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View Full Version : Random number generation, what could I buy?



Shinizak
2019-09-30, 02:01 PM
The only reason that we use dice is because they're good at generating random numbers. There's nothing stopping us from using something else like a deck of cards, a magic 8 ball, roulette wheel, a dart board, or a fliping bop-it if you wanted.

What other things could you use to generate random numbers?

JMS
2019-09-30, 02:37 PM
a dart board, or a fliping bop-it if you wanted.

What other things could you use to generate random numbers?

So, with those two, you may have issues with skill throwing of the generator. Another one might be Dewy-decimals off a book, or publication date? Just be aware that they could be skew given preferences in books.

Slipperychicken
2019-09-30, 03:08 PM
Phone apps are popular for RNG among those dang kids. Turn off the screen timeout, press a button on the phone, numbers come out

Spin-wheels are used in some board-games

If you have a masochistic streak, you can replace any dice with the right coin-flipping method

I know it's still dice, but you can use of those dice-poppers for novelty. Get two of them, put d20s in there

aimlessPolymath
2019-09-30, 07:59 PM
When running games on car trips or on camping trips, I've variously used the last digit of a stopwatch app (centiseconds, from 1 to 10) and a game of "pull the short stick".

Anxe
2019-09-30, 10:05 PM
A magic 8 ball is just an upside down d20!

I've used cards for some effects when I didn't have the right number of dice. Dice keep me with them because of convenience and the physical satisifaction of the weight and noise of rolling.

JMS
2019-10-01, 10:42 AM
A set time and bugs, pets, or anything moving in a random pattern on a grid?

Shinizak
2019-10-01, 11:55 AM
A set time and bugs, pets, or anything moving in a random pattern on a grid?

This is a good idea, but the execution bugs me. 😉

Anonymouswizard
2019-10-01, 01:52 PM
The only reason that we use dice is because they're good at generating random numbers. There's nothing stopping us from using something else like a deck of cards, a magic 8 ball, roulette wheel, a dart board, or a fliping bop-it if you wanted.

What other things could you use to generate random numbers?

The problem, besides some methods being dependent on skills, is that everything has different qualities. So I use drawing from a deck of cards when I want previous draws to affect subsequent draws, generally with a method to 'reset' the deck (normally drawing either a Joker, but sometimes a particulat value or just 'when the deck runs out'). Even rolling dice is skill-dependent, if you know the starting orientation of the die you can make certain outcomes more likely with the right speed and angle (which is much easier on a smaller die, and why some tables I've played at have had you shake your die before rolling). The best pseudorandom number generators tend to be computer-based ones, because they're using processes the user has little direct control over, but they're not as fun as rolling dice.

Now I don't really have access to other random number generation methods, but yeah most of them are valid. The one problem is that often it's best to build your game around them than trying to substitute them into games made for a different mechanic, and especially with RPGs dice dominate. Although sometimes it's just fun to make a player draw a random curse from a bag or hat.

Luckmann
2019-10-01, 04:25 PM
A roulette wheel.

jayem
2019-10-01, 05:52 PM
Random number table books.

Bag of tokens/Spinner/Bespoke Cards

Bingo/Lottery machine.
For a very simple/freeform internet RPG. I did wonder if (future) lottery numbers would act as an independent, verifiable and common source of randomness.

Calculator

TV static, and whatever it is /dev/random uses (the best known mechanisms of truly random numbers available from a desktop computers hardware)

If you wanted to be ambitious I'd have thought some of the very simple pseudo-random number generators could be half implemented mechanically (square and take middle perhaps)
Or perhaps use half an enigma machine (if you replaced the tubes with pipes it could be purely mechanical). Both of these would be a lot of work for lousy randomness.

Dimers
2019-10-01, 07:44 PM
Another one might be Dewy-decimals off a book, or publication date? Just be aware that they could be skew given preferences in books.

Friendly neighborhood librarian advice: use the ISBN instead.

Other people have already mentioned playing cards, which I found both delightful and thematic in Deadlands. My only other idea is drawing tokens out of a bag.

boomwolf
2019-10-02, 06:37 AM
you can literally use google search as a RNG

Corneel
2019-10-02, 06:49 AM
RANDBETWEEN in Excel.

Kardwill
2019-10-02, 09:51 AM
I've already used a phonebook to replace D10 and D100 during a vacation ^^



Other people have already mentioned playing cards, which I found both delightful and thematic in Deadlands. My only other idea is drawing tokens out of a bag.

Yeah, both are cool, in part because they do not simply replace the dice as a "neutral" random generator. The system can play on this.

