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HotCanadianChick posted:There's also that the story that SweetBro posted described it as a Pathfinder game, and sounded exactly like what all my gamer friends in high school thought would be "totally sweet dude": PCs in a D&D game being stuff like vampire/drow/half-celestial paladin/mage/assassins who had been around for 1000 years and had a really sick talking magic sword that disintegrated things and we just started the game and we're only level 5 man! First of all, for the record we're all in our mid-20s to mid 30's. Second of all, vampires are a common part of the setting in the vein of Vampire Counts in Warhmamer. Finally, we've been playing for over a bit over a year and most of the things my character has become happened through play, because fantasy poo poo happens in fantasy game. So kindly take your Mary-Sue presumptions and shove it up your rear end. **ME CONDESCENDINGLY REBUTTING EACH OF YOUR LINES DELETED HERE** You know. Nevermind. You do you. If you think that being a professional GM is unfeasible/people who pay for a gm are suckers/ruins the spirit of the hobby, I frankly couldn't care less. If you think that people perusing what they love as a career is a surefire way to poverty or hating what you love, then I hope you're happy with whatever job you have. I personally think that as a player it's some of the best fun/dollar I've had. If the GM is making enough to pay his rent and otherwise live comfortably and continue to offer this as service then I'll likely continue playing until I can't afford the time to do it anymore. SweetBro fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Oct 21, 2016 |
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Oct 21, 2016 07:08
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Sweetbro you want to make your own thread about paid GMing and why it's awesome? I don't really want to read long posts in here that don't involve Icon Dice or the Chunky Salsa rule.
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Oct 21, 2016 08:01
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Oh now the whole paid GMing thing makes sense. SweetBro is a SF techbro who doesn't know how people work at all and just think throwing money and technology at everything solves all problems. He's just found a GM willing to endure his particular brand of bullshit.
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Oct 21, 2016 08:24
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Razorwired posted:Sweetbro you want to make your own thread about paid GMing and why it's awesome? I don't really want to read long posts in here that don't involve Icon Dice or the Chunky Salsa rule. My bad, I got caught off-guard the crippling autism. I'll contribute with something more on topic: So this is the story of how I TPked the party through my own curious stupidity, and how I then became BFFs with the thing that TPked the party. Important piece of meta background: these are two groups running the same campaign in almost parallel, but because of different choices being made the scenarios/environments are bit different. Group 1: I have a half-elf investigator and we're almost done with a dungeon, when we find a hidden door. We go through it and after a while we find ourselves in a place that's basically looks like a containment area, with an overly edgy shadowy dude in the center with massive rear end runed chains around him and a circular contraption above him. Mistake 1: We didn't nope out of there, despite the GM clearly describing this place as "nopeville". Clearly there must be some sort of treasure/loot after we solve the puzzle of this room we though. Mistake 2: When one player got visions of doom and gloom when he got close to the horrible thing, we didn't take him seriously. Mistake 3: When my character sees a screaming arcane rune when he gets close to horrible thing, the correct answer was not "I want to roll linguistics to find the matching rune on the chains and then match the pitch of the scream." This unleashes the god of nightmares. Mistake 4: When the god of nightmares offers a character to become it's champion in exchange for not wiping the party, maybe that option should be considered. So after that we all died and started the next chapters with all of our fancy loot gone and half of the characters re-rolled. Group 2: Same region, completely different location. We murder the gently caress out of some edgelord black ice wizard because a zombie-dwarf asked us too. While we were exploring the rest of his sanctum we find a strange contraption that's got an indirect yin/yang motif and a circular contraption that seemed vaguely familiar to me (neither myself nor the other player from the first group made this connection). So we gently caress around with it and end up solving a puzzle by basically duplicating a key to get what we thought were "max rewards". A moment later the GM gives us the hand outs of the two creatures that appear before us, and I lose my poo poo because I recognize one of them and I think we're going to get TPKed again (and this character I actually like), the other guy had to mute me for a moment because I was spamming his Skype with "gently caress" on repeat for their entire introduction sequence. Fortunately, when you release the two as a pair, the latter is less inclined to murder the gently caress out of you, especially when half the party decides they want to worship them. Now my character is blessed with a couple of dark and edgy nightmare themed abilities, and also daily nightmares. What's the lesson here? If you release it, you praise it. Also don't shout at magical runes. Arivia posted:Oh now the whole paid GMing thing makes sense. SweetBro is a SF techbro who doesn't know how people work at all and just think throwing money and technology at everything solves all problems. He's just found a GM willing to endure his particular brand of bullshit. Your avatar is appropriate. SweetBro fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Oct 21, 2016 |
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Oct 21, 2016 08:26
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Of course a techbro slinging "autism" around as an insult would be hostile to criticism from his "lessers" (also known as people not like him). I'm kind of surprised you're using autism as an insult to be honest, you must be the most popular guy in your department when you insult your colleagues like that. It's fine, I understand, you're too busy to actually pay attention to other people. Your Uber is waiting sir.
