> This is also insane. Really, the justification for doing this is for very large probability tables.
That’s indeed crazy. As every Hackmaster [0] player knows, you need a D10,000 to roll for critical hit locations [1]. The severity range goes up to 24 btw. And there is a table for hacking, crunching and puncturing weapons each. Followed by 4 pages of skeletons, muscle structures and organs of a human to explain where all those locations are, exactly.
But what am I saying, maybe you rolled a fumble or mishap, in that case you do indeed need your d1,000 [2].
FWIW, this is a D&D 1st ed based game that has multiple possibilities of dying during character creation ;)
It is good to see that DSA, Das Schwarze Auge or The Dark Eye, isn't the most complex system with rolling talents with three D20 against three attributes. Except for talent, which replaces the 3D20 with a single D20 against an average of attributes, different ones for attacks and parries or ranged attacks, and then compares the margins of success between rolls. Don't ask how magic works, I never figured that one out so I stuck with fighting characters.
DSA. Hated pretty much everything about it (both 3rd and 4th edition at least). From the rules to the setting (though I did enjoy the video games).
> Don't ask how magic works, I never figured that one out so I stuck with fighting characters.
I was playing a mage. I was also the only one who understood how magic worked. The only time I did something useful was the day I was sick, and they had my character use a quarterstaff to bash someone on their head -.-
4th Edition isn't too bad, besides needing a BA degree for the basic rules and a Masters for magic. Not that I ever cared about magic. The setting is nice, as are some of the non-mainstream medieval cultures. It took dive, IMHO, with the start of 5th edition.
Being the only one who gets the magic rules, playing a mage, should be quite power gamer move!
EDIT: The most useful spells I ever encountered were those forcing NPCs to do what you want, burn NPCs or make someone super fast.
That! I consider myself holding a Bachelor's degree in the 4th edition combat rules and having dropped out of my masters in the sub-set of rapier-and-dagger fighting rules. I never really started to study un-armed or mounted combat. I do own copies of the, what fell, like 300 pages of magic and clerical rules. Never understood those.
I think there was a time in my life when I had too much time it seems, as this was also my active kickboxing period with regular tournaments. Wouldn't miss those times!
I've got to ask, does this sort of thing actually create interesting gameplay decisions?
Does gameplay actually end up feeling fun in practice?
Are the tables interesting themselves to lookup or is that just "the bad bit"?
Do you as a player, or anyone you've played with spend time scrutinising the tables for crafting better characters?
Are there interesting types of actions or manoeuvres that you can perform so you get more interesting strategic play?
Does combat feel like a duel for example?
I'm curious as I do sometimes sit down and write simulators for things like this and I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to source the books and see if this sort of complex branching decision-making actually provides some interesting gameplay =)...
EDIT: Any good crunchy book suggestions of stuff to look at which might be interesting to simulate?
Hackmaster dialled this all up to 11 because it's essentially an extended joke in rulebook form. It was original referenced as the game played by the characters in a gaming cartoon strip, and only became an actual thing years later. A lot of the outcomes on the tables are there for laughs.
There are more serious games that had lots of tables, like Rolemaster, and basically the idea is for the game system to generate a wide variety problems and situations for the players to deal with, in combat but also in encounters and such. This takes some load off the GM by providing a lot of variety without preparation, but also because these outcomes are generated by the rules, the players can't claim the GM is picking on them by imposing nasty consequences arbitrarily. It's just one school of game design though.
HM was absolutely playable (I only know the original 4th edition), but it was created by a company making RPG comics (specifically, it was the, until then, imaginary system the characters in Kights of the Dinner Table played), so it does not take itself super serious.
The super-detailed tables mostly don’t matter. It’s not as if you’d know the shorter ones by heart, so you either look them up anyway, or you (what we did) have a small program on the GMs laptop.
As with most roleplaying games, almost everything lives and dies with the skill of your GM to make it work and to a lesser part with the skill of your players (and by skill I mean ability to get into a flow with everyone else)
Our first session ended in (Chaotic Neutral with a bit of evil) me accidentally killing the party fighter and him re-rolling a Paladin that did not like me. And I got critically hit by his thrown pebble after clapping at a funeral.
A very important detail about HackMaster 4e was that their license with WotC for the AD&D 1e things allowed them to publish a parody of AD&D 1e. They absolutely set out to create a fun and playable game (and IMO succeeded), but everything was contractually obligated to have an element of ridiculousness. On top of the generally lighthearted and joking prose, a big part of how they did this was to take the convoluted parts of 1e that later editions simplified away and instead make them over the top. 1e had lots and lots of overly specific lookup tables for things which later editions replaced with more general rules, so HM doubled down on that and made the tables even more gratuitously detailed.
If you set aside the humor aspect, HM is a game that plays very similarly to 1e, but more fleshed out and with a lot of assorted improvements.
Thanks for the clarification, 100% any roleplaying game is GM skill dependant.
It seems like the nice thing you get here is that some people went and came up with a whole bunch of stuff that could happen which could be good fodder for "fail forward"[0] style outcomes?
