Arcanist Lupus

The idea of colour-coded dragons basically began as a convenience thing. Fantasy minifigs were very hard to come by when D&D was first starting out – remember, tabletop RPGs did not branch off from fantasy wargames as is sometimes claimed; they developed in parallel with them, both having budded off from traditional historical re-creation wargames at roughly the same time – so groups often resorted to buying bags of cheap plastic dinosaurs from dime stores and just re-painting them. Customising a plastic figurine is hard; slapping a coat of red paint on a spinosaurus and saying "that's a Red Dragon" is easy.

(Amusingly, this is also where we got several other iconic D&D monsters. Dime stores were not always conscientious about the origins of their toys, and bootlegs of licensed characters frequently ended up in the mix. The owlbear, the bulette, and the rust monster are all the product of D&D's creators coming up with stats for some shitty recasts of several Ultraman kaiju they found mixed in with their dinosaurs!)

As for the further subdivision into chromatics versus metallics, it seems to have been a symmetry thing. Metallic dragons per se are not present in OD&D; it has the five familiar chromatics in their minifig-primer hues, plus a singular lawful-aligned gold dragon, which Gary Gygax claimed in a 2003 interview had been modelled after "Oriental dragons" (his words) in order to suggest that it was a separate kind of critter and not necessarily related to its Western-inspired chromatic counterparts. It's likely that it's gold simply because long are often described by historical sources as having golden-hued scales.

In terms of Big Stupid Tables I've personally contributed to, the most ambitious to date would probably be the Core Costume Deck from Costume Fairy Adventures. 108 entries isn't huge by itself, but it's notable for the fact that all of those entries are fully illustrated, which is something I probably wouldn't do a second time, save perhaps as the product of a very meaty stretch goal; even with most of its artists offering very favourable rates, Costume Fairy Adventures ended up turning a modest loss due to the sheer volume of art it required.

In terms of the most ambitious I've seen, probably one of the miscellaneous wild surge tables that were floating around back in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition's netbook era (i.e., back before PDFs or file-sharing services were a thing, and fan-created supplements were circulated in TXT format via Usenet posts and anonymous FTP servers). Many of them were the product of dozens or hundreds of collaborators and routinely exceeded ten thousand entries in length – for a time, a D&D netbook was hardly considered complete without a d10000 table to call its own.

The ways in which a lot of entries were bad are also interesting. There were some gems, of course, but also:

Repetitive entries

Non-gameable or inconsequential results

Overly-impactful results.

Do we really need a dozen different substances that could replace your bones, all of which are fatal? Do we care whether Dire Wolf #137 will have a weird dream tonight given the players will never know? Do we want bumbling apprentice wizards to rearrange whole countries in ways powerful ancients could never do on purpose?

Even the fetish material usually failed on one of those counts, like repeating minor variations or creating situations with no clear mechanical effect - doomed to be forgotten unless they are unduly dwelled upon.

A frequent remark in Eat God's latest round of playtesting has been that the aggressively random nature of playsets can put the GM on the spot to figure out what's happening at a randomly drawn location when the God-eaters arrive or how two randomly drawn NPCs relate to one another. Our solution, of course, is more Big Stupid Tables.

The table on the left, Location Events, is intended to be used in a roll-twice-and-combine fashion to keep players on their toes; each entry is designed to be broadly compatible with being paired with every other entry, though some pairings may take a bit of thinking to reconcile. The tablet on the right, NPC Connections, is aimed more at one-and-done rolls, both because there may be several pairs of NPCs who need fleshing out and because many of the most fun possibilities tend to be mutually exclusive of one another. In both cases, the final rules text will encourage player participation to help the GM brainstorm what the results mean if there's any doubt.

(As you've no double noticed, we still have about 20/72 slots left to fill if there's anything you'd especially love to see that 's not already on there!)

Plaintext under the cut, as it wouldn't fit in the image's ALT text:

Everybody urgently wishes to leave the location

Fortunately, death saving throws are a lot simpler than the general case of "X of outcome 1 before Y of outcome 2" because (probability of outcome 1 + probability of outcome 2) equals 1; the presence of a "neither" case can throw a monkey into the wrench.

