jammed, or in a major need of servicing. If you are going through a forest and stumble across a weapon, unless you are trained to use said weapon, you cannot honestly believe you can just pick it up and use it. Melee weapons may be more obvious in their telling of it they are good or not, but a pistol, though caked in mud, may actually be in rather good condition. Or one found in a drawer next to a box of bullets, while scavenging supplies, may have not been used in so long that it needs oiling. Upgrades on a weapon can be seen on sight.

Speed would only increase in increments of 2. A pistol starts with a 10, but you find an upgrade that raises the firing speed, so now it fires at a 12. That means you can now get 3 shots off per reaction! That’s a lot of shots. With each shot doing 4d6 damage, you have the possibility of 72 damage in one Reaction. Think of the possibilities. Now that may not be much for a low tier weapon, that could increase exponentially for common or high tier qualities. Like I said, a weapon should be dangerous and a player needs to feel the weight of that responsibility. Risk the spent bullets, noise, and misfires but pump out some damage, or conserve your shots and focus on surviving.

Shotguns would a little differently; obviously they aren’t fast, but with enough upgrades they can be. Rifles are powerful and fast, but have a high chance of misfiring.

Let’s touch on Misfire real quick, actually. This is a mechanic that effects all weapon types, despite it sounding like it only effects ranged weapons. Think of it like the Wild Magic Table for a Sorcerer in 5e. Every time you roll to attack, you will see if you hit. If successful, you will roll your damage. Based on the weapon type (lets keep going with pistols), you will roll your damage (4d6) AND THEN roll your weapons base die (1d6). This is called your Misfire Chance. A misfire chance can be anything from your weapon jams, to the handle breaks, to the gun ricochets and hits you, to the weapon fails you in some way. In fact, it is optional, but the DM can use a table (created in a later post) that details just exactly what your weapon does. This brings a sense of stress to each encounter. You will roll the base die after your roll your damage. Each quality tier will have a different misfire chance;

Low: Evens or Odds

Common: Call the number and if you land on it then you fail.

High: Roll a one (1) on the base die.

As you can see, the chance for a mess up is always there. The chances are slimmer the better quality your weapon, but the presence of failure always looms. The Misfire Chance will have to be tweaked, of course, for different types of weapons but as I make the chart, I will add those effects. I like the idea that even a well seasoned soldier can have a mistake and I also like how we have gotten away from the D20 being a deciding factor in all of this.

There has been a lot of information thrown out so let’s recap: There are categories for weapons. Each category of weapon has three attributes; damage, speed, and quality. Depending on the quality, a weapon has a chance to misfire or fail. Upgrades can be attached to weapons to not only decrease this oversight, but also to increase weapon damage and speed as well as do a variety of effects. Qualities should be randomized by a roll unless otherwise stated by a DM. Players will need certain perks to properly handle certain weapons as well attached and dismantle upgrades.

Weapons have real power and must be used responsibly. A shot or swipe of a weapon can easily take down another player or NPC and in most cases, an enemy. Ammo or resources should always be scarce and the tension and stress should always be high. Remember DM’s, this system is made to put the odds in the favor of the enemies, not the players. Your players did not come to play Resident Evil or even Left 4 Dead, to feel like the king of the world. They came to play a game that’s thought outside of the box. A game that will challenge them and maybe even frustrate them. A game that will force them to survive.

We are almost ready people. The horror is coming.

#survivalhorror #d&d

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Larian’s gorgeous Baldur’s Gate 3 looks to be a game of groundbreaking systemic depth • Eurogamer.net

It’s early days for Baldur’s Gate 3. An end of year release window seems to have leaked but there’s “no exact date” for when it’s coming out, according to developer-publisher Larian Studios, of Divinity: Original Sin and Original Sin 2 fame. And when it does come out – simultaneously on Google Stadia and Steam – it’ll be in early access first. Understandably, early access can seem a bit icky to some, but Larian’s argument for it seems fair enough: the game needs en-masse testing from its own audience if it’s ever going to come together, and having now seen a marathon, over three hours long presentation of live gameplay, I can see why. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game with an extraordinary level of systemic depth and remarkable complexity. Across the board it’s a game that’ll need time. Time to polish, time to balance, and quite a bit of time from the player, I’d imagine, to really get anywhere close to understanding and mastering its systems. But from what was shown of the game and what Larian has told us in our Baldur’s Gate 3 interview, it’ll be worth the wait – and then some.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Developer: Larian Studios

Publisher: Larian Studios

Platform: PC (Steam), Stadia

Availability: Early Access “later this year”.

Our presentation opened with the same stupidly pretty CGI intro you’ll have seen from the Baldur’s Gate 3 panel going on at PAX, before a quick run through the character selector, a skip over the “secret” tutorial, a couple of hours of early game party-gathering and dungeon crawling, and then a closer look at a massive, later-game dungeon that showed all the flashy systems off with a little more depth. To start at the beginning though, on the most fundamental level, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a darker, more viscerally detailed story than what you might have been used to from Larian.

The story begins with a bunch of Mind Flayers – angry, definitely-not-Cthulhu squid people with some pretty gnarly magic powers – flying around in a jumbo squid mothership called a Nautiloid. On board, you and a handful of others are held prisoner and infected with what could more or less be described as brain worms: a “tadpole”, with lots of teeth, bores its way under your eyelid, through the back of your eye and into your brain. The Nautiloid crashes, you wash up on a spot of beach, and your mission is to find someone who can get that tadpole out of your head before it pops through your skull and rather gruesomely turns you into a Mind Flayer yourself. As I said: a bit darker than Divinity.

