Dice Jail
Laurel and I just celebrated our 7th anniversary. For those of you unfamiliar with the big list o’ traditional anniversary gifts by year, that’s the copper anniversary. She got some cool steampunk jewelry. No points for guessing what I got.
Now I don’t know about you guys, but I believe that adding a new d20 to the herd should be about more than plopping an icosahedron into a box. That’s your fictional life on the line. You’ve got to lay down the ground rules. You’ve got to let that uppity little platonic solid know who’s boss. And in my house, that means giving ’em a tour of “the hole.” And trust me, if you’re a d20, you don’t want to wind up there.
Case after plastic case of repeat offenders line the dark corridors of that purgatorial desk drawer. I let the new meat talk to the old-timers. Just for a night, you understand. Just to let them get acquainted. If they’re smart, they listen.
“What you in for, pops?”
“Blew the Warden’s kill shot. It was the last round of the final battle. The bard wound up getting the KO.”
“And you guys?”
“We thought it would be funny to roll double-1s with advantage. Warden can’t take a joke!”
“How ’bout you old man?”
“Death saving throws are a part of the game. It ain’t my fault. Ain’t my fault….”
Sure they come in talking a big game coming: I’m my own die. I roll what I want, when I want. But by time they roll out of the hole, chased by cries of, “I want to talk to my rules lawyer!” and “What edition is it?” they start singing another tune. I’m proud to report that my scared straight program has a 95% success rate. And I’d like to hear about another corrections program with that kind of recidivism rate.
How about you guys? Are you the warden of your own dice jail? Or maybe you go with the shaming technique? Whatever your strategy, let’s hear about the ways you discipline your errant dice down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
I just stopped using physical dice, and now exclusively use roll20’s dice roller. who knew that cold, unfeeling AI made perfect dice?
About half way through this one at the moment:
https://www.amazon.com/Shared-Fantasy-Playing-Social-Worlds/dp/0226249441
Just got to the section on luck and superstition. Dude talks about someone bringing a simulated d20 on a calculator (it was 1980). They rolled a few times, then decided they trusted their dice more.
I trade off my cursed die. No matter how cool, if a dice rolls more than three nat 1’s during official rolls (I.e. not when I’m just rolling due to get the ones out), they’re banished from my sessions and put up for adoption. I often trade with my brother but I also do exchanges with my local players, often exchanging cursed die to see if I can’t rehabilitate them.
What’s the rehabilitation process like?
Cheap dice are often not perfectly even in weight (though they are of course close). If you “pre-roll 1’s out,” you are selecting for dice that are more likely to be slightly weighted towards rolling 1’s.
I am the agent of dice evolution. Feels good, man.
oh I don’t know what you all have with uppity dice.
My first D20 mostly behaves, I even was suspected of having loaded it one session.
I have other D20s that I use on secondary rolls: Three iterative attacks is 3 different dice for example: Big Red, big white and little white.
That spreads the responsibility around a bit.
You only have three dice!?
https://giphy.com/gifs/adventure-time-lemongrab-unacceptable-QUaqJRizED5NC
of cause not, I have two D20 of the 28mm size and nine D20 with 16mm.
In my last DnD group we had a gelatinous cube miniature that doubled as dice jail. This was significantly more humane than previous iterations, which included putting them in your mouth or the time we hit a particularly cursed d20 (and a d6 as well) with a hammer.
All that remained of the d6 was a stain on the concrete, but the d20 sheared in two quite nicely.
I’m guessing we have the same gelatinous cube mini:
https://i.redd.it/pfet8u9kof2z.jpg
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/wAUAAOSwbb5d8w39/s-l400.jpg
This is the one we used.
Are the inevitable prison baby minion daggers just going to be shanks?
I guess that depends on the old nature vs. nurture debate.
I don’t have enough dice to put any in dice jail. I only have 2 sets and I’m not entirely sure where the first set is since we moved since I bought it. I also have a pair of d10’s in my desk and one dice ring that won’t stay on my finger that’s also in my desk.
Also, guess who has a new character for Laurel to sketch at MomoCon? 😀
I myself had only two sets of dice when a beloved character was slain by poor rolls. I didn’t have enough dice as to make the offender expendable, so it survived its traitorous rebellion. In response, I bought another three sets of dice. Now, all of my dice know that should they fail me in the extreme, they can and will suffer punishment.
Yes… Yes… More math rocks!
You got one of those dice rings too? Mine stopped spinning so good after a few days. 🙁
I haven’t used it all that much. As I said, it won’t stay on my finger.
I’ve just gotten a pair of dice trays, so when my friend’s dice started to roll bad, I lent one to him. The extra motivation started getting them to roll better, but not great, and the dice started to roll bad again whenever he forgot about the tray. None of us at my group really have a dice jail, so our solution to dice problems is to just stop using the offender, then forget about what happened and started using the die a few sessions later. This one set, though… it was my first dice set, but its luck seems to have run out. I was slow to realise the curse, as well, so I ended up foolishly using it to roll a 3 and a 1 on death saves, and for the combats that had put me into death saves. Its luck doesn’t seem to be getting better, either, even after so many sessions, so I’m not sure what to do with it. I could try giving the set away? Although I’m a DM right now, so I suppose the players would appreciate me “rolling away” the bad luck.
