Quick Dice Questions

[Rob Donoghue]

Is there any particular reason to count odds rather than, say, count 6+, or whatever number happens to give you a 50% outcome?  I ask because I was considering switching to 6+ so I could resolve ties by dropping the bottom (to 5+, 4+ and so on until the tie is resolved).

Second: Anyone have any experience with using dice as fanmail tokens? I've got enough same-colored dice sitting around from my Exalted days that it seems like an ideal solution, but I worry a little about potential clutter.

-Rob D.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

I think it's a good thing that, using the current rules, the highest value possible (10) is not a success value. Per die, one of the five "loser" values is higher than (i.e. wins narration over) all of the five "winner" values.

Now, that doesn't actually show up in every roll in terms of success and narration. For one thing, you might get more successful dice than the opposition, and one of your non-success dice happens to be a 10. For another, the person who loses a conflict may not have any 10s. But regardless, over many many conflicts and rolls, a very slight bias exists for the narrator to be on the losing side.

If you preserve that feature, then whatever 50% values of a given die you choose don't matter.

Best,
Ron

[Rob Donoghue]

Hnh.  Knew I was forgetting something.

Though that suggests that it woudl be an easy mechanic to introduce if you prefer a winner-is-more-likely-to-narrate model or (by making 1-5 a success) increasing the tie between worst roll and likliehood to narrate.  Wacky.  Still, that's reason enough to leave it be for the time being.

-Rob D.

[BlackSheep]

Yeah, I think the idea behind the current system is that it doesn't necessarily tie winning the conflict with winning narration rights; they're almost independent of each other, with a slight bias towards the loser narrating.

One idea I had was high die wins, low die narrates.

[Chris Goodwin]

I'm running PTA this weekend, planning on using d20's.  I bought six dice marked 0-9 twice with pluses on one of the 0-9 sets.  The idea is that a + denotes a success and ties for narration, if they exist, are resolved in favor of a non-+ roll. 

[johnmarron]

Second: Anyone have any experience with using dice as fanmail tokens? I've got enough same-colored dice sitting around from my Exalted days that it seems like an ideal solution, but I worry a little about potential clutter.

-Rob D.

Rob,

We just ran our pilot episode last week, and I used exactly the idea you are talking about above.  I have lots of d10's so use color coding to mark the various type of dice in the game.  At the start of the episode, I hand out blue dice equal to screen presence to each player.  I have a bowl of green dice for use as trait dice, and players draw from it, returning the dice after the roll.  I have one funky red/blue die for my base die as producer, and a bowl of red dice with dice equal to the episodes budget in it.  After I roll the red dice for budget in conflicts, I just pop all of the ones I rolled into a bowl for the audience pool.  Players draw red dice from this bowl to award as Fan Mail.  When they spend the fan mail to roll the red dice in a conflict, I put successes back into my budget bowl, and put failures back into my dice bag.  It worked great for our first session, although very little Fan Mail was awarded, so most of my budget dice sat in the audience pool bowl and I didn't get to show off my clever system as much as I would have liked!

John

[Darren Hill]

Rob, have you seen the card version that some people use to replace the dice?
IIRC, it's basically: Give out cards instead of dice, Red cards count as successes, High card gives narration.
There's some rule to determine suit priority in case of highest cards tying, but I don't remember offhand.
I plan to use this method when I play.