The tadpole does come with a special power though, which acts as one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s central gimmicks: you can sort of “mind meld” with anyone else who has one, and as well as the “origin characters”, plenty of characters around the world will turn out to have a pet tadpole of their own. (The character creator itself appears just as detailed as Original Sin 1 and 2. Origin characters and their special, fully-voiced, cutscened and backstoried facets return of course, and in the creator you can choose race and subrace, background, class, subclass, and just about everything else conceivable).

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On the surface, much of the time the tadpole mind-melding boils down to the odd special dialogue option with fellow brain wormers, acting as sort of shortcuts through tricky conversations, in the vein of special origin character options that are seemingly always positive. But that’s a superficial explanation, really. The tadpoles are one part of a much wider set of systems – or perhaps more accurately, a wider web of sets of systems – that all play off one another with Larian’s now-typical panache. To get to the heart of how this little story gimmick plays into the wider game you need to go deeper, into what Baldur’s Gate 3 really is and how it really works.

What it is is complex. Start by thinking of a typical CRPG like Divinity: Original Sin, where the background numbers power the visible numbers, like your characters stats, which dictate your ability to navigate certain situations like persuading someone to let you out of prison through dialogue, or smash through a door with magic. All of the people-persuading and the door-smashing intertwines with a set of rules, which in the Original Sin games is built around surfaces and statuses. So, if the floor’s on fire and you throw some water on it, or cast a water-based spell at it, the fire and water turn to a lingering cloud of steam. Standing in the steam might do damage to you or cure you of an ailment or whatever else, depending on all the moving parts like what race you are and what innate traits you have, and so on.

The devious grease and fire trap in action (click to expand these images, and for better look at the UI behind our captions).

Now, intertwine those rules with the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, as they were back in the original Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2. You can dip weapons in flaming sconces to light them on fire, you can throw anything you have on your person (more on that in a bit) you can stack objects to create stairs (more on that too), and, above all, everything is powered by a D20 dice roll. Sometimes that’s behind the scenes, little formulae whirring away in the background as you walk around the world passing and failing perception checks for little hidden levers or pressure plates; or spotting or failing to spot facial twitches that reveal anxiety or anger in conversation, all the working-out of which viewable in a little bottom-right tooltip that lifts the mathematical bonnet. Most of the time, however, that dice roll is quite explicit. You roll for initiative on encountering enemies, according to things like who has the high ground or the element of surprise. You roll for explicit attempts to do things like persuade or intimidate in conversation, as well as the passive rolls in the background that might just pop something up. You roll, three times, to see just how “dead” you are when you’re downed: fail three and you’re dead for good (if you haven’t already been picked off, or if you haven’t got a resurrection scroll on some other party member to recover).

Stir all that together and what do you have? Chaos. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a molotov cocktail of a game, every action’s consequences shattering outwards, spreading and spurting across seemingly the entire length of a run through it. Take the experience we had, with Larian’s founder, Swen Vincke, taking control of the origin character Astarion, who’s a vampire spawn (like a vampire only he has a boss, who’s more of a proper vampire). Astarion, being a vampire, regularly has the option to just go ahead and feast on the neck of whoever he’s talking to. Most of the time that’s not a very good idea and there’s not a very good chance it’ll work, but if you want to try it, you can. To demonstrate this, Swen opted to chow down on a sleeping party member at your camp (you can make camp in most places to heal up, restore ability uses and so on). He needed to role an 18 or higher, out of 20, to succeed – the purposes of the demonstration was to show it was pretty tough – and of course he rolls a natural 20 and now we’re noshing on our mate, left the next day with an especially upbeat Asatarion and a very “tired” Cleric.

youtube

But that, really, is only the surface of what you can do – and more than that just how much the inherent chance-based systems of D&D affect an already complicated mesh of things you can do in games like Divinity. At the very beginning of our first playthrough, at what would be the first little tester battle after the tutorial, Vincke missed a shot that had a 90 percent chance to hit, scored a critical miss on what would’ve been a one-hit-kill spell, and got killed in one shot by a critical hit from the enemy. So we roll back through all the intro chat for another go and: two hits, two kills, enemies done and dealt with before they could even move.

In another skirmish, this time our party up to three members, against about four bandit grunts, Vincke showed off the game’s new stealth system, sneaking Astarion up behind an archer that would have had an incredible high-ground advantage to punt him off the ledge before the battle begins. Again though: bad luck. Misses and critical hits in all the wrong directions mean that, even including the tactical ledge-punt, the battle goes horrifically and we’re left kiting the bandits out into the woods towards some neutral fighters nearby, in the hope they’ll join in. A magical, disembodied hand was used to try and nudge someone off another ledge but missed. Potions were used up, abilities spent, and Astarion left to throw his boots at an enemy for a bit of chip damage – and hits. Half-triggering the nearby group of neutrals changes how we meet them later on, forcing us to fight the last one instead of triggering a cutscene. Some party members are lost for good. Some secrets, hidden in plain sight just off the beaten path, through some bushes and under some noticeably odd-looking rock, go undiscovered. The point above all is luck can swing a playthrough to the wildest extremes of success and failure. Enjoying that will come down to how happy you are to improvise, make do and fly by the seat of your throwable boots. Or how regularly you like to save.

There’s 4 player online co-op, and two-player couch co-op confirmed by Larian so far.

