Sep 22, 2008
Dice Politics
We all have them and I can guarantee during at least some point of a game the players will get distracted by them. Have you ever sat down and ‘player watched’ during play and seen just what they get up to with them?
photo credit: cal_harding
Every group will have a player that brings along five times the amount of dice needed for the gaming system and before play will systematically go through every die rolling each in turn several times and only using those that give good results that day.
Anyone that is lucky enough to roll the max on at least 5 dice in one go will be congratulated with a cry of Yahtzee from another player. No one will ever own up to shouting this however and despite best attempts to track them down they will always remain a mystery.
Two words. Dice Jenga!
The oldest member of the group will sit down with the youngest to pass on the secrets of spinning D4. They start with a D20 and gradually work down in die size until that small pyramid can spin for what seems like an age. Stories are even passed in a whisper amongst the other players that the seen the group elder spin the D4 that well it hovered in place over the gaming table.
Recreating Crossbows & Catapults over the gaming table. Walls built with D6’s, towers topped with D4’s and all the D20’s you can find to use as your ammunition.
A small group of players will insist the GM has a set of loaded/lucky/unlucky dice. Just watch them inhale sharply as you reach for them during a game. Have some fun with them by rolling group perception checks behind your screen with them and watch the paranoia set it.
Every so often The Crossbows and Catapults game will escalate into a full on dice war. It’s a this point that you can separate the men from the boys or rather the anally retentive diceaholics and those that think of them as just little bits of plastic that you an buy more of. Watch as one group dives to cover their dice from grabbing hands whilst the other tries to get as much ammo into a clenched fist as possible so that the fight can move off away from the table once the loose dice are used up.
You’ll always have the players that arrive with their colour co-ordinated dice set for each system or for that matter those players that have cannibalised their dice set from all the available board games in their parents house. Just watch though when one day someone brings along a limited edition sparkly set in its own presentation box. Make sure the mops handy to wipe up the drool. Then watch the mayhem when someone pulls out the D6 they recieved in a magic set as a child and attempts to use it in game.
Every group has it’s own quirks. What have you seen your players get up to during a session?
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Spin a d20 (or whatever) on the character sheet, lift the character sheet off the table, and tilt it back and forth making the d20 trace little patterns.
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Because we spend so much time playing Mutants and Masterminds, there are always a lot of poker chips (Hero Points) around the table… I carefully stack my dice between the chips (d6, poker chip, d12, poker chip, and so on).
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I’ve seen a few of them just rolling d20s over and over and over…and over again. Not discarding any of the ones that “roll poorly”.. just rolling and getting upset at bad results. As if you can practice rolling to hone your wrist motions to such a point that you can roll that natural 20 every time. Oye!
Dice superstitions are a silly thing. However, it’s perfectly valid to own thirty or more dice.
My personal bad habit is taking my D10s, D20s and D12s and holding one under each finger in a fist and then squeezing them so they creak.
I’m also wierd about which dice I use – the clear ones are mine and only mine, the others anyone can use.
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Pascal’s Triangle with my mini d10s, at the weekly Exalted session. There was a while in which I even had the right numbers to be able to do it with one color on the edge, one for the rest of it.
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Oh how I hate mini dice (No Offense Ravyn). I hate not being able to see another’s success or failure from across the table. I never know whether to be happy or not. I need those dice to tell me what to feel.
I hate mini dice as well. I’ve no idea why but they scare me so I offset that by hating them.
And Hammer…just as well I didn’t try and join your group when you were looking to get one going. If you do that mid game you’d be scraping me off the ceiling :p
My own quirk was stuffing as many dice as I could into the end of my dice bag and turning them into a kosh. Folk would get a bit nervous when I started swinging it around the game table demonstrating my characters combat moves…
I would make a teetering tower of dice made up of at least one of every size die. lowest was the d6, then getting the less stable die as I go up until the mini die and d4 were on top. I would do this so intently that I never noticed when someone was about to purposefully knock the table. Everyone would laugh and I would laugh too, but secretly I was quite pissed off.
I know a woman who will lay out her mass of d6s, turn them so the 6 is on top, then sort them by color and line them up in single file. She doesn’t even need more than 2 for D&D, but I think she feels they surround her with high-roll energy.
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It was tradition to roll random numbers of random sided dice and act out a pretend, pseudo-game of Vampire before we started the D&D session for the night. This was nostalgia for the most awful gaming experience our group experienced at the hands of a bad Vampire storyteller. His game included rolls for no reason, DMPCs dual wielding sniper rifles, loose rules and looser gameplay. We never returned to his abode.