Since there's no "neither" outcome, the number of rolls you can possibly make is bounded; "three successes before three failures", for example, will never exceed five rolls, because after the fifth roll you're guaranteed to have at least three of one outcome or the other. That makes it possible to enumerate every possible sequence of outcomes:

SSS SSFS SFSS FSSS SSFFS SFSFS FSSFS SFFSS FSFSS FFSSS FFSSF FSFSF SFFSF FSSFF SFSFF SSFFF FFSF FSFF SFFF FFF

Let's assume that our S (success) result is rolling a 4 on 1d4, and our F (failure) result is rolling anything else. We can then work out the odds of each case, like so:

SSS = 1/64 = 16/1024 SSFS = 3/256 = 12/1024 SFSS = 3/256 = 12/1024 FSSS = 3/256 = 12/1024 SSFFS = 9/1024 SFSFS = 9/1024 FSSFS = 9/1024 SFFSS = 9/1024 FSFSS = 9/1024 FFSSS = 9/1024 FFSSF = 27/1024 FSFSF = 27/1024 SFFSF = 27/1024 FSSFF = 27/1024 SFSFF = 27/1024 SSFFF = 27/1024 FFSF = 27/256 = 108/1024 FSFF = 27/256 = 108/1024 SFFF = 27/256 = 108/1024 FFF = 27/64 = 432/1024

Adding up our target outcomes, we get 106/1024 odds of three successes before three failures, and 918/1024 odds of three failures before three successes. (If these don't add up to 1, you know you missed a case somewhere.)

Once we've got the symmetrical case (i.e., X successes before X failures), we can deal with asymmetrical cases simply by changing up which rows in the probability tree we've already constructed count as which outcome – we needn't start from scratch. For example, the odds of two successes before three failures moves all the 27/1024 rows in the above table into the "overall success" bucket, and we arrive at 268/1024 odds. Similarly, "three successes before two failures" would flip the 9/1024 rows over to the "overall failure" bucket.

P(k failures before r successes) is given by

where p is the probability of success on a single roll, and the first factor is the binomial coefficient.

(Wikipedia says the negative binomial distribution is the same as the Pascal distribution, but when I took stats a thousand years ago, the Pascal distribution was the special case where r=1.)

Assuming we're talking about two identical dice (i.e., so no goofy tricks like comparing the values of two different-coloured dice, d88 lookup tables, etc.), if I needed that exact distribution, my inclination would be not to overthink it; take the sum of the dice, with result A (1/64) on 2, result B (31/64) on 3–8, result C (31/64) on 10-15, and result D (1/64) on 16. On a sum of exactly 9, use some sort of 50/50 tie-breaker (e.g., a coin flip) to decide between B and C.

Assuming we're talking about two identical dice (i.e., so no goofy tricks like comparing the values of two different-coloured dice, d88 lookup tables, etc.), if I needed that exact distribution, my inclination would be not to overthink it; take the sum of the dice, with result A (1/64) on 2, result B (31/64) on 3–8, result C (31/64) on 10-15, and result D (1/64) on 16. On a sum of exactly 9, use some sort of 50/50 tie-breaker (e.g., a coin flip) to decide between B and C.

Boo fucking hoo

say it’s because it makes the

other kids feel bad

As a trans woman, I really, really, don't appreciate people acting like they know what it was like for me growing up. Like yeah, I realize that your childhood was like that and I'm sorry that you were treated that way. But don't act like that's how it is for everyone.

I was very much seen as one of the guys growing up. I went to "boys nights" with the guys, which typically consisted of very masculine activities, I had gay cis dudes hit on me, I never once was seen as anything other than a dude.

Guys never once mistreated me, or saw me as anything other than a man. Even through University, I was seen as a man to the point where my University friends were shocked when I came out to them as a trans woman.

I was even treated as "one of the safe ones" all through high school by the girls I hung out with. I had an all female friend group that I hung out with and gossiped with, and was allowed to hang out with them in and out of school, because friendship with me never came with the possibility that I was gonna make things weird and try to fuck them. I showed no interest in dating them and treated them like any other person.

They literally called me a "Girl's guy".

And then there's my husband, who hated being a girl, hated femininity, was bullied by girls growing up, never had any friends aside from a few guys in high school, and was never accepted as a girl by girls.

There is not one true way to be Trans any more than there is one true way to be a man, a woman, or non-binary.

"NO, Imi. You aren't a girl."

Sweetheart, back then I thought i was.

"NO"

Which is to say, gender can't be flattened without losing something. It's a social construct. It's a set of traits linked to secondary sex characteristics. It's a spectrum. It's a Potato Head of expression and performance and identity. It's all of those things and none of them and I'm going to shake it shake it shake it shake it until all the weird stereotypes fall out and then I'm going to EAT IT with GLITTER and KETCHUP.