Discussions of GURPS often mention that the game has only "three types of dice rolls": success rolls (made on 3d; roll low to succeed), reaction rolls (made on 3d; roll high to get a good reaction), and damage rolls (roll as many dice as indicated; a higher total is more damage).
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Gaming Tips: Taking your chances on 3d6
“A 12 or less? That’s good… right?” If you come from one of those popular games that uses a twenty-sided die to whack monsters and roll other checks, and you step up to one of several games that uses three six-sided dice instead… you might feel a little lost. We deal with percentage-based probabilities every day: “30% chance of rain” and all that. So given the obvious fact that each number on that twenty-sided die has a 5% chance of occurring, it’s easy to mentally convert “Roll 19 or higher to succeed” into “10% chance of success”, or to understand “You shrug off the poison on a 12 or higher”…
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Gaming dice as art
I earlier called attention to a premium “wish I had one” product, the ultimate gamer’s table. It should surprise no one that I haven’t yet plunked down my $8K for this handcrafted piece of furniture. But I’m rather tempted by a premium gaming product that’s a bit more affordable: custom hand-made dice. I’d say these are more than handmade dice, really. This is art, with gaming dice as its medium. The creator/artist, Abraham Neddermann, was kind enough to answer some questions about his work. Please read on! (I have no connection to the site or product; I simply thought the dice and process were fascinating.) Apparently, one does not set…
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Dice pools vs dice plus mods
Following up on my post about The Riddle of Steel RPG, here’s a broad question for readers at large, touching on many games: What, exactly, is the appeal of the “dice pool” method of generating outcomes? I know it has a two-dimensional aspect to it, in that you can modify checks in two ways: you can both modify the “target number” that determines whether a die counts as a success, and you can modify the number of dice rolled. That sounds like it offers something richer than the classic one-dimensional, dice-roll-plus-summed-modifiers method, and I don’t yet see anything wrong with the dice pool method. But I’m curious: Do dice-pool systems establish a clear, easily-followed…
