Call me, beep me, if you want to reach me

Here's a table of the number of table entries required to reach a given probability of no repeats after a certain number of rolls. E.g. if you're going to be rolling on a table five times, a table with 17 entries will give slightly better than even odds (52.3%) of not yielding a repeated entry, while a table with 16 entries will not (47.0%). Rolling a half-dozen times on a table with 100 entries will give slightly better than an 85% chance of no repeats. Rolling twice more, and the probability drops to 75%.

The "20 entries per extra roll" rule of thumb undersells the size of table needed past half a dozen rolls or so: for a dozen rolls, you'd need a table with over 400 entries for the same 85% probability of avoiding a repeat. (The number of entries needed seems to grow superquadratically, but empirically the exponent is something like 2.0025: e.g. for an 85% chance, the number of entries approaches 3.024 * rolls²·⁰⁰²⁵ as rolls increases > 150.)

😞

They all started giggling, I was trying not to smile, I threatened to make one of them explain why it was funny, they were all really excited to explain why it was funny.

Too busy  

Lost interest  

Increasing age gap between characters and author made it difficult to relate  

Did the math and figured out that completing the planned arc with their current update schedule would take 150 years  

Ostensible author actually a fictional persona that’s now being retired, and they didn’t want the comic linked to their real identity  

Realised that the way they’d written the central relationship wasn’t emotionally genuine (note: this was a hobbit porn comic)  

The comic’s readership contained too many lesbians  

Converted to a religion that regards all representational art as a form of idolatry  

Broke up with the person the protagonist was based on  

Outed as not actually Japanese  

Imprisoned for manslaughter  

…i’m sorry manslaughter?

A table with 250 entries is trivial, but that off-centre average is going to give you grief; any sum of fair, evenly distributed dice is going to want to peak around the centre of its range, or around 125 in this case. In order to push the peak off centre using only dice, you need loaded dice – that is, dice where some results are more likely than others.

For example, rolling 36d10, but reading the tens as zeroes and any other result higher than 7 as 7 (i.e., effectively a die with faces reading 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7) gives you a range of 0–252, with a distribution that peaks around 151, close to what you're looking for.

couldn't you also just use something that averages 150 and artificially cap the ends? it would make 250 disproportionately likely but that doesn't seem that damaging for the intended purpose. full trains do happen for exactly that reason, demand is more or less a normal distribution AIUI

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

For this game you'll need:

A pen.

Some scrap paper.

A timer.

The strongest will and opinions.

A small container.

You begin with an odd number of players. Choose which player is The Judge and write various silly arguments such as "is coleslaw a salad", "are there more doors or wheels", or "king of the hill is American anime" into a container. The Judge pulls an argument and decides teams to argue each side.

Each team sets a timer lasting 10 minutes. The timer is paused unless the team is talking, once the timer runs out the team cannot argue or give rebuttal to anything the opposition says.

The Judge can decide to add a stipulation or flip the script. A stipulation would be something such as "coleslaw is only a salad with burgers", and flipping the script would be forcing each team to argue the other side instead for the remaining time.

The judge decides who wins after both timers have run out. A player from the winning team is selected as the next judge.

The prize of winning is that each player must abide by the argument that has won. Coleslaw is now a salad for all time.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

200 words exactly

Note from me: I am uploading this on behalf of my cousin who doesn't use tumblr. I sent them my entry to proofread, and they made this in an hour, which rules. They have consented to it being included in the archive. Below is a message from them. My central idea of this game came from sitting awake at 2am, being given the idea of this game jam and finding myself remembering arguing with the one posting this to tumblr about various silly and stupid arguments for hours at a time, some even still being brought up today. These arguments have gotten out of hand and I feel it's my duty to get wide public opinion and outrage at people who argue with as much stubbornness as them.

I don't have tumblr but you should message my cousin (the one posting) every dumb argument you have so they can lord them over me like the malicious little gremlin they are.

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

ACQUIRE: Three players total Hex Paper Squared Paper Pencils A ttrpg appropriate for dungeon delving

You are a dungeon core. Your mind is a gemstone, and your body a dungeon. Absorb the world around you to grow, and destroy all who enter.

One player is THE LAND One player is THE MORTALS One player is THE PARTY

THE LAND dictates all of nature’s bounty. They describe the environment into which the dungeon is born.

THE MORTALS are in charge of describing culture and civilisation - how and where it’s grown.

THE PARTY are the enemies the dungeon will fight as it grows.

The game is played in three phases:

DIVINING: THE LAND and THE WORLD decide what’s close to the dungeon, above and below. First one hex, then expand outwards each time.

GROWING: collaborate to describe your growth, drawing on square paper. Invent traps, use monsters from your ttrpg.

ADVENTURING: THE PARTY presents characters of appropriate level to plunder you. Play the adventurers and dungeon together. If the dungeon wins, it feeds on the dead to grow - switch roles, repeat the cycle. If the adventurers win, take the core, this game ends, play your ttrpg with this magic item. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 200 words exactly

Post Script:

First of all: I consent to this being archived.

I've been writing a much longer version of this game, with actual systems and mechanics, so that you don't have to grab a ttrpg appropriate to dungeon building to apply rules to the system. I've been struggling with a lot of it, and thought I'd try condensing it all the way in the opposite direction to see if that helped!

I've kind of become obsessed with the sub-sub-sub-genre of fantasy that is the Dungeon Core story, even though it's very hard to find the good ones (I'd personally recommend Blue Core, but they're all an accquired taste imo), and I really want to play a ttrpg as one, either as a solo game or as a group - since one doesn't exist, I'm stuck trying to make it.

Dragons on the wing are vulnerable to being mobbed by smaller, more agile flyers, particularly in your large rear blind spot, like a bird of prey being mobbed by crows. Having a human armed with a long spear perched on your back helps to dissuade anyone from getting any funny ideas.