There’s another rather ingenious twist to all this, too, which that bandit skirmish hinted at. You can split your party and put any of them into turn-based mode at one point, while the others can simultaneously walk around in “real time”. Baldur’s Gate 3 is technically a turn-based game. The combat is turn-based, dialogue is turn-based, so to speak, and the environmental puzzles, of which there seem to be many, are solved in that manner too. But you move around the world in real time and this system, really, is a bit of a hybrid. In our playthrough Astarion wandered down into a dungeon – previously guarded by those bandits – on his own, and worked his way through most if it solo while the others were left presumably frozen up on the surface. Then we got stuck in some combat after some more bad luck, including a key that failed to open a chest it should’ve (and an attempt to smash the chest open that just… smashed the chest entirely), and had to bring in some help. So back up on the surface another party member smashed through the ground they were standing on to drop down, conveniently, into a room next door to this tricky battle – a spot of movie magic, I’d suspect: “oh no it’s going wrong in exactly the right place, we definitely didn’t plan for this as a way to show you how the hybrid system works!” – and so we turn a 2v1 into a 2v2, that additional party member automatically entering turn-based mode when he reached the “battle area”.

Later in that dungeon we got stuck in a particularly grisly grease and fire-based trap (with a dash of raising the undead thrown in for good measure) and again Vincke demonstrated the power of lateral thinking by juggling real-time and turn-based movement to bring other party members to join and work around the hazards. Often that actually descends into a sort of calculated gaming of the game itself, and fascinatingly that seems to be where the game really finds its groove. Baldur’s Gate 3’s magic is in its malleability, but also in your malleability, as a player that has to react and adapt. You are supposed to try and break it. You’re supposed to build a staircase of crates the other side of a door to an enemy and keep popping it open and closed to confuse them and juggle the aggro. You’re supposed to see what happens when you throw this at that, cast this on them, say this to her or climb up onto that.

The elaborate verticality in action, as our party splits and sneaks through a multi-floored dungeon.

Which brings us to the climbing, and perhaps the biggest shift in how CRPG regulars will need to work their way through Baldur’s Gate 3: its fascinating use of verticality. Your characters can now all jump quite a significant way – success depending on, you guessed it, character stats and semi-hidden D20s – and so even in towns and hubs you can work your way onto a building and down into it through the roof, bypassing locked doors or barred gates. In the later-game dungeon we played, you’re tasked with tackling a tough boss surrounded by enemies. He’s got a tadpole himself, but try to use that in dialogue and, unless you’re lucky with the dice, it’ll probably fail, leaving him angry and you exposed to a pretty nasty ambush. So what do you do?

Well, if you picked up some interesting-looking barrels several hours ago, you could use them to create sort of veil of darkness to sneak up behind him. Things – obviously – went wrong when this was attempted in our playthrough so again, improvisation. The stealthiest character was sent up to the rafters – this must be the third or fourth level up of at least a four or five level dungeon – and around beside the boss. A very risky jump is attempted, to right behind him, and somehow pulled off. An explosive barrel is placed, and the our rogue Astarion works his way out up the other side, knocking down the escape ladder with him. Then the conversation, which our other party members had seemingly been paused in, half-way through, this entire time, can play out. Mind-meld fails, boss gets angry – planted explosive barrel gets detonated! – and he goes flying across the room and through a hole, down three floors to some giant spiders in the basement. Carnage – but all predicated on a decision to pick up some barrels hours earlier, your own ingenuity to think of it, your knowledge of how the systems themselves can be gamed, and the luck to pull it off.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/larians-gorgeous-baldurs-gate-3-looks-to-be-a-game-of-groundbreaking-systemic-depth-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=larians-gorgeous-baldurs-gate-3-looks-to-be-a-game-of-groundbreaking-systemic-depth-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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bluewizard-gaming · 5 years

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How Metal Dice is Different from Other Dice

Something that I get asked frequently when I tell individuals that Imaginary Adventures sell metal dice is 'the reason metal dice?’

Being an old cap at this RPG thing, the redness of metal dice bounce ideal out at me... in any case, that probably won't be the situation for everybody. You might take a gander at your first arrangement of dice, and spending close $50 is definitely not a little venture. You might be a dice aficionado who has been utilizing the equivalent for a long time and are vigilant about having a go at something new.

Along these lines, in this blog passage I would like to tell you more about the metal dice that Imaginary Adventures sell, and why they are so wonderful.

1. How are they made?

Metal dice are made of top notch zinc composite, and are cast utilizing molds. They are totally non-Toxic and conform to universal En71 principles.

When cast they are then covered in various ways relying upon the completion - either electroplating for the metallic completions or electrophoresis for the hued variants.

The numbers are additionally indented as a component of the form and after that loaded up with paint. This implies despite the fact that the paint may blur after some time, the numbers will consistently be there.

2. How are they diverse to typical dice?

I'll keep away from the conspicuous answer here and state that MAIN contrasts are the weight and nature of the edges.

Weight

A typical plastic 7 arrangement of dice generally weighs around 26g. A lot of our metal dice weighs around 122g - almost multiple times as overwhelming!

For what reason would you need heavier dice? First off they FEEL marvelous.

The additional weight makes a fantastic thump when you roll. This is the most fulfilling piece of utilizing metal dice. They simply feel better to roll. No matter what, 100% of my dear companions and part individuals who got a lot of metal dice never needed to return to rolling plastic.

Metal dice additionally don't roll as far, so they are extraordinary in littler spaces (eg. a mousepad on a jam-packed gaming table)

Edges

The sharpness of bite the dust edges are imperative to helping the dice remain as arbitrary as could be expected under the circumstances. Investigate the d6's utilized in club - they have the absolute most honed edges around to guarantee the dice roll as arbitrarily as could reasonably be expected.