There are games that democratize the power of the GM a bit. Very traditional RPGs are into putting pressure on the GM to be a one-man band for the players' entertainment, but the more "modern" ones share the authority, get the players involved in worldbuilding and/or expect the players to be proactive (rather than just respond to the GM)
My group is currently playing such a system, Irownsworn [0] (Free to play). It allows single player, gm-less and gm play. While we are playing with GM, you still have to make decisions about outcomes that are traditionally done by a GM. It works because a lot of details are abstracted away.
"The current 5th edition has removed most of the parody aspects, and contains game mechanics written from scratch in order to avoid any intellectual property problems." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackMaster)
I really like the "funky dice" that get used in Dungeon Crawl Classics [1], like the D5 which shows up here. Also, it's probably worth noting that Lou Zocchi had at least four major iterations of the Zocchihedron (d100), with different braking mechanisms, and that they're basically impossible to obtain in the last couple years. He lost a fair bit of his work in a fire [2] and had some major health problems [3] last year as well.
As a sidenote, I'm not sure why a d216 hasn't ever been made -- that one feels like a fun (novelty) opportunity to replace 3d6 for attribute rolls.
I saw a Mk II once and it definitely would brake well on a soft surface. It was still hard to read though. I always wondered if putting a liquid with a small bubble between the numbers and the outside would yield a cursor for reading the number. Still 2d10 is more practical.
Rather than a d216 you then need a conversion table to use, why not a 16-sided dice numbered 3-18 that has been weighted to roll the appropriate distribution?
I hate pages just designed to make fun of people...
What do you care if someone likes odd dice? Or digging tunnels? Or dressing up in costumes? Or whatever else?
The worst ones are whole communities dedicated to bullying people (e.g. diwhy or cringetopia). We all do stupid things sometimes. I liked the time before someone would try to catch you on camera and internet-shame you for losing your temper, dressing funny, having a different opinion, or whatever else.
Indeed. I'm not sure it's harming them to a minor extent. Getting picked on harms people to a large extent (especially kids).
There's two options:
1) You did something really dumb, and now you're internet-famous for having done something really dumb. I care about this even if it was something genuinely bad. I'd like that to be handled with a justice system and not a mob justice system.
2) You do something a lot of people find obnoxious. You're really into some obscure sci-fi show, obsessively like Bulgarian folk music, only wear purple clothing, want Hello Kitty on all of your merchandise, or hold some non-mainstream political view. No one is going to individually ruin your life over it, but collectively, everyone shames you a little bit. That can be super-damaging too.
I think we should be tolerant of most things that don't harm other people (the same goes geopolitically; if a foreign culture has different views on government / gender / religion / etc., we don't need to fix them). I don't think we should be tolerant of bullying (e.g. another country invading their neighbor).
There's also a big difference between condemning people and things. My comment was that I hate a page and forum. I can do that without hate or condemning the person who made the page or the users of those forums. A person isn't defined by one dumb action. The linked page goes out of their to be mean to individuals who buy dice like those, or design them. I would have no problem with a product review page which said "These are bad dice." Dice (and web pages) aren't sentient beings.
I agree with you in general, but the mockery in this article is pretty undirected and mild. If you actually said this at a gaming table where a new and, especially immature, player was using the dice in question; then this applies in spades.
If you don't tolerate this level of being made fun of, you should probably stay in your moms basement. Calling the post harmful to any degree, is disrespectful of people actually experiencing harm.
There's a massive difference between talking about a thing you don't like verses trashing people who like a thing you don't like.
To sum it up in a meme: Let people enjoy things.
Sportballs is silly? Sure. Compare it to the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome? Sure. Calling people who like American football dumb? Not okay.
Watching football is as dumb as playing D&D, fixing cars, listening to music(1), etc. People get invested in things they like and can get just as "nerdy" about it as any programmer into designing programming languages.
1: I will make an exception for bagpipes. Pretty sure they were *designed* to be offensive. Which is why I get so much joy listening to them. ;)
> However, if you are too lazy to use your imagination to decide what alignment a character might be, then maybe role-playing isn’t for you
Using your imagination around the roll of a dice is the entire point of using dice in an rpg, if I just wanted to make this stuff up with no rules and no restrictions then I'd be writing a novel
Don't remember were, but I saw someone randomly rolling the sex of NPCs when the sex isn't important to story. A nice touch, which made me realize that a lot of NPCs I came up with weren't randomly distributed. magicians for example tended to majority female...
Once I built a separate Battletech universe using the random event tables from the MW3 RPG. it was centered around one particular merc unit and span like 150 years. Was fun to interpret the random events to put them into context and build story around it.
Always hated "alignment" in D&D. Your character is as they do. I was happy to move over to DragonQuest back in the day, did away with a lot of D&D's baggage to my mind.
> then I think the whole “story-telling adventure” thing is too taxing for you. You should just load up your Call of Duty 4 on the Xbox and enjoy not having to worry about coming up with complex narratives. Just shoot and call other people “fagtards.”
This part really turned me off at first, but I thankfully kept reading to realize how tongue-in-cheek the whole writing was. I feel that the list could have been ordered better, to more easily establish the tone first.