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Oct 21, 2016 08:34
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Paid DMing has cropped up now and then outside of the con circuit (where buying in on a table is sorta expected. Varying results - if you trust the random thirdhand scuttlebutt that's how they fleshed out some of the random npcs in Baldur's gate, and sometimes you can get paid consistently to DM for teens at a community center. On the other hand some people who've tried it have crashed and burned
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Oct 21, 2016 08:43
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Tunicate posted:Paid DMing has cropped up now and then outside of the con circuit (where buying in on a table is sorta expected. Varying results - if you trust the random thirdhand scuttlebutt that's how they fleshed out some of the random npcs in Baldur's gate, and sometimes you can get paid consistently to DM for teens at a community center. On the other hand some people who've tried it have crashed and burned If we're back on this subject. It's certainty possible, but I think you pretty much have to do it online. Physical space is an extra expense, and ads are kind of worthless. The best ads/credentials you can have is having your players recruit their friends (word of mouth in other words). Streaming is also pretty decent, since effectively lets people sit on a session. On an side-note, I never got the appeal of con-RPGs, outside of comedic games it seems hard make a memorable story in just a few hours. Can you at least pretend to be semi-on-topic when you hurling personal insults? I'm sorry techies ran over your cat or someshit, I hope you make peace with it some day. SweetBro fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Oct 21, 2016 |
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Oct 21, 2016 08:51
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Tunicate posted:Varying results - if you trust the random thirdhand scuttlebutt that's how they fleshed out some of the random npcs in Baldur's gate, -ish? I mean, Baldur's gate was basically made by a relatively small team. They pulled most of that stuff from local talent than they did going abroad and getting people. It was more LARPs (Edmonton has a proportionally high larping scene) and friends that they pulled from. Hell, a lot of the portraits are of friends and family of the team.
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Oct 21, 2016 08:55
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Pull up thread, pull up!
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Oct 21, 2016 09:00
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berenzen posted:-ish? I mean, Baldur's gate was basically made by a relatively small team. They pulled most of that stuff from local talent than they did going abroad and getting people. It was more LARPs (Edmonton has a proportionally high larping scene) and friends that they pulled from. Hell, a lot of the portraits are of friends and family of the team. That story can't be true anyway, since half-orcs weren't a thing in Baldur's Gate (and there's no mines in the sequels.)