At the point when plastic dice are made, they are generally placed in a tumbling procedure to clean the dice, yet this additionally mollifies the edges. Another lamentable symptom of this is the dice can likewise be made somewhat elongated (this applies more to d20s than others), which thus can influence which numbers appear all the more frequently (consider rolling an egg)

Not exclusively are the edges of our metal dice fresh (for premium irregularity!) they additionally aren't put through any procedures like tumbling. Each beyond words sell is made utilizing a similar form, and consistently turns out molded precisely as proposed.

3. Things to be cautious about

Metal dice are incredible, however in case you will get a set there are a couple of things you should be cautious about.

Storage

Do whatever it takes not to store them in a dice pack with all your other dice. It's not extraordinary for your metal dice (they can scratched) and they can likewise do terrible things to your plastic dice (they can get much MORE damaged).

Every 7 dice set of metal dice sold on Imaginary Adventures accompanies its own little velvet sack. I particularly prescribe keeping your dice in this sack, at that point placing the pack in with your other dice.

Weight

I know - this was recorded as an or more above. In any case, when you wind up conveying a full complement of metal dice - 4 arrangements of 7, a lot of d6's - all that metal includes. Ensure you have a dice sack of pencil case that can face the test.

Humidity

I don't know how frequently this would occur, yet being made of metal; these dice are vulnerable to dis-shading because of oxidization. Attempt to keep them out of water, especially salty water. No rolling in the seas.

Be cautious where you roll

Being a lot heavier and with decent sharp edges, our metal can do mean things to delicate wooden tables or floor tiles. Be cautious where you roll. Attempt to keep your dice rolling region contained (dice plate are extraordinary) and the table cushioned (mouse cushions do fine and dandy).

#metal dice

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theadddm · 5 years

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Regarding the Gentle Art of the Passive Check

Raise your hand, if your Dungeons & Dragons character is supposed to be a master of ancient magics, or whatever, but can’t ever seem to accomplish any test of intellectual and arcane skill, because you, the player, keep rolling 2′s on your d20? Go ahead and raise your hand, and really confuse the people around you, in the coffee shop.

Now, raise your hand, if you’ve ever DM’d games of Dungeons & Dragons, where the heroes enter a room with secrets to be discovered, and when you ask the players to make a Perception check, they respond by obsessively searching for the things which they aren’t supposed to know are there.

These are well-known dilemmas for anyone experienced in playing roleplaying games, and Dungeons & Dragons has answers, but is extremely vague about them, because they want to empower DMs to make their own decisions about things that they don’t understand. Said answers are Passive Checks: when the DM evaluates the result of a character’s effort, without rolling the die, and instead using the equation of 10 + Skill Modifier.

The Player’s Handbook is sparse on the details, and the Dungeon Masters Guide even sparser, but the essence is any of a handful of mechanics:

1) when the DM wants to test the player characters ability to accomplish something, without letting the players know about it, the DM may use a passive check (A.K.A. seeeeecret check).

2) when the narrative situation is such that DM would be asking the player to make many consecutive ability checks, the DM may, instead, use a passive check (A.K.A. make one average check, so you don’t have to make a full-days’ worth of regular checks).

The second mechanic is pretty harmless and makes a lot of sense, but the question of whether checks should be made in secret has a range of fans and detractors, depending on how much the DM trusts (or wants to trust) their players to not meta-game, or how much the DM wants to create a sense of drama in their game.

3) There is, however, a more interesting issue, in a 3rd mechanic, which is *not* in the core rulebooks, but has been described by Jeremy Crawford, lead writer for the Player’s Handbook, as the intended mechanic: that the value for a Passive Check is intended to serve as a minimum value for a regular check, at least for Wisdom (Perception) checks. The idea is, that there is a baseline level of awareness, which is available to the character when they’re not paying particular attention; it’s the difference between spotting something which you’re looking for, and just happening to notice it. (take a gander at this podcast episode, for more details about this concept: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/james-haeck-dd-writing)

This leads us to the fascinating question, of whether it makes sense for a character to have a minimum-possible value for any check, if they have one for a Perception check? Maybe the wilderness-guide ranger should be able to get a sense of direction or danger intuitively as well as analytically. Perhaps the worldly bard should be able to sniff out a liar before they even speak, without having to take in their cadence and micro-expressions. In other words, maybe sometimes you just get a feeling about something.

ALSO, though, this mechanic doesn’t have to assume that the character isn’t paying literal attention; instead of it being “oh, I didn’t realize that I was attempting a feat of Acrobatics,” perhaps it can be “this feat of Acrobatics? No sweat; I don’t even need to try.”

This is a SUPER-contentious item amongst the dungeon master community, since it boils down to pure philosophy of gaming. Shouldn’t skilled characters be able to consistently succeed at their skills, even if their player can’t roll to save their imaginary life? ...but shouldn’t characters also be able to fail catastrophically? Shouldn’t players be better than meta-gaming, and shouldn’t the DM trust them to be? As I often do, I believe that the real answer is revealed with MATH!

Looking at the numbers, characters with a +0 to a skill will automatically succeed at a DC 10 check; we’re talking about a character being able to walk through Very Easy and Easy skill checks, and the DM gives it to them automatically, even if they aren’t particularly good at that skill. ...unless a character has a penalty to that skill, in which case their passive score is probably 9, maybe 8. Keep in mind, that, we’re talking about Very Easy and Easy checks—mundane tasks; things that anyone could do, and the only questions might be how well they do it, or how long it takes. It could be something as minute as opening an unlocked door, or something as neutral as chopping firewood, where a skilled person can do it magnificently, but a complete derp can still accomplish it.

