Too Many Dice
It’s bad manners to announce somebody else’s d20 roll before they do. I know this. It’s bad manners to add up another player’s damage for them. I know this. It’s just that sometimes it’s really, really hard not to.
We talked back in “Dithering” about long combats and complicated turns. However, I feel like the question of massive crits and big ol’ buckets of dice is its own kettle of numerical fish. If we’re talking D&D then you’ve got to do the song and dance of crit multiplication. This generally involves borrowing an extra couple of d6s from Bob, then you’ve got to remember to go back and confirm the crit, and then you’ve got to remember that’s not a thing in this edition, and whether poison damage applies now or on the creature’s next turn, and what kind of damage a bite does, and whether resistance means you round up or down after halving the damage. All that done, you’ve got to do like the BBEG in today’s comic and make with the addition.
Easily the best trick I’ve learned in that regard is to “make 10s.” This is especially helpful when you’re throwing 20d6 disintegrate spells around the battlefield. You just group together the dice that add up to 10—psychically rearranging them on the tabletop—and then add up the groups. Easy peasy.
Of course, the problem gets worse in Shadowrun or Exalted or any other dice pool game. There it’s not so much that you’re doing math, but that you’re using your shirt to dump 50 odd dice onto the table. After you’ve grabbed the strays off the floor you’ve still got to count successes. And if your dice collection is anything like mine, picking out the 6s and 9s and otherwise hard-to-read numbers is an exercise in time wasting (not to mention the fact that it’s easy to ogre-finger the dice and change their results). I’m rather proud of my solution to this one. I bought a healthy collection of these blank d10s, then colored in the sides. Black Sharpie for the 1, silver for 7-8-9, and gold for the 10. Just as I hoped, picking out colors is one whole hell of a lot quicker than hunting for numbers. Unfortunately, I neglected to seal my dice. The black Sharpie ran everywhere. It now looks like I dipped my custom dice in a fireplace.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever struggled with the practical problem of dice reading? Do you have any tips or tricks for speeding up the post-roll process? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Wow I love that color coding success/failure solution.
My solution was… not care that the players better at math did mine for me in the games with tons of dice rolls. In fact sometimes I would ask them. Well more like give them a look that expresses permission.
Otherwise, yeah the grouping things to add up 10s is the way I handled large pools of dice.
Interestingly “how dead” can in fact be important sometimes. Despite the fact that I hate it, 5e for example has an instant death rule that is that you’re dead if you drop to negative your max hp. The difference between that and just lying on the ground making death saves is pretty different.
And hey, when the situation is flipped, the party would gladly sit around to see just how badly Fighter killed Death. Though I guess that would suddenly make it a Call of Cthulhu game. =P
I used to think that moving things along at a fast clip was top priority. If the monster had 1 hp left I would wave away the damage roll and just ask the player to describe their kill. I changed that policy recently when one of them came up to me after the session.
“Hey, thanks for giving me a second to calculate damage. That was EXTREMELY satisfying, and that dragon was EXTREMELY dead.”
You can use all the fancy descriptions you want, but sometimes a big number is more eloquent.
More than once, when someone in my party has scored a crit on a nearly defeated (or otherwise low-HP) enemy, someone has moved to hurry it up and the GM has replied to the effect of “let the man roll his damage.” Especially against a boss or final enemy and ESPECIALLY if they’ve been giving you a hard time, calculating the true level of deadness can be quite satisfying.
Cathartic is the word I believe.
Being able to describe *how* you killed a thing is always nice too though. The preferable situation is the GM allowing you to calculate the damage and then describe what that means.
D&D Quick Dice for Android. Rolling 20d6 is 3 taps.
That is an excellent idea. It efficiently solves the problem. I hate it. How can anyone appreciate my collection of exotic dice if I’m using a digital roller? 😛
Only use them for the most dramatic and critical of rolls, thus making their rare appearances even more special. 🙂
Perhaps I could use some sort of randomizer–a spinner or a maybe a bingo cage–to decide when to bring out my dice.
Down this path lies diceception.
I prefer doing this as a DM than as a player. It makes it harder for them to hear how many or even when I’m rolling and greatly speeds up the process. As a player though, there’s just something about rolling physical dice that is sooo satisfying, and something I would not want to deprive my own players of unless necessary (e.g. an online game).
exactly the argument with real books v. ebooks…
I’ll usually default to an SRD for at-the-table rules lookups, but there’s no replacement for a book in hand if you’re just learning a game.
It works out lovely for one group because the area we have to play in is a bunch of couches around a small coffee table. It’s either we all lean way over and crowd around the coffee table, or lounge back comfortably on the couches with a dice rolling app. It’s easy to play for several hours when you’re not getting a sore back in the process.
It also benefits this group because everyone has acquired some sort of familiar or animal companion or the like at this point, which makes for a lot of rolling in combat. In order for it to flow smoothly, we have to seek any efficiencies we can. Spellbook and bestiary apps are also a godsend for this.
I have the RPG Roller app by Moondog on my phone. It has lots of neat features including a graphical representation of dice rolls if you want to run say, a thousand trials to see the average.
Sadly I never have a reason to use it.
In my experience, gamers come in two types: those who own a single set of gaming-dice and need to borrow from other people any time they need to rolls more than 2d6, and those who keep their dice in a bucket/tackle-box/sack, etc.