Hey, the worst thing in the world is a DM with hot dice. Keeping a set of “bad dice” for DM duties is a good option.
I feel like there’s some joke here about admonishing people for trying to force their dice into being crooked, playing on the duel meaning of crooked as in criminal and crooked as in the type of cheaters dice that doesn’t have an even chance of rolling each number but I can’t quite formulate it.
Personally the most I do is pick up a new die/handful of dice if the one(s) I have been rolling rolled poorly several time in a row.
Well that’s awfully sedate. You mean to say that you don’t even hurl the offending dice across the room in disgust?
I stand by my dice. They don’t always roll how I want them to, but I trust them to roll an interesting story.
Anyway, how are they supposed to learn to roll other numbers if you stop rolling them?
They aren’t. They’re supposed to serve as a warning to the rest of the dice. As soon as I can figure out how to mount a d20 on a pike, you’d better believe I’ll be decorating my castle walls.
for multiple offenders you can melt them flat and use them a holiday ornament.
I don’t punish my dice for performing poorly. I just try to set them up for success. Keep them lucky, well loved, etc. Mine rarely disappoint, so I’m pretty happy with them. If anything my dice are a little too bloodthirsty, which can be problematic since I’m the DM.
A good friend of mine cuddles her d20 to make sure it loves her. She made a special necklace with a wire cradle to hold the die, which she keeps down her shirt on a daily basis while she goes about her day. Not sure how well that works as far as influencing rolls goes, but I’d say it’s a pretty lucky d20 if you know what I mean.
Positive reinforcement? Well I suppose it’s a viable alternative, but you won’t catch me going in for that hippy dippy stuff!
Besides which, I doubt that a day spent lovingly nestled between my man-boobs will endear any inanimate objects to me.
I prefer the summary execution route.
Set the offender/s out on the porch,
Line up the rest nearby,
Stop, hammertime,
Give the survivors a long hard glare and “Anyone else feel like failing me for the last time?”
The problem lies in my manual dexterity. Just a hair off with the hammer and the little shits go squirting across the car port.
Colin, no offense, but treating inanimate objects like they were living things is not a good signal. I know what i am talking about once i argued with the oven for three hours about his way of cocking food :/
On other news. You and Laurel are married!!! Why you didn’t say anything? Congratulations, Mazel Tov or mabruk ealaa aleurs, depending of your inclinations 😀
Love makes you crazy I guess. 😛
Did we seriously never say anything about being a married couple? I guess I assumed that it would just come across, but yeah: we’re partners in adventuring, Handbook, and life. 🙂
Until today you were a writer and artist couple, now you are a writer and artist marriage. I checked the archive of the HboH, the first one is from 07/09/2015. If you got your 7th anniversary those days then you were already married back then, so no wedding news in the comics and the question of the day. I saw nothing in the Chorus either 🙁
Again congratulations and have much more anniversaries and good things in your life 🙂
Awww… Cheers, Schattensturm!
And while we’re on the subject of holidays, may all your days be merry and bright. 🙂
Thank you. Hope you are enjoying holidays to you, Laurel and you families, may their visits be short and nice 🙂
I find that kindness is the best medicine. When i was playing the bard that would become known as elliot the unlucky, my friends kept telling me to switch my dice, saying that they were clearly evil, or unbalanced in such a way to make them roll that bad, but i stuck with them, and in time they came to trust me, and do well by me in turn. Now i consider them my allies, and people claim they favor me too strongly, as they had never learned to grow such strong bonds of their own.
So you started out as a band of unlikely companions eyeing one another distrustfully, only to become a top-tier fighting force through trials and adversity? That sounds familiar somehow….
Thats how the adventure with my dice went. With eliiot the unlucky’s party, things just kinda continuously fell more and more apart. They started as a bunch of unlikely companions, and ended with multiple being fully ready to kill the others if they ever got in the way of their goals. Elliot ended up being the only guy who didn’t go evil, though the barbarian may have still been neutral, as he kinda always straddled that line, while the wizard went so far as to sell his soul to devils for power.
Happy Anniversary to you both!!!
As to the question: I love and respect my dice, and play to their personalities.
The green ones work best on wise older characters, the blue ones like smarty-pantses, the red and gold ones are pretty similar, both liking shining nobility, the pink ones are player-killers, etc.
Ah, my pink dice… I never use them when I play, because they roll terribly in the hands of players, but when I want an encounter to be tough-as-nuts wild when I DM, I break them out. They roll suuuuuper well in the hands of a DM.
Cheers! The dice even roll well. 😀
I suspect your of ork ancestry what with the color-coding.
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Colorz
Sadly no matter how hard you try, you cannot throw a forum dice roller in jail. 😉
As for my irl dice, rather than punishment I believe in encouragement. I’m not entirely sure my dice understand “Believe in me who believes in you” though. =P
Dude… Is there a Gurren Lagann RPG? There needs to be a Gurren Lagann RPG.