You totally missed the point. The author wasn't calling anyone a "fagtard". The author was making fun of the kinds of people who call other people "fagtards" while playing mindless online shooters. There's a lot of people like that.
I believe anyone who has played FPSs online would agree it doesn't take long to find an individual that fits this profile.
I think you're just word policing and hall monitoring someone. I understand decorum and that there's a time and a place for different types/styles of language but I don't think the context of this article violates that at all in this forum.
I think the vast majority of black people are not criminals. You’d probably have to look harder than you think to find blacks people that are criminals if you surveyed society in general.
They can contain dice that are specifically made for some badlysold or unsold boardgame, which just adds to the fun. A friend of mine has dice with undecipherable symbols on them.
Pre-COVID, I myself got very heavy metal dice. I didn't use them a lot, they're very pointy and I had the feeling they might damage my wooden table.
I got my kids some Math Art Fun dice. These included a rhombic d12, d24, d48, d60, and the mighty d120, plus some assorted skewed dice. Shoulda gotten a d30 too. These are absolutely fabulous dice, even if they have limited use. And they're cheap.
Not really the kind of people that tend to be offended by something like this often lack the capacity to appreciate it after it has been explained. As the quote goes "explaining humour is a lot like dissecting a frog. Not very many people like it an either way the frog is dead."
I disagree on the crystal dice. I don't think I would be happy if a game design chose to use them, but at least the idea is cool, because who doesn't love barrels? They're historical! They're fantasy! They're still used today!
> However, if you are too lazy to use your imagination to decide what alignment a character might be, then maybe role-playing isn’t for you. If you can’t make in your choice in your head whether Grongor the Dwarven Fighter likes to save women and children or save women and children for dinner, then I think the whole “story-telling adventure” thing is too taxing for you.
I dunno, I think it's more fun to explore all the options. Maybe Grongor is secretly evil, maybe Grongor is secretly good, maybe Grongor doesn't care and is just in it for the money.
People are more biased than a d6. Setting aside multi-generation debates about the notion of moral alignments, a rolled alignment is only "wrong" if it doesn't meet stereotypical expectations.
Nice. I have a d3 that is shaped like a little jellybean with 3 evenly spaced indentions that wrap around, really odd shape. Very satisfying for 33%ers.
Someone else posted this in a toplevel comment, but in case you missed it, 3d34-2 is a binomial distribution from 1-100, which approximates a normal distribution.
I played D&D the other day for the first time in 20 years (since 2nd edition) and my friend lent me a set of dice. Turns out, I still care about dice because I did not like these ones! The edges were too round and the design made the numbers hard to read. I guess I'll have to dig around for my old dice...
Weak research, I have at least 4 out of 10 in my dice collection, some improved (my "d1000" set has 10 or 11 digits, newer and rarer d100 makes in addition to the old Zocchi patent, both d4 numbering schemes...).
I used to own a D100, used it about two times. I wouldn't call it "shameful", but it was a silly idea to create one, and it was silly of me to buy one.
I actually quite like the standard d4. Lands with an air of finality without faffing about. Also, I'm clumsy with dice and roll them off the table far too often.
I'm not sure that calling dice "retarded" or using the term "fagtard" reflects appropriate language for 2022. The article's written in a manner that leads me to believe the author was a 13 year old boy. No insight, nothing to actually learn. Just one person complaining about dice. Why is this something worthy of Hacker News today?
It's interesting to see how far language/norms have come since 2009.
Still pretty damn funny I thought, if you can get past those two terrible and unfunny slips. I like the idea of not throwing out the whole thing when someone says something boneheaded.
Depends on the bubble you're in. Where I was, this was offensive in 2009 and had already start being phased out for over a decade before by my middle and high school experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa%27s_Law
You can trace use of pre "r-word" euphemisms at least back to the mid aughts and Carlos Mencia.
There are some interesting trends here. Spikes in searches seem to coincide with Mind of Mencia going on the air, Rosa's Law and a tweet from Ann Coulter directed at Obama.
I vaguely recall "retarded" sticking around a little longer than one might expect in the Northeast. It fits the local accent perfectly (got that ar in the middle to enthusiastically butcher). Of course I 100% agree with getting it out of the language nowadays, it is quite hurtful.
The world is more bipartisan, and discourse more vitriolic. Bad faith is more common, and as such, language more guarded. Outside certain bubbles, these words are definitely common.
> This is also insane. Really, the justification for doing this is for very large probability tables.
That’s indeed crazy. As every Hackmaster [0] player knows, you need a D10,000 to roll for critical hit locations [1]. The severity range goes up to 24 btw. And there is a table for hacking, crunching and puncturing weapons each. Followed by 4 pages of skeletons, muscle structures and organs of a human to explain where all those locations are, exactly.
But what am I saying, maybe you rolled a fumble or mishap, in that case you do indeed need your d1,000 [2].
FWIW, this is a D&D 1st ed based game that has multiple possibilities of dying during character creation ;)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackMaster
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/FIljuga.png
[2]: https://i.imgur.com/13xVopQ.png