Cards :
- cards can only be drawn once until you shuffle the deck. So it will tend to "even out" luck during the game (that's the reason why the "cards instead of dice" variant of Catane is popular).
- shuffling the deck can be its own pacing mecanic ("when the scene change", "when the player does X", "when the joker is drawn")
- It's possible to have special, thematic cards
- You can change deck composition to create effects ("You're cursed. From now on, every time you draw a king, it will be put out of play and not shuffled again"
- Special cards can mean special stuff, and can be added or removed as necessary
- You can have a player hand that can add to or replace the draw as a way to control randomness, and replace "hero points".
- Colors, figures, etc... can give bonus to some actions, Falkenstein or SAGA style ("hearts count double for social stuff")
- Drawing several cards and choosing one feels more "natural" than rerolling a dice
...

Tokens in the bag have many of those advantages. The idea didn't really convince me, until I played Arkham Horror LCG that uses a "chaos bag" full of cardboard chits with numbers and symbols. And those chits will change acording to the difficulty level, or the way the campaign is evolving ("We failed to stop the cultists from escaping, so we'll add another "cultist" token to the bag")
And the fact that you're not throwing a dice, but shoving your hand into the bag and searching for a random token gives a pretty nice "if I draw the auto fail, it's my fault" vibe ^^

137beth
2019-10-02, 09:56 AM
I recommend random.org. (https://www.random.org/)

Kardwill
2019-10-02, 10:04 AM
Not really random, but DREAD uses a jenga tower.

Every time you do something dangerous, draw a tile from the tower. If it holds, everything is okay. If it crumbles, your character dies. Since a "new" tower has very little chance of crumbling, it creates a pacing mechanic where a character death is followed by a moment of respite.

Pro : Drawing a tile is a very tense moment, and a crumbling tower is nicely dramatic.
Con : Not random. Player skill, experience and firm hands factor in survival, which means clumsy players hate it.

Interesting application : You can sacrifice your character by deliberately breaking the old tower, so that your comrades will have a chance with the "clean", rebuilt tower.

Faily
2019-10-02, 09:37 PM
Not really random, but DREAD uses a jenga tower.

Every time you do something dangerous, draw a tile from the tower. If it holds, everything is okay. If it crumbles, your character dies. Since a "new" tower has very little chance of crumbling, it creates a pacing mechanic where a character death is followed by a moment of respite.

Pro : Drawing a tile is a very tense moment, and a crumbling tower is nicely dramatic.
Con : Not random. Player skill, experience and firm hands factor in survival, which means clumsy players hate it.

Interesting application : You can sacrifice your character by deliberately breaking the old tower, so that your comrades will have a chance with the "clean", rebuilt tower.


Came here to mention Jenga tower. Glad that someone beat me to it though. :smallbiggrin:

The Jenga solution is for those who really want to increase the tension for each action.

weckar
2019-10-02, 10:24 PM
No need to buy anything. Just go the Omegle and count the number of times you get immediately disconnected before a stranger actually says something. Perfect random numbers, imo.

Malphegor
2019-10-03, 10:13 AM
No need to buy anything. Just go the Omegle and count the number of times you get immediately disconnected before a stranger actually says something. Perfect random numbers, imo.

That would involve going on omegle and being subjected to some stuff people do on that.

I've heard of people using a pack of cards, jokers are crit fails, king is a crit success.

NNescio
2019-10-03, 10:26 AM
Old school random number tables used for statistics. You know, the ones they used before computational PRNGs and hardware RNGs became widespread.

Otherwise, well, dice, chits, or just use an app on your phone that implements a PRNG (or accesses the hardware RNG built in the CPU). Cards are easily manipulated for people who pay attention to minute scuffs and scratches on the back (chits less so, and they are more easily replaced). Darts are skill-based. Magic 8-balls are basically upside-down floating D20s with a tendency to be less fair than gaming D20s. Roulette wheels take forever to stop (D100 'golfballs' are more bearable, really) and takes up too much table estate.

MoiMagnus
2019-10-03, 10:28 AM
What other things could you use to generate random numbers?

The best answer is obviously a Ouija and asking [insert dead personality] to answer. Second best is Wikipedia random article -> follow the first links (except disambiguation paragraph, and pronunciation rules) -> count the number of links before looping.

On a more serious note, I've actually used a Rubic's Cube as a d3 more than once. (You can arrange the cube so that every face has only two colors, each of them showing 1, 2 or 3 like a normal dice). And my favorite method out of the reasonable ones is probably the bag of tokens/marbles.

JeenLeen
2019-10-03, 03:27 PM
No need to buy anything. Just go the Omegle and count the number of times you get immediately disconnected before a stranger actually says something. Perfect random numbers, imo.

I don't know of that website, but it does sound like a good way to get a Poisson random variable.

If you want to avoid dice but have technology, an online dice-roller or writing up a pseudorandom code in your programming language of choice (or Excel) works well. Just check how the seeding works if programming. I once wrote up something in VBA in Excel and didn't realize that the seed was the same every time you opened up the Excel document. At least until one of my players pointed out that they got the same sequence of results on their d10s.