When the numbered polyhedra disobey their master, they go right into here https://i.imgur.com/9ORmnnE.jpg (I made it myself!). They remain there for the rest of the session and are given time to think about what they’ve done, at which point they can be placed back into the active bin to start afresh.
You know, it only now occurs to me that a Dice Jail is a product that Wyrmwood et al ought to actually sell. One look at that thing and I totally want one.
I’ve seen other companies that sell them; can’t remember which ones but they do exist on the market.
{Ahem}
https://wyrmwood-tabletop-tiles.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/174740
I prefer positive reinforcement for my dice. Strongly compliment the good ones and encourage the lesser die to do better. Eventually they get better and I can enjoy my translucent-orange die as much as the solid-blacks and translucent-greens.
And tips for dice pep talks?
I admire the attachment and relationship that so many commenters have with their dice. But personally, dice are just dice! Failure is part of the story, part of the risk, and nat 1s just help that along!
Heh. I have a Mutants and Masterminds character with your user name. Dude has a fly speed of “very slow.”
Any dang way, I think that superstition is one of those things that adds a level of immersion to the experience. I’m willing to bet that 99% of superstitious gamers will admit that, deep down, they don’t really believe their own hype. It’s fun to behave as if we do though! Some of the magic of the game-world seems to rub off on the dice, and just a little misplaced mysticism can help to bring you into the fantasy.
I don’t engage in such silly and superstitious nonsense as punishing my dice. After all, such things would offend the Dice Gods, who have the power to force 1s upon any die, no matter how loyal.
All hail the Dice Gods.
Welp, I now have plenty of dice for a dice jail. My mom bought me Dice Bonanza for Christmas. It’s a tube of different kinds of dice. 35 regular dice in different sizes and colors, 4 with letters, 6 with colors, three d4s, two d20s, two d10s, two d8s, two d12s, and five d6s that have card faces on them.
We may have a dice collecting comic coming up. Stay tuned.
Cool.
My d20s were all saltwater tested. The balanced ones saw use, the ones that fail did not. If they’re balanced, then their rolling badly is simply probability. I fail to see the need to shame them.
That said, as a DM I feel like I roll better than as a player. This may be simple sampling bias though. A DM makes many more rolls than a player. so my players may simply notice that when I’ve rolled 6 attacks with advantage that I got 2 crits. That’s pretty reasonable considering the math of advantage but it still feels like I’m rolling hot.
As a player I’ve had abysmal rolls, but that’s my fault as an unlucky person. Do not ascribe agency to the polyhedron.
I won’t delve into anything as shamelessly superstitious as “sampling bias.” You roll better as a GM because your subconscious desire to kill PCs activates you latent telekinetic abilities, causing you to roll better behind the screen. Obviously.
I actually avoid rolling behind the screen. If you’re fudging rolls/HP then the party isn’t playing a game, they’re riding along in your narrative until you arbitrarily say they win or lose. That said; between the books, 6 players, and my giant ass, table space is finite so sometimes I have to set up an impromptu “Screen” by standing the books up, and my dice fit behind it because that’s where there’s space.
Have you considered other reasons to roll behind a screen, aside from fudging rolls? For one it keeps the players guessing – does this monster keep hitting because of a massive attack bonus, or is the DM just rolling well? For another it can create mystery – did that noble’s sense motive beat my deception check or not? He hasn’t called me out but does he suspect I’m lying?
I don’t have that many problems with my dice, but then, I’m the DM and am less invested in the fate of “Firenewt warrior #3” than someone with their lovingly-crafted PC. Granted, some days I roll badly (any time I have ever run an encounter with bugbears, they have all had difficulty hitting the broad side of a 40×20-foot chamber), but that helps balance those times when I roll 3 20s over the course of a session (thankfully all were directed at the tankiest party member).
My players, on the other hand, will all start sessions using “their” dice but tend to switch if they start rolling badly. Nobody has permanently ditched a die yet, though.
In Ars Magica, you roll a d10, and it explodes on a 1, while a 10 is actually a 0 and a possible disaster.
In the Storyteller system, you roll a bunch of d10, 1s are bad while 10s are great.
So, knowing that dice are perverse objects, we like to try to make them think we’re playing Vampire when we’re really playing Ars Mag by rolling a bucket of d10, knowing only one of them really counts (each player has their own die color). (hammily) “This is a very important throw for my character, I better get a lot of 10s.” throw bucket, black die rolls 1 (whispering) “Yes, it worked, I fooled the dice!”
Yo… It would be tough for me to transition between those two systems. I’d wind up getting excited by my “excellent” rolls only to fall face first into crushing disappointment.
“Huzzah!”
“Dude. The low rolls are bad today.”
“Eff.”
I’ve rarely ever used physical dice, but even online, some players would change dice color if their rolls went badly for too long.
Weirdly, it seemed to work. I refused to do anything of the nature for Derrik Darkluster though, he was a follower of Tymora after all, and using such unsubstantiated means to try to control luck would have just been insult to the lady.
Then again, he also got a clockwork amulet which allowed him to take 10 on attack rolls… but the amulet actually works for real… and it was lucky that he found such an amulet! Right? Sure, that tracks…