(conversely, a check with a DC of 15 almost always requires a character to be proficient in that skill, to pass it with a Passive Check. The keyword, here, is ‘proficient’ -- a character needs to be actually good at this thing, for the DM to just give it to them, and this is for a check which is considered to be only Moderately Difficult.)

...and that’s the part that I think most people miss, thinking about Passive Checks -- EVERY DM hands out automatic successes for most things that a character does. DMs don’t require a die roll, for a character to open an unlocked door. It’s something extremely easy, the DM says “yeah, you can do that,” without going to the d20. ...and, why would they? That’s a task that’s well-within that character’s ability to accomplish perfectly-well, nearly every time. This DM just used a Passive Check, against a task with a really low DC. The big variable in every DM’s usage is how extreme is the ease of the task which is being attempted. Of course a DM wouldn’t require a roll for opening an unlocked door, and of course they would require a roll for picking a locked one. It’s the stuff in the middle that’s the question -- the checks with a DC of 10, 12, 15, which are the question, and Passive Checks simply offer a consistent mechanic answering that question. Would the scholarly wizard be able to find common information in a book? Probably. How about the barbarian? Maybe not. On the flippy side, a check which isn’t a gimme is not going to be accomplished passively, except by a character who’s reeeeally good at that thing. So, is it a given, that the barbarian could make the 5-foot jump over a pit (let’s say it’s Athletics, DC 12)? Almost certainly. ...but the wizard? Not at all. This is a mechanic that provides quantifiable justification to answer the question of when to grant an automatic success, or when to require a roll -- something that every DM has to think about, throughout every game.

Personally, I prefer a somewhat middle road for Passive Checks. My guidelines are:

For Passive Check Mechanic #1: Seeeeeecret checks,

Does it make any damn sense for the skill to have a sub-conscious baseline level of that skill? When making this check, the question is literally whether the character is aware of needing to use this skill, and if they could just happen to notice something, or get a feeling about something. So, physical skills probably don’t make sense, here, ie., Athletics, Acrobatics.

I use Perception, Insight, Survival, Medicine. ...Wisdom skills, basically, for that gut-feeling factor. I can see an occasional use case for Charisma skills, for those situations the character’s vibe is affecting a whole room, and the character hasn’t taken particular notice of every person there.

Is the situation such that a sub-conscious baseline level of that skill would be available to the character? Sure, a character keeping watch over a quiet campsite could happen to notice a hidden monster, but what about in the heat of battle? Other roleplaying games (see: Kids on Bikes) have standardized this distinction as a primary mechanic in their system, distinguishing decisions or actions made in calm situations versus stressed situations, and, if you want to allow Passive Scores to ever be used in these situations, D&D can handle this with Advantage and Disadvantage (which modify a Passive Score by +/- 5).

For Passive Check Mechanic #2: Make one check instead of a billion,

Will the character be doing this thing repeatedly for more than 6 seconds? This one is useful for a whole day of library research, or hours spent climbing a mountain, crawling a dungeon with constant searching, or anything that takes a while; more than a minute, even. Its flaw is that it does assume the law of averages -- that the character will never achieve an extraordinarily good or bad result. That don’t seem right to me, so I think it makes sense to ask the player for a roll, first, to give them that chance to roll really well, or reeeeeally badly. Then, if they didn’t roll a 1, the Passive Score can be their result.

For Passive Check Mechanic #3: Passive Score as mimimum-possible-value for an Ability Check,

Is the DC for the check below 10? It’s in the every-day, low-difficulty tasks, where a character really should be able to perform how we expect them to, since they have the time and room to set up for it. Probably less so, for the more difficult tasks, although there is an argument for pressure actually sharpening one’s senses, which is totally a thing in real life. How to measure if a character is a pressure performer? Imagine me shrugging. (if it helps, I’m 5′7″, average build, with brown hair and eyes, and a short beard)

Is the situation such that the player would ask to make the same roll over and over again? You can’t just keep rolling until you get a 20, but if the character has the time and the freedom to keep trying something, they truly should get something more than just that one roll. Then, the situation falls under the purview of Passive Check Mechanic #2, so just use the Passive Score to back up a single roll.

As contentious an issue as this mechanic is, I believe that it’s really just a sensible way to codify the long-standing common-sense practice of allowing characters to auto-succeed certain tasks, and lets skilled characters be skilled.

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swipestream · 6 years

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Testing The Float Test: Comparison VS Chi-Square

Recently I came across another video featuring the float test for testing die fairness. For those not familiar, the float test consists of floating your dice in a dense bath of salt water and repeatedly spinning, rolling, or shaking them and letting them settle to see if a certain face or set of faces routinely float to the top. This result is supposed to be indicative of voids or differences in density of your dice and proof that they do not roll fairly. In theory, if a die fails the float test you shouldn’t use it.

I’ve always been skeptical of the float test though. Yes, it certainly can tell you if your dice have imperfections that make one face or collection of faces lighter or heavier than others, but do those differences really result in a meaningful difference in rolls? So, I set out to do a not at all repeatable, not at all scientific test to see if the results from a float test on my d20s, were borne out by a chi-square analysis.

Rough Methodology:

I wanted to test all my d20s, but I discarded three of them for the purposes of the test: two which had insufficient contrast to read easily, and one that is an old-school double d10, not a true d20

I was left with 22 d20s. I wanted to perform a float test on all of them and note which ones failed and which face(s) repeatedly floated to the top.