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Oct 21, 2016 09:05
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I dunno, if paid GMs were to become a thing - in a professional twitch streamer kind of way, where it's probably not a responsible long term career choice, but a way to coast by for some time/another plate to spin as a freelancer - i think it'd have a pretty nice hobby-to-business ratio, especially if you're not completely dependent on it as your sole source of revenue and can afford to ditch complete dragonkin weebs. As in, if you pour your love of games into running a game store, it's 99% pure boring business, with some hobby perks on top, such as grabbing games for wholesale prices for yourself or convenience to join Friday Night Magic. In case of paid GMing it'd be more like twitch, where the business part is really increased commitment, lowered flexibility and the need for some self-promotion. I'm surprised at some goons being so angry at the very idea. I mean, you could say the same thing about selling modules on drivethrurpg, when one could just run them for friends or make a free fanzine out of it. Lichtenstein fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Oct 21, 2016 |
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Oct 21, 2016 09:05
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Arivia posted:That story can't be true anyway, since half-orcs weren't a thing in Baldur's Gate (and there's no mines in the sequels.) Just some random miniboss. Tunicate fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Oct 21, 2016 |
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Oct 21, 2016 09:13
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Lichtenstein posted:I dunno, if paid GMs were to become a thing - in a professional twitch streamer kind of way, where it's probably not a responsible long term career choice, but a way to coast by for some time/another plate to spin as a freelancer - i think it'd have a pretty nice hobby-to-business ratio, especially if you're not completely dependent on it as your sole source of revenue and can afford to ditch complete dragonkin weebs. I mean this holds true for any "content-creator service" business type, right? Heck, it holds true for most businesses. You gotta diversify your revenue stream. As a pro GM, if you've designed your own setting you can leverage that as an IP for other media, which of course can feed back into your initial revenue source of GMing since that gives you more exposure, or vice-versa.
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Oct 21, 2016 09:33
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Oh my god shut up about paid dming already, seriously. On topic: Does anyone have a story of the crazy Pathfinder numerology stuff at work? I've only ever randomly come across some of the stuff in the SRD like Sacred Geomtery and I can't imagine any story about it or the players that use it would end well.
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Oct 21, 2016 11:15
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SweetBro posted:On an side-note, I never got the appeal of con-RPGs, outside of comedic games it seems hard make a memorable story in just a few hours. Out of curiosity how much does this awesome GM charge you, and how many players are in any given session? And finally, does the game happen in person, or online (and if inline, over what service)?
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Oct 21, 2016 12:19
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SweetBro posted:On an side-note, I never got the appeal of con-RPGs, outside of comedic games it seems hard make a memorable story in just a few hours. I haven't played so much at cons but I've come to appreciate the one-shot format much more lately. Something that can be played in 2 to 6 hours, be fun and then be over. The thing about con games I'm not thrilled about is the random weirdos who might make the game terrible. I'd like to hear some good/bad stories about one-shot games.
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Oct 21, 2016 14:18
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SweetBro posted:Studies have shown pretty much everything including things that contradict other studies and yet somehow almost always conform to the biases of those performing the studies. This was a while back, but just chiming in as an actual scientist to say that this is horseshit. If one study contradicts another then 99% of the time it means that one or both of those studies is flawed and more work needs to be done. This is a good thing! It's not always obvious that a particular methodology isn't working out. Good studies are retracted all the time, this is a normal part of our developing understanding of the world. The other 1% of the time it means something really interesting is probably about to be discovered and that's even better! Good studies are not biased - this is difficult to do, but very possible and well worth it. Please don't peddle this 'you can prove anything with a study' line. Education on the importance of good research and an interest in humanity as a whole doing good work to find out the truth is much more important than dismissing the whole thing as a lost cause because a lot of people do bad science. If you don't believe in studies and research, please educate yourself so you can recognise good research and bad research - it makes filtering out the truth from the lies in the mountain of "New Study Proves X" headlines possible and will improve your life immeasurably because you will be less susceptible to the media's attempts to deliberately deceive you. Remember: people who want to sell you things have a vested interest in making sure you dismiss the facts because 'you can prove anything with a study.' For the record, I haven't read the studies Yawgmoth is talking about so they might be hot garbage for all I know. But what's important is that it's possible to go and check!