Owning a lot of dice is neat, and rolling a handful of dice across the table can feel very satisfying, but in terms of ease of use, for anything requiring more than 3 dice I tend to prefer dice-rolling programs. You can even get them on your phone these days.
I know for some groups “electronic distraction” can be an issue though. It was never a problem for me- I brought my laptop to several groups because I liked to use it to take notes about our adventure, and because I was an ardent roleplayer I was usually pretty focused on what was happening in the game.
Some GMs might not be as tolerant at your staring at a screen though. If having to gather up dice is a real issue, maybe look into investing in a dice-rolling tower or something like that.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bTwTn3FqJ4Y/TgaX5HWL4zI/AAAAAAAAAhc/-2g_Hy1qqQs/s1600/16244387.jpg
My GM screen.
This is especially important for PFS, when you’re often running on specific time blocks. Personally, I love the ‘make 10s’ rule and I live by that when I throw out bundles of d6’s on my Kineticist. I also have a Vigilante who makes a ton of attacks and takes a while to calculate, thanks to the Enforcer feat and each attack dealing 1d3 × 15 or so. Having to cut every d6 in half takes up a lot of my procrssing power when I’m also adding the flurry of bonuses from things like flanks and buffs, nevermind the penalties of TWF, Power Attack, and itiratives.
Multiple attacks can really compound the issue, which is one reason I’m much happier with natural attackers. Every attack has the same bonuses, usually similar die sizes, and I’m also a fan of the aesthetics.
I’ve taken to writing down my bonuses on the battlemat in front of me. That way I can just add new pluses or wet-erase minuses as they come up. Physically writing down my attack routine also creates a useful sense memory, helping to ensure that I know where all my numbers are coming from.
It’s kind of funny when the default character sheet gives me 4 boxes to enter attacks and it’s still not enough for the potential variant full attacks just from feats and self buffs alone.
I wonder if there’s a fanmade supplement that’s JUST attack boxes. I imagine it would be popular among some of the golf-baggers.
Back when Laurel played a mythic fighter in Pathfinder, the back of her character sheet look like an artisanal Excel file: all hand-drawn boxes and columns and rows with conditional modifiers. When you get to that level, I think that your only real option is Hero Lab.
Bluhhhh. I’m not the biggest fan of Hero Lab, but I love what it does. It has just a few too many mix-ups with the rules for my taste, and I’m really not excited about having to buy licenses for my entire library of books all over again. But I understand why people use it.
Wow, Fighter’s not doing so well lately huh? This is two in a row where he was getting destroyed by a boss monster – dead is a good look on him though, isn’t it?
Err, not in a row. I was archive crawling again and just remembered out of order. Still, he seems to be dying quite a bit lately!
You make a good point though. It’s satisfying watching Eric Cartman get his comeuppance, but only because he so richly deserves it. I’ll have to write a few more “Fighter is a jerk” scripts to balance out the “Fighter gets deaded” scripts.
Playing online only, macros on Roll20 are my bread and butter. I love automation to a fault, so setting up exploding dice or a crit auto-roller is my ideal. The best part is, even though it does all the math for you, you still get that big block of numbers showing on an explosion 🙂
I need to learn me some roll 20. I’ve only had a few sessions with it, so I never got out of the growing pains part of learning the software.
https://wiki.roll20.net/Macros
This helped me a lot.
Oh dear…
http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/12/1227c32e4c9eccafd355175bcf6174adbb35b9e9120c627d0251b44532e50bf2.jpg
I couldn’t program a pocket calculator, let alone use macros, but I run campaigns on Roll20 just fine! The software has its flaws, but it’s pretty user friendly, and it encourages me to make elaborate dungeon maps and scare the pants off my players with terrifying images. 🙂
I originally took to it after bad experiences with face-to-face gaming in a new city, but now it’s really won me over. Not having to physically host a posse of grubby people with junk food addictions around my kitchen table has also turned out to be a plus, and I find a lot of people rp much better from the comfort of their own homes.
Just use a simulated dice roller program or a PRNG. It’ll add up everything for you right away plus you can use impossible dice sizes like d5’s and d23’s
Can I get a simulated dice roller program in mammoth ivory? How about brass? Does it have a “dent my wooden table” function? Will my cat knock it off the table? THESE ARE CRITICAL QUESTIONS.
I suppose if it was a phone app the cat could knock it off the table
Thanks to Irlana’s crit on a 15 and get extra attacks upon attacks, the GM began asking me to add it up myself. Then even that got to be too much for him and he began just offing the monsters if I confirmed just two crits during the round and the monster was under 100 HP at the start of it. Though to be fair, even without crits giving extra attacks, one full attack between Irlana and Mick was 5 attacks.
I use the same “make 10s” idea. I sometimes start with “make 5s” then pair them together. For the standard “add the values” systems like D&D and PF. World Of Darkness I haven’t played much, but I do have a set of d10s that have a different color for 8-9-0, so that is easier to spot. Beyond that? I actually multiply crits, rather than rolling extra dice. Using my hat to roll 100d6 was fun once, but adding that up was a chore!
Swearing at Roll20 and calling her a cheating scoundrel notwithstanding, it has been nice to run a digital dicepool lately.
Oh, good! I’m not the only one that thinks Roll20 is a temperamental and fickle devil that enjoys seeing games stall and groups frustrated. … It is nice to know I don’t have to borrow literally everyone’s dice to roll massive numbers of them, though