Then I wanted to perform a chi-square goodness of fit test on those dice. However, since we had a clue which face(s) should be the most (or least) common according to the float test, we should actually be able to do a better test that the standard 19 degree of freedom test vs H0: all faces have a .05 chance of occurrence. Instead we would be able to do the better test against H0: the face(s) indicated by the float test have a chance of occurrence equal to .05 times the number of faces. This test is better since we’re able to target the specific faces that should be off rather than general deviation from the ideal distribution.

Execution:

I started with 3 cups of water in a small bowl, enough to contain all my d20s at once. I then started adding salt to the bowl, one tablespoon at a time with the goal of getting all my dice to float. One of the dice started to float after I added about 3 tablespoons of salt (about a 1/16 concentration) but the rest stubbornly refused to float as I added tablespoon after tablespoon of salt. Eventually around 10 tablespoons of salt (about a 1/5 concentration), another die started to float, but the salt also stopped dissolving in the water with 20 of my dice still sitting solidly on the bottom of the bowl. I fished out all of the dice and microwaved the solution and was able to get another few tablespoons of salt to dissolve but no additional dice were floating. So, after a quick google search to make sure I wasn’t about to ruin my dice, I transferred the entire solution to a pan (featured above) and slowly heated it on the stove with a few of the stubborn dice on the bottom so I’d know when I had enough salt dissolved. I managed to get about 16 total tablespoons of salt to dissolve (about a 1 to 3 ratio, making my solution literally saltier than Poseidon’s trident) before two things happened:

The salt stopped dissolving yet again.

Impurities and seeding crystals into the solution (via adding salt) caused a rapid crystallization of the salt out of the solution into a thick crust on the top of the pan which broke loose and sunk.

So, I had gotten about as much salt into the water as I was going to be able to in my kitchen. But even after much of the salt crystallized out of the solution, I was able to float four dice (the four pictured above). That’s not a good result out of 22, but it’s something at least. One of them was very recognizable: my PolyHero Wizard die. The other three are generic d20s. If it’s important, the black one pictured above was the first one to float, the Wizard d20 was the second one to float, but may well have floated better because of its unique textured shape. The two translucent greens were the last to float.

Now that I had four floating dice, I was able to do a float test. The black d20 exclusively had the 16,19,6,9, and 3 cluster at the surface, the Wizard die exclusively had the 20 rise to the surface, and the other two had no discernible tendency. If the float test actually works to detect internal voids and bubbles though, the results of the green dice would make sense, as they are clear enough to visibly confirm that none exist. This gave me two dice to run chi-square goodness of fit test on, but I had already run a general 19 degree of freedom goodness of fit test on my PolyHero Wizard d20, so I was even more skeptical that I would find anything amiss with it. Still, for the sake of being thorough, I went ahead and tested it again.

Remember, that the end result of a chi-square goodness of fit test is a p-value and “if the p is low, H0 must go” i.e.: if your p-value is lower than a standard critical value (usually .1, .05 or .01 depending on how skeptical you want to be) you must reject your original hypothesis. Remember also, in this case our hypothesis is that the faces indicated by the float test came up a proportion of the time equal to .05 times the number of indicated faces (i.e.: the die follows the normal fair distribution). For each, I rolled the die 100 times and ran a one degree of freedom goodness of fit test on the two categories of “float test faces” and “other faces”.

For the wizard die, which had exclusively had the 20 rise to the surface, if it was a fair die we would expect 5 20s to be rolled and 95 other faces. Instead we saw 4 20s and 96 other faces. This results in a p-value for a chi-square goodness of fit with 2 categories (1 degree of freedom) of about .35. This is not sufficiently low to reject our H0, so we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude that the results of the float test are meaningful. As I stated earlier, this isn’t surprising, as I had already run a standard goodness of fit test on this particular die and not found sufficient evidence to reject it’s fairness.

For the black die, which had exclusively had the 16,19,6,9,3 cluster of sides rise to the surface, if it was a fair die we would expect those 5 sides to be rolled 25 times, and the other 15 sides to be rolled 75 times. Instead we saw 26 and 74 occurrences respectively. This resulted in a p-value of about .18. This is lower than the results of the wizard die, but still not sufficiently low to reject our H0. Thus we don’t have sufficient evidence to conclude the float test results are meaningful in this case either.

End Conclusion:

Honestly, this debacle is inconclusive. I couldn’t even get 18 of my 22 dice to float. Either better conditions, a better method of making the solution or a denser solution is required for me to test more dice. If anyone has suggestions of how to improve my results here, I’d love to hear them. I’m willing to give this another go with more dice. Reading sources online I also find that others have seen the same results I have with dice floating at wildly different densities of solution. It’s possible that this is related to the presence of bubbles and voids and more prominent ones make for denser dice. It’s also possible this relates to particular type of material used in manufacture.

However, given the difficulty in successfully executing a float test, and the proportion of my dice that resolutely refused to float, and the fact that in the two cases we could test, we found no evidence to support the conclusions of the float test, I’m going to tentatively call the float test as impractical and not supportable, but would be very interested in running more tests once I have a better protocol to work with.

Have you had better success with the float test? Swear by it? Have you conducted this or a similar experiment yourself? I’d love to hear from you so I can get tips for another go at this.

Testing The Float Test: Comparison VS Chi-Square published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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kayawagner · 6 years

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Testing The Float Test: Comparison VS Chi-Square

Rough Methodology:

I wanted to test all my d20s, but I discarded three of them for the purposes of the test: two which had insufficient contrast to read easily, and one that is an old-school double d10, not a true d20

I was left with 22 d20s. I wanted to perform a float test on all of them and note which ones failed and which face(s) repeatedly floated to the top.