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Oct 21, 2016 14:30
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Mondian posted:Oh my god shut up about paid dming already, seriously. So the thing about Sacred Geometry is that if you have your Knowledge (Engineering) skill maxed out for your current level and are a math nerd, you literally cannot fail to get your free metamagic'd spell. It's horrifically broken.
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Oct 21, 2016 14:46
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Mondian posted:On topic: Does anyone have a story of the crazy Pathfinder numerology stuff at work? I've only ever randomly come across some of the stuff in the SRD like Sacred Geomtery and I can't imagine any story about it or the players that use it would end well. What the- Is that thing for real? A table with prime numbers, rolling a whole bunch of d6's, and then finally brute-forcing yourself with math through a ton of RNG numbers to end up at one of three specified end results? That's insane.
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Oct 21, 2016 15:18
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Sage Genesis posted:What the- I think it might be an "unglued" kind of feat, if you catch my drift.
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Oct 21, 2016 15:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think it might be an "unglued" kind of feat, if you catch my drift. Like the joke MtG expansion? I dunno, the link says it's from a product called Occult Mysteries. Was that known for being a joke product?
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Oct 21, 2016 15:29
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Sage Genesis posted:Like the joke MtG expansion? I dunno, the link says it's from a product called Occult Mysteries. Was that known for being a joke product? No, Occult Mysteries is a serious (and pretty good) book. One reoccurring problem in Pathfinder discourse is people just looking at rules items on the SRD and ignoring the actual books, which this conversation has fallen into. Occult Mysteries is from Paizo's campaign setting/GM focused line, and not everything in those books are meant for player use. That line frequently consists of a number of smaller articles on a series of related topics. Occult Mysteries talks about the feel of occultism, occult organizations, and then bringing occult philosophies into your game. So that last section includes the Sacred Geometry feat as an example from one of an optional take what you want systems to add to your game for an occult focus. The book notes that the occult options can be unbalanced, unpredictable, and burdensome. It actually suggests doing the math for Sacred Geometry ahead of time to avoid slowing down play. So Sacred Geometry isn't a problem feat in the way people are suggesting it is - it's embedded in a particular context, and only meant to be invoked in that context by GMs who specifically want that idea included. A player pulling it out of context and just throwing it out there is either ignorant of the actual book, or intentionally misrepresenting it for power gain. In all honesty I'd never include Sacred Geometry in my games though, and I remember there being one other really bad one. The harrow traits and astrological stuff is great though. (Postscript: Despite having similar names, Occult Mysteries completely predates and does not interact with Pathfinder's occult-themed rulebooks, particularly Occult Adventures.)
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Oct 21, 2016 15:58
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Doodmons posted:This was a while back, but just chiming in as an actual scientist to say that this is horseshit. If one study contradicts another then 99% of the time it means that one or both of those studies is flawed and more work needs to be done. This is a good thing! It's not always obvious that a particular methodology isn't working out. Good studies are retracted all the time, this is a normal part of our developing understanding of the world. The other 1% of the time it means something really interesting is probably about to be discovered and that's even better! Good studies are not biased - this is difficult to do, but very possible and well worth it. Psychology has a huge problem with replication and wishful thinking results though. Ego depletion and reconsolidation theory being recent examples.
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Oct 21, 2016 16:24
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Arivia posted:It actually suggests doing the math for Sacred Geometry ahead of time to avoid slowing down play. How would that even work? Until your turn comes up, you can't know what the exact situation is. Did the Cleric just erase half the battle with a spell of his own? Did the charge-monster Barbarian just crit and off the Big Bad? How can you know ahead of time exactly which spell and which metamagic feats to use? I mean... maybe when there's just one combatant before you, I guess, but that's not really all that much of a time-saver. (Not to mention kind of rude to the others at the table, that you're clattering a poo poo ton of dice and obviously taking your turn when it's not even your turn.) And as for the book pointing out that they're unbalanced, burdensome, and unpredictable... Well that's what I call bad design. Just because the book admits it doesn't make it good. Have we reached the point where feats are an ornamental piece of flavor instead of a valid game-mechanical option? Is this the loving Rococo movement of game design?