Breath weapons are impressive enough on the ground, but in flight they're really only good for strafing stationary targets; trying to use your breath weapon in an aerial dogfight is a good way to get fire up your nose. A real fight calls for sterner measures – and, concomitantly, a crew to aim and reload the cannons.

In today's competitive world, it's not enough to devour a flock of sheep and call it a day if you want to keep your edge. You're accompanied at all times by a qualified personal alchemist tasked with carefully regulating your internal furnace to ensure peak performance, and sometimes you even listen to them.

Your tragic backstory might not be particularly large, but it's a very awkward shape, and this blessed battle-axe deals so much damage. If you forget about the man who killed your family, you could equip the battle-axe and maybe fit in the emotional availability trait.

A few things that cards can do that dice can't:

You know that dice superstition that people have about how if they roll enough low numbers they're bound to get a high one? That sort of actually works with cards provided cards aren't immediately returned to the deck and the deck reshuffled. Because there's a limited number of each "roll," good or bad.

You can hold them in your hand. It's basically like pre-rolling a bunch of numbers and then getting to spend those numbers as they become relevant. Maybe you only get to draw more cards by playing all your cards, meaning that if you don't conserve your good cards your character's luck is eventually bound to run out.

You can make poker hands with them. Added to the previous point, maybe you will be forced to play a worse hand and have your character flub a non-critical roll because you're hoping for that better hand that'll turn the tide.

Playing cards can be used to implement large random lookup tables where duplicate results need to be avoided without resorting to forced rerolls. (Tip: remove the aces, jokers and court cards from a standard poker deck, leaving only the 2–10s of each suit, and you've got a set of cards which can be used to double-index a full d66 table to allow it to work with either cards or dice. Also, you just set aside 18 cards, so you can use those to double-index a separate half-d66 table if you need both.)

Even when you're using playing cards as ersatz dice (i.e., just drawing the top card from the deck and treating that as your roll), the drawn card automatically furnishes a persistent token representing the result of that "roll"; this token can then be fed into a resource economy, retained as an historical record of the outcome, or both. (For example, Rose Bailey's Beautiful Anomalies, in which "rolled" cards are played face-up on the table into a linear queue from which the GM draws, allowing players' actions in the present to control the GM's dice rolls in the future.)

In physical play spaces, the fact that cards have face-up and face-down states allows randomised outcomes to be made known to some but not all players much more easily than with dice. The face of a drawn card can be selectively shown only to certain participants, while a played card can be placed on the table face-down to offer assurances that the unrevealed outcome hasn't been tampered with. (This can be done with the outcomes of dice rolls via note-passing, of course, but using cards in this way removes the need to trust that the note accurately reports the unrevealed roll, which can facilitate some types of adversarial play.)

Building on the previous point, cards have extra axes of statefulness. A die typically offers only the rolled number and its position on the table as stateful information, but a card can be face-up or face-down, placed in an upright or rotated position, etc. In face-to-face play, cards are also much easier to move from zone to zone on the table when position-as-state is required, making them better suited to applications where randomisers double as resource tokens or playing pieces.

Deckbuilding. It's a lot more feasible to give each player a personalised mini-deck of cards to draw from than it is to give each player a set of dice with customised faces; if you're determined to bring deckbuilding mechanics to the tabletop, basing it on actual playing cards is going to be a much easier sell for potential players than asking them to screw around with papercraft tokens or blank dice and markers. (Or, heaven forefend, asking them to actually buy custom dice which can only be used with your game!)

In a recent post, I'd mentioned a method of double-indexing d66 lookup tables to allow "rolls" to be made with either dice or playing cards. This can be useful in situations where you sometimes want to ask players to make large numbers of selections without forcing them to fuck around with rerolling duplicates, but also want to keep things accessible to folks who can't really do cards because they're playing in a chatroom app that only has a basic dice roller. I've been asked to elaborate on that a little, and I figured I'd just post an example – this one is taken from the forthcoming 0.4 update for Eat God.

The basic idea is to take an American-style poker deck (i.e., a French-suited 54-card deck with exactly two jokers, typically distinguishable from one another because one joker has a trademark notice or publisher's guarantee on it and the other doesn't – these steps may require adjustment if you're using a style of deck with a different number of jokers), and divide them as follows:

One pile of 36 cards, consisting of the 2–10 pips of each suit

One pile of 18 cards, consisting of the jokers, aces and court cards

The former, 36-card pile can be used to double-index any d66 table: a full 36-entry d66 table can be indexed with individual cards (as shown); an 18-entry d66 table can be indexed by rank and colour (i.e., you only care about whether the card is red or black, not about its exact suit), and a 9-entry d66 table can be indexed by rank alone. A 12-entry d66 table is admittedly a little more awkward – there's no obvious way to double-index one of those with cards without resorting to funky notation, but several workable approaches exist.

I'm fascinated by the Knights in Tight Spaces demo for what can potentially be taken away from it for the tabletop – less in terms of the deckbuilding stuff, and more in terms of its asymmetric action economy.

Basically, the structure of each round of combat is as follows:

Each NPC moves – typically either one or two squares in cardinal directions, though some NPCs move in other ways – and chooses a facing.

Player characters do their thing, spending action points from fixed pools to perform a variety of tactical manoeuvres and attacks.

Finally, each NPC performs a deterministic action based on their final position and facing; in the simplest case, this is "deal your damage to whatever is in the adjacent square you're facing".

In a hypothetical tabletop context, this creates a environment where the players and the GM are functionally playing different games. The players have this whole complex action economy with multiple semi-independent resource pools to engage with, but the GM has no resources to track beyond making sure each NPC gets to move, and the only choices they make are where to position their playing-pieces.