Execution:

The salt stopped dissolving yet again.

Impurities and seeding crystals into the solution (via adding salt) caused a rapid crystallization of the salt out of the solution into a thick crust on the top of the pan which broke loose and sunk.

End Conclusion:

Have you had better success with the float test? Swear by it? Have you conducted this or a similar experiment yourself? I’d love to hear from you so I can get tips for another go at this.

Testing The Float Test: Comparison VS Chi-Square published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

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dungeons-dragons-pancakes-blog · 7 years

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Session 1: Dice Superstitions and Ranged Bros

I had my first dice superstition happen mid-session. I had bought two sets of dice, and my blue d20 was rolling terribly. This was the same d20 that gave me three natural 1′s in our combat test. So, I switched to my orange d20 (blue and orange are my colors) during our goblin camp encounter, and lo and behold, I managed to hit! Logically, I know that each has basically the same chance, but I felt better using the orange die, and my rolls were better for the rest of the session. We’ll see how things go for our second session; knowing me, I could be switching back right away.

Simon and Titus actually formed a pretty good team in our fight against the goblins. The duo, whom I now refer to as the “Ranged Bros,” alternated being accurate, with Simon first, and then me (following my die shift). We even did a freeze-frame high-five after one such accurate shot, so we’re definitely bros.

Also, there was this...

(Simon hit the goblin sharpshooter with a magic missile.)

Me: Titus says, “Great shot, Simon!”

J: Simon blushes.

Simon and Titus... OTP?

#dungeons and dragons #d&d #d&d 4e #first time d&d #first time session #ranged bros FTW

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anony-mouse-writer · 7 years

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Tagged by @not-natural-moose-and-squirrel

I am the worst person. I didn’t see that I got tagged and I think this post is like a month old….

Rules: Answer all questions, add one question of your own and tag as many people as there are questions. 1. coke or pepsi: mountain dew? Coke and Pepsi started tasting the same to me after we did a taste test- sugary awfulness 2. disney or dreamworks: anything that gives me great stories and animation, usually dreamworks rn 3. coffee or tea: tea. Or hot cocoa 4. books or movies: books 5. windows or mac: both actually. 6. dc or marvel: Marvel movies. Marvel comics before AvX. 7. x-box or playstation: nintendo 8. dragon age or mass effect: *shrug* probs da if I ever played 9. night owl or early riser: night owl 10. cards or chess: cards 11. chocolate or vanilla: chocolate 12. vans or converse: whatever is on sale? 13. Lavellan, Trevelyan, Cadash, or Adaar: *refer to earlier lack of gameplay on this yet* 14. fluff or angst: yes 15. beach or forest: what kind? 16. dogs or cats: yes 17. clear skies or rain: warm rain 18. cooking or eating out: cooking 19. spicy food or mild food: s p i c y 20. halloween/samhain or solstice/yule/christmas: halloween 21. would you rather forever be a little too cold or a little too hot: cold 22. if you could have a superpower, what would it be: hard light projection (a la the lantern corps) 23. animation or live action: animation 24. paragon or renegade: still debating picking up the game 25. baths or showers: showers 26. team cap or team ironman: Cap 27. fantasy or sci-fi: yes 28. do you have three or four favourite quotes, if so what are they: “Life is pain highness, anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something” ”The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose“ “Tick, tick, boom” 29. youtube or netflix: my wallet demands youtube 30. harry potter or percy jackson: Percy Jackson 31. when you feel accomplished: after finishing a project to polished completion 32. star wars or star trek: Star Trek 33. paperback books or hardback books: Paperbacks 34. horror or rom-com: no. 35. tv shows or movies: hmmmm. I love a great tv show, but with movies, they can be pretty bad and I’ll keep watching, i won’t finish a really bad tv show usually 36. favorite animal: ummmmmmmmm. Idk. Inland Taipans? Blue ringed Octupuses? Bengal Tigers? 37. favorite genre of music: whatever p!atd and fob count as, I think it’s officially “pop punk” 38. least favorite book: Our Mutual Friend 39. favourite season: autumn 40. song that’s currently stuck in your head: Spotify works miracles. None. 41. what kind of pyjama’s do you wear: tank and shorts 42. How many existential crises do you have on an average day: roll a d20 to find out! 43. If you can only choose one song to be played at your funeral, what would it be: idk. Heathens? (Probably a bad idea. My mom would resurrect me just to kill me again.) 44. Favourite theme song to a TV show: idk… Batman Beyond? 45. Harry Potter movies or books: I never finished the books after they we spoiled for me, but I liked the ones I read better than the movies mostly. 46. You can make your OTP become canon but you’ll forget that tumblr exists. Will you do it?: eh. I don’t have an out of canon OTP that I’m that attached to, and tumblr is a great hellsite. 47. Do you play an instrument, and if so, what is it? Used to play trumpet. Mine: 48. Person/character you’d most like to punch in the face rn? (Mine is Nick Spencer) I tag:

@sonnet3141 @cap-saturn @keepcalmandf-ckoff @lachryphage @pippinstark

#yeahh #im not tagging that pany ppl #only tagging ppl i think would want to fill it anyways #im sorry moose #asks #mouse's life

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tiktokia · 7 years

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Good Morning!

So I’m still ill as foooooooooook but that doesn’t matter because my January Loot Wearables finally arrived! Now I haven’t subbed to Loot Crate for a while now (Wraith still gets his Firefly Crates) but when I saw that it was going to be Dungeons and Dragons (and being such a massive D&D nerd) I had to subscribe.