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Oct 21, 2016 16:59
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Arivia posted:No, Occult Mysteries is a serious (and pretty good) book. One reoccurring problem in Pathfinder discourse is people just looking at rules items on the SRD and ignoring the actual books, which this conversation has fallen into.
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Oct 21, 2016 17:03
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Sage Genesis posted:Have we reached the point where feats are an ornamental piece of flavor instead of a valid game-mechanical option? Is this the loving Rococo movement of game design? Thats as good of a summary of 3.x/PF design as I've ever seen.
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Oct 21, 2016 17:05
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It'd work better for a downtime crafting feat, so long as it was balanced around getting the benefit all the time
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Oct 21, 2016 17:09
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Sage Genesis posted:And as for the book pointing out that they're unbalanced, burdensome, and unpredictable... Well that's what I call bad design. Just because the book admits it doesn't make it good. Have we reached the point where feats are an ornamental piece of flavor instead of a valid game-mechanical option? Is this the loving Rococo movement of game design? I think that's pretty much exactly what a lot of Pathfinder's supplements are comprised of: feats, archetypes, abilities, spells, and the likes, which are made to reproduce a specific effect that's thematic to the particular setting or adventure module being covered in the book. Like, when they had an adventure module that involved plane (and time?) jumping to early 20th century Russia to track down Rasputin, they made a Trench Fighter archetype for the Fighter class that specialized in using rifles, ostensibly because it fit with however many NPCs were supposed to be gunmen in an adventure set in real-Earth 1900s. EDIT: and as HotCanadianChick points out, you can kind of also see this in 3e where you'd have a Knight of the This Specific Cleric Order prestige class included in the book where that Order is first introduced.
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Oct 21, 2016 17:10
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Ilor posted:You've clearly never played the right con games. $30 per month I think? It's 7 players per group, and I think there's about two-three groups per day, with the exception of Wednesday which is his day off. Online, using Skype and MapTools. Mondian posted:Oh my god shut up about paid dming already, seriously.
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Oct 21, 2016 18:14
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Sage Genesis posted:How would that even work? Until your turn comes up, you can't know what the exact situation is. Did the Cleric just erase half the battle with a spell of his own? Did the charge-monster Barbarian just crit and off the Big Bad? How can you know ahead of time exactly which spell and which metamagic feats to use? I mean... maybe when there's just one combatant before you, I guess, but that's not really all that much of a time-saver. (Not to mention kind of rude to the others at the table, that you're clattering a poo poo ton of dice and obviously taking your turn when it's not even your turn.) Sorry, my bad - I got it confused with the other feat on the same page, which involves calculating digital roots of spell names. quote:And as for the book pointing out that they're unbalanced, burdensome, and unpredictable... Well that's what I call bad design. Just because the book admits it doesn't make it good. Have we reached the point where feats are an ornamental piece of flavor instead of a valid game-mechanical option? Is this the loving Rococo movement of game design? Actually, it's good design because it's representative of the flavour and what Pathfinder is trying to do with occultism as a theme - so it does involve pomp and ritual, with odd effects that sometimes don't work or work too well. Are they like normal feats (and the same goes for the spells, traits, and items accompanying the systems in that chapter), no. And the book acknowledges that, and tells you to introduce them carefully and sparingly, so they don't lose their mystique. Like any other RPG, Pathfinder creates rules elements to serve the stories it's trying to tell. I'm not sure why that's so surprising to you.