Knaight
2019-10-04, 05:41 AM
The big ones have already been covered (cards, spinners, bag draw). Stealing from boardgames there's always the cube tower (the random number is the amount of cubes that fall out, but if few fall out it gets bigger more will probably fall out, giving a whole equilibrium effect), and the pachinko tower.

I could see a pachinko like pyramid being really fun. You drop a ball in, it ends up somewhere in a 2d plane of results. Another ball hits it from above, it gets knocked down into a lower plane. It's another system that has memory, which could do some really interesting things.

DominoMasque
2019-10-04, 07:13 AM
I have flicked open a book to a random page and used the page number (in fact I think Sagard the Barbarian had die images on the bottom of each of it's pages for this).
I've used Randbetween in Excel when I've had access to a computer but no internet.

My favourite, but not often used method for generating stats for D&D characters is to have 4-9 in two suites of cards and draw two cards for each stat (keeps a random array with the same totals).

I think some version of 40k used to use a grid to determine hit location, so you rolled your dice onto the grid, the physical location of the dice indicated where you hit, while the number determined damage done.

NNescio
2019-10-04, 11:29 AM
I have flicked open a book to a random page and used the page number (in fact I think Sagard the Barbarian had die images on the bottom of each of it's pages for this).

Biased towards middle numbers. And hard to get workable upper limits.



I've used Randbetween in Excel when I've had access to a computer but no internet.

Terrible for Excel 2007 and earlier because M$ repeatedly goofed up trying to implement a basic Wichmann and Hill generator.

Excel 2010 and newer works (it implements the Mersenne Twister, and does it correctly), but only for the function when called 'manually'. It's not the case for the one in VBA or the analysis toolkit, which uses a different algorithm for some weird reason, and is notoriously poorly-seeded. (the VBA one in particular has a tendency to produce the same sequence of numbers.)



My favourite, but not often used method for generating stats for D&D characters is to have 4-9 in two suites of cards and draw two cards for each stat (keeps a random array with the same totals).

That works out the 2d6 + 6. Which is an... odd way of generating stats.

Tinkermancer
2019-10-05, 09:43 AM
Siri. Honestly, every non-bell curve random number needing generated can be done so from the palm of your hand by saying “can you generate a random number between x and y”.

Don’t know if this works on Android.

Lord Lemming
2019-10-05, 05:36 PM
I've been building an RPG system with a character sheet in Google Sheets (Google's version of Microsoft Excel), and it uses Excel's =RANDBETWEEN() function to emulate rolling various kinds of dice. It also automatically adds the appropriate modifiers for various kinds of rolls. Nice for playing online with friends, though the fact is that Google Sheets isn't really built for it, so it's kinda clunky. Also, for some odd reason, randomly-generated numbers on Google Sheets are unique to the person viewing the sheet, so no one has any way of checking each other's dice rolls unless they're looking over each other's shoulders.

FiberPilot
2019-10-07, 11:25 AM
Tokens in a bag which you draw from.

Fully customizable, exactly as many sides as you want, can be changed on a moment's notice, and if you use printed images / icons, it can be as thematic as you want it.

Lvl 2 Expert
2019-10-09, 07:17 AM
Copy the number pi to lots and lots of places into a document with the same color text and background. Reveal the places one by one every time you need a roll. (For D10's. For all others you can do things like d20 is the first number even is 11-19, odd is 1-10, second numer is the ones.)

Beleriphon
2019-10-12, 04:23 PM
Siri. Honestly, every non-bell curve random number needing generated can be done so from the palm of your hand by saying “can you generate a random number between x and y”.

Don’t know if this works on Android.

"Hey Google..." and telling it to generate a random number between X and Y does work. Google as search engine the same function. I even has a "die roller" with the images and preprogramed ranges.

TrashTrash
2019-10-16, 03:42 PM
A magic 8 ball is just an upside down d20!


Here's a table to use a magic 8 ball as a d20 (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/581457001871992728/?nic=1)

Also, you could use a random book page up to a certain point. I mean, you could even Google "random number generator" and Google will give you one. You could even guess the number of forks you have in your utensils drawer, the number of dishes in the dishwasher, how many cups of coffee are left in the pot. Go nuts, my guy.

ExLibrisMortis
2019-10-16, 04:09 PM
Apparently there's a fairly definitive book. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Random_Digits_with_100,000_Normal_Deviat es)

Quizatzhaderac
2019-10-18, 04:27 PM
Cards have been mentioned, I will remind you that custom cards can be printed and card shuffling machines exist.

If one s using excel, one can use =ROUND(NORMINV(RAND(),10.5,sqt(33.25)),0) instead of a D20 and throw out rules about "natural" ones and twenties; numbers less than one and more than twenty can happen, just less than 5% of the time. In fact, any number can happen, it's just increasingly unlikely.