Now for all you out there that don’t know what Loot Wearables is, it’s a monthly subscription service from Loot Crate focusing on well…things you wear, from socks and tee’s, to one dedicated to female accessories. Prices start at £9.83 and the theme matches whatever the main box is that month. This month (March) is Primal and if you fancy getting your own goodies I will be posting a discount code at the bottom of the blog!

I did actually produce an unboxing video for this on my YouTube channel if you want to check it out, but as I’m feeling so rough it’s pretty short and sweet hence the blog for highlighting some of the finer details.

I realise this seems like it’s a little late if it’s the January theme, which was Originals for the record, well that was because there were some serious delays. I originally subbed for this on January 9th. Now I knew I was getting a hoodie, which as I’ve pretty much worn my N7 one everyday for the last few years, I really needed and being the cunning rogue that I am considered, £14 is a bit of a steal. Unfortunately less then a week later an email arrived saying there was going to be a delay, this being the first zip front hoodie that loot crate had produced, they wanted to make sure that it was a super high quality. This is fair enough, after all it wouldn’t do them any favours sending out shoddy merchandise now would it?

So I waited and waited, in the mean time I had cancelled the subscription as I didn’t really fancy the next wearable coming up (Power Rangers jogging bottoms and not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles purse I mention in the video, that was in the HER wearables crate) which they took payment for, thankfully the issue was easily fixed and I was refunded nice and promptly. However there was still no word on the hoodie situation until the start of February when we were told they would be shipping out early Feb and that there would be a freebie as a way of saying sorry for the delay. That’s cool, I love freebies! Then the radio silence came again and we heard nothing and received no tracking emails, that was until it arrived at my door this morning (24th Feb).

Now I’m gonna put this out there, this isn’t normal for Loot Crate, as far as shipping goes I’ve always had a great experience with them so please don’t let this put you off, it was merely explaining why the delay on the blog, not detailing my experience with them as a whole.

Now on with the actual goodies!!

There were 3 items in the bag total, first up was the leaflet telling what was in each of the LootWear tiers. Next up was the freebie, this came in the form of a D20 Ice Mould, which I was more then happy with. The mould was an “exclusive” item from one of their previous boxes, now the reason for the quotation marks is I actually already had one from ThinkGeek that I got a few years back, which was down right awful, wouldn’t hold water and so only made half a die.

Plus its blue so, yay!

ThinkGeeks version

Now I did test this out before writing this as thankfully the Loot Crate one is soooo much better, the mould in itself is both smaller and more flexible which means not only does it fit in a fuller freezer, but it makes getting the ice cube so much easier to de-mould. The other main difference is the hole is much bigger, which not only means it’s easier to fill but it means you can see if you need to top it up at all.

Nice and easy to use

although apparently juice doesnt freeze as well as water!

But you’re here for the main article so let’s go on with the hoodie! So as promised this is an exclusive all over print, zip front hoodie. First impressions are it’s very light weight, not black, it’s grey and looks big.

Now I’m actually really happy that the hoodie isn’t black, I think it’s always nice to mix it up a bit and I think black would have conflicted with the subtle print. Which for the record is a great choice, the whole hoodie is covered in off white D20 (rolling a crit, naturally) and the Dungeons and Dragons logo. It works well. There are other small details on it too, like the single red D&D logo on the left pocket and the little stitched on Loot Crate emblem.

The hoodie itself feels sturdy with everything being hemmed and double stitched, there is plenty of space in the hood and it actually has pockets (bonus) although they are personally a little shallow for my tastes. This being said the hoodie is seriously light weight (100% cotton) so won’t do you much good in those cold winter months (or be replacing my N7 hoodie like I had hoped) but would make a really good summer hoodie. I’m probably going to wear mine around the house or while I’m recording.

The zip is my only gripe, it feels fairly cheap and a bit plastic-y, I’ve had tops with this kind of zip before and they never lasted long but if that happens personally I will just look at re-zipping it. I mean for £14 its about the same price as a Primark one but waaaay nice.

The sizing was also a little odd, I ordered a Large (I checked after making the video) and received a medium, which was actually slightly too big! I’m a short lass, standing no taller then 5 ft but I’m not the lightest of creatures so I really wasn’t expecting a medium to fit me. Now I don’t know if maybe it was just a printing error or it’s how the company that manufactured it size their product differently (as it was made in India) but either way I’m glad they didn’t send out the large in the end or I would have been swamped!

On the note of sizing and labels I do love the fact that according to the interior print this hoodie will not only give you +6 to armour but also +10 to your charisma with no attunement required, there are going to be some unstoppable bards out there now thanks to Loot Crate!

All in all I’m actually super happy with the hoodie and will probably be wearing it most of the time now as let’s face it, it’s perfect for training in and my wizard could certainly do with the charisma boost! I don’t know why but no-one seems to like the necromancer…..

Even with the delay I’m so pleased with what they sent out and the freebie was a fantastic bonus. I will definitely be looking at re-subbing this month!

If you fancy your very own wearable or even one of their (now) many crates you can use the link below to get $5 off your first purchase.

http://looted.by/e6AgI

So until next time, roll nat’ 20’s and don’t forget to rage loot the hell outta that dragon hoard!

TikTok X

LOOOOOOT -Lootcrate wearables January 2017 unboxing.

Good Morning! So I’m still ill as foooooooooook but that doesn’t matter because my January Loot Wearables finally arrived!

LOOOOOOT -Lootcrate wearables January 2017 unboxing. Good Morning! So I'm still ill as foooooooooook but that doesn't matter because my January Loot Wearables finally arrived!

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