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Oct 21, 2016 21:08
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Arivia posted:Sorry, my bad - I got it confused with the other feat on the same page, which involves calculating digital roots of spell names. The what of the what now? Ok, you're trolling, right? Well done mate, you had me there. Arivia posted:Actually, it's good design because it's representative of the flavour and what Pathfinder is trying to do with occultism as a theme - so it does involve pomp and ritual, with odd effects that sometimes don't work or work too well. Are they like normal feats (and the same goes for the spells, traits, and items accompanying the systems in that chapter), no. And the book acknowledges that, and tells you to introduce them carefully and sparingly, so they don't lose their mystique. No, I get that Pathfinder is going for a certain theme with that book and tries to reinforce it. That's fine. (Although the idea that a feat like that can ever have "mystique" is somewhat laughable to me. Rolling a d6 per skill rank and then going full Numberwang is not wondrous, it's obtuse.) The issue I have with this is that what a "feat" is, is something pretty well defined. In terms of what it costs, what it roughly does and doesn't do, etc. By introducing stuff that's unbalanced and admitting it, you're doing it wrong. The proper thing to do would be to introduce new feats which are all "mystique" and still be balanced. This is not a zero sum thing where you can only have one or the other. This is especially true if you also publish your kooky feats in an SRD amongst all the others where the book's warnings are absent - you can't blame people for ignoring context if you freely present the feats without that context.
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Oct 21, 2016 21:19
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If a feat introduces a loving minigame of on-the-spot story problems and dice rolling, it is poorly designed. But Paizo's playtesting is typically "whatever numbers the writer thought sounded good got printed" with a great dollop of telling anyone who actually knows anything about game design, balance, statistics, or math in general that they are bad people for understanding or caring about any of the aforementioned fields of thought.
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Oct 21, 2016 21:30
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Sage Genesis posted:This is especially true if you also publish your kooky feats in an SRD amongst all the others where the book's warnings are absent - you can't blame people for ignoring context if you freely present the feats without that context. tbf d20pfsrd isn't published by Paizo. Paizo's SRD is at paizo.com/prd and only includes content from the major books
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Oct 21, 2016 21:33
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Sage Genesis posted:The what of the what now? Nope: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/arithmancy (The two feats combined take about a page in the printed book. It's funny.) quote:The issue I have with this is that what a "feat" is, is something pretty well defined. In terms of what it costs, what it roughly does and doesn't do, etc. By introducing stuff that's unbalanced and admitting it, you're doing it wrong. The proper thing to do would be to introduce new feats which are all "mystique" and still be balanced. This is not a zero sum thing where you can only have one or the other. Actually, feats aren't that well defined in d20 design space. They do a LOT of things in a LOT of different ways - the only commonality is "abilities you can choose at common increments from a common list shared between other gameplay choices like class and race." Are what we think of as the common combat feats in Pathfinder or 3e more focused? Yes - but there's still Leadership and Craft Wondrous Item in that same selection too. So no, the numerology part of Occult Mysteries isn't doing it wrong - it changes the assumptions of the game in a particular way to accomplish a particular story, like plenty of other things do in 3e. It's not a story you or I would play through, but it's a valid design space. Don't forget that there have been multitudes of balance issues with feats over the years too. Again, see Leadership for one feat that can warp things very quickly and is in the core rules. quote:This is especially true if you also publish your kooky feats in an SRD amongst all the others where the book's warnings are absent - you can't blame people for ignoring context if you freely present the feats without that context. D20PFSRD isn't Paizo's official resource document. It's a third-party website that actually lost its fansite affiliation awhile back, even. Paizo has nothing to do with it. Their own Pathfinder Resource Document site is better written and does a far better job of providing context for the materials it does suggest third-party publishers should use. (For example, it includes the supporting material from the Technology Guide that would be lost in a simple list of items.) A lot of players use D20PFSRD because it does contain all the new books and all of the poo poo - it's an accessible way to see what stuff is in the huge Pathfinder product line. The problem is that people rely on it and use it without actually checking the actual books for context, and taking it as gospel despite it having frequent and common errors. For example, a player of mine in one game kept using summon monster to summon a monster known as a reefclaw that's not on the standard summon list; when I finally looked up where that option came from on the D20PFSRD, it was a specific option for divine spellcasters of a deity that didn't even exist in our campaign setting (and the player was a witch to boot!) But the d20PFSRD said it was in AP #37 or so, so no one actually checked. Seeing stuff like Sacred Geometry come up out of context is a frequent problem in Pathfinder discussions because of how dominant d20PFSRD is - but that's a player problem, and not anything Paizo's done. Arivia fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Oct 21, 2016 |
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Oct 21, 2016 21:43
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Speaking of numbers causing headaches, this reminds me of a short story about a Tale of Cursed Dice. So no joke, one friend of mine had, at one point, gotten from his roommate a set of bone dice that were claimed to be made from human bone. Of course, there was no proof of this when pressed on the matter, so we assumed it was just a joke. That said, those dice, a single set of a d4 through d20, were statistical anomalies. Never once in a year of play did they manage to roll their maximum result, and they had a bad habit of consistently rolling the lower end of their result spectrum. We were considering throwing them out altogether because we assumed they must've been badly-made and thus unfair dice, when one of our friends said they knew a guy at a hobby shop who knows some folks who can make crap dice good again, so the next day we took the bone dice to get redone. Next evening, we tried them out after getting exact measurements taken to show the dice should roll fairly. For the next month they continued to do their same pattern of awful numbers. We eventually threw them into the garbage where they belonged. Why didn't we just stop playing with them? Because we'd bought this cool metal skull dice cup to hold them in and the idea of "rolling dem bones" was fun for us kids. We eventually stepped up to those zinc alloy metal dice for our "fancy table-clacking dice of doom" and never looked back. Plastic's neat and all but there's just something fun of there being some real weight behind the dice you roll. Plus there was the simple pleasure of my punchman clanking two dice together while doing a "punch your fists together" pose before punching something with his metal fists.
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Oct 21, 2016 22:09
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Unknown Quantity posted:Speaking of numbers causing headaches, this reminds me of a short story about a Tale of Cursed Dice. So no joke, one friend of mine had, at one point, gotten from his roommate a set of bone dice that were claimed to be made from human bone. Of course, there was no proof of this when pressed on the matter, so we assumed it was just a joke. That said, those dice, a single set of a d4 through d20, were statistical anomalies. Never once in a year of play did they manage to roll their maximum result, and they had a bad habit of consistently rolling the lower end of their result spectrum. We were considering throwing them out altogether because we assumed they must've been badly-made and thus unfair dice, when one of our friends said they knew a guy at a hobby shop who knows some folks who can make crap dice good again, so the next day we took the bone dice to get redone. Next evening, we tried them out after getting exact measurements taken to show the dice should roll fairly. For the next month they continued to do their same pattern of awful numbers. We eventually threw them into the garbage where they belonged. This reminds me: is using something like a dice rolling app or website more or less fair than using real dice for a truly random result?
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Oct 22, 2016 00:06
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Regardless of the answer, this monstrosity is clearly the fairest of them all: http://www.gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic
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Oct 22, 2016 01:31
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chitoryu12 posted:This reminds me: is using something like a dice rolling app or website more or less fair than using real dice for a truly random result? If you really wanted true randomness, you'd use random.org's integer generator set to 1 to 20 (or whatever other dice size you need), but then that doesn't include things like easy access to modifiers. Dice apps are probably more "truly random" than your cheap-rear end plastic dice from Chessex, but to be sure you'd have to vet (or ask for a verification) on the random generator that they use, but I think even a call to your standard RNG API is going to be good enough for government work.
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Oct 22, 2016 01:44
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Speaking as someone who works for the government, the above is almost certainly true.
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Oct 22, 2016 01:53
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Bieeardo posted:Regardless of the answer, this monstrosity is clearly the fairest of them all: http://www.gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic ......it's beautiful....
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Oct 22, 2016 01:55
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