Things in RPGs that you used to like but don’t anymore

[PhoenixPhyre]

Strangely, this is exactly why I play Fate/PbtA games.



I actively tell players in my Fate/PbtA games not to do things "to make a better story". Story comes between the players, their goals, and the opposition to them. And, yes, things spiral in interesting ways.



While there is definitely a group that plays both games in heavily- or almost exclusively-author stance mode, it's not necessary. There's some mandatory author stance stuff in Fate, but it can be pretty minimized. Most decisions in PbtA games can be framed as player-facing.



It's interesting, because maybe, in this case, that's a good thing? AW is a tool designed to do a fairly narrow set of things, and do them pretty well. It's up front about that. And if that's not the thing you want to do, cool. I'd rather have a game be honest about what it does and let me decide up front if I want to play it or not.

As far as narrow vs. broadly scoped? I find that most games are more narrowly scoped than people think... it's just when you're used to the walls being in particular places, you don't go there and don't notice them. But that's me.



Pretty similar to what I do. I've had players amazed that my games weren't prepped or pre-written.

I'm not saying you're wrong. But I do think it's interesting that we seem to have reasonably similar goals, and you dislike games for not achieving them, while I like the same games for facilitating them greatly. But, as I've said, there's also that very vocal "hyper-narrative" crowd that asserts everything must be cooperative GM, full author stance, blah blah blah stuff even that's very weakly supported by the texts of the games themselves.

From my reading, FATE is way more conducive to my style than PbtA. May just be tone--FATE came across as "here's how we do it, and here's why" while PbtA came across as "here's how you have to do it if you want to not be a bad person". And FATE leaves it way more open for the GM and the players to collaborate (or not), while PbtA seems to demand that they do, and do so in particular ways (especially the "rules for GMs" section).

And if I seriously played one of those games, I might revise my opinions. But a quick read through the rules (and lots of experience with very vocal, very pushy fans online) makes me unwilling to try (in the case of PbtA specifically). Lots of the fans come across as "One True Way" believers (whether they really are or not), often pushing themselves into non-PbtA discussions and insisting that you have to read and follow the ideas in PbtA systems or you're not running interesting games/you're being a bad DM. Instead of accepting that PbtA has its niche and so does D&D. Or Exalted. Or whatever.

[kyoryu]

From my reading, FATE is way more conducive to my style than PbtA. May just be tone--FATE came across as "here's how we do it, and here's why" while PbtA came across as "here's how you have to do it if you want to not be a bad person". And FATE leaves it way more open for the GM and the players to collaborate (or not), while PbtA seems to demand that they do, and do so in particular ways (especially the "rules for GMs" section).

And if I seriously played one of those games, I might revise my opinions. But a quick read through the rules (and lots of experience with very vocal, very pushy fans online) makes me unwilling to try (in the case of PbtA specifically). Lots of the fans come across as "One True Way" believers (whether they really are or not), often pushing themselves into non-PbtA discussions and insisting that you have to read and follow the ideas in PbtA systems or you're not running interesting games/you're being a bad DM. Instead of accepting that PbtA has its niche and so does D&D. Or Exalted. Or whatever.

Baker's tone is very divisive and often unnecessary. And yeah, a lot of the fans are just waaaay too vocal.

If you're ever interested in a one shot of either, lemme know.

[Tanarii]

And the type of stories it encourages you to tell (which yes, contra @Tanarii, it does encourage creating stories) are the kinds of stories I find interesting. It encourages discovering the story of the characters as they explore a world. Where it "fails" is at providing authored-fiction-style stories with clean story beats, closely-plotted events, beginnings, climaxes, and ends. But I find that to be a feature, not a bug. If I want a clean narrative, I've got tons of fiction to read/watch. I want things that could spiral out of anyone's control at any minute. Where me, as DM, having to improv and react to the players' actions and them having to react to my actions is the story. I don't want players thinking "but the story demands...." or "this is better for the narrative...". I want them thinking like characters. Let me weave it (or not) into a coherent narrative--that's a chunk of my fun in trying to fit these disparate aspects into a retrospective "story"[1].

None of that sounds like creating stories to me, other than in the colloquial sense of giving you something after the fact to tell stories about in retrospect. It sounds like the DM giving a world (fantasy environment) and circumstances, and the players playing their characters as if their characters are living in that fantasy environment and circumstances, and making decisions for them.

As I've said before, personally I live through events, I don't create a story of my life. And playing a character (or running a game for others playing characters) isn't different for me.

[Max_Killjoy]

Sadly enough, D&D as a system?

It's not that I dislike D&D. It's the gateway drug, if that makes sense--it got me into tabletop, and it's still the system that people default to when you wanna do some pen-and-paper. But I'm also aware that D&D has some weaknesses, like its simulationist ruleset, its emphasis on GM vs. Player, and how little the rulesets encourage storytelling.

If you're GMing, you need to be ready, at any time, to set DCs for anything the players do, adjudicate which check it uses, have statblocks/names/voices ready for any and all NPCs the players can interact with. You create the world, the lore, the adventure, because if you don't have a dungeon full of goblins, gnolls, and beholders, you just end up staring at each other for five hours. What's more, because it is largely the GM vs. the party, players often feel the need to fill traditional party rolls, and any opportunity for non-standard parties or interpersonal conflict gets largely stifled.

Compare that to a system like Apocalypse World or its derivatives Masks, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and Fellowship. To start with, much of the world is player-generated. Each system primes you with player relations, past deeds, stuff like that, which is all fitting to the archetypes of the players. So right from square one, you're set up with plot hooks and threads to chase down and tase out or forget, as appropriate. Wow, the Brainer stole something from the Hardholder? What was it? Why'd they need it? What are they doing with it? Is it still around? And it's totally legit, as a GM, to turn to a player and say, "Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. But Barbecue, you're the hardholder, whatcha got? You know the troublemakers in New Manhattan, alright. What's the nasty on the people harassing your supply caravans?" Players are invested because it's not just your world; it's a shared world that everyone's contributing towards. And what's more, due to the greatly simplified ruleset, you're basically always set for whatever direction the players go towards! And what's more, interesting characters are not only possible, but encouraged!

Seriously, PBTA games are just a tutorial on how to run fun, interesting games, and I can't recommend them enough.

First, "D&D" and "simulationist" (to the degree one takes the GNS model seriously in 2021) don't belong in the same sentence without a lot of qualifiers. I'm never quite sure how D&D and "sim" got lumped together, but I suspect it has to do with some people taking two things they wanted to dump on, and pretending they were one and the same to make it easier. (I like a lot of "sim" in my RPGs, and I don't like D&D because it kinda fails at that in so many ways.)

Second, as a player, the last thing I want to do is to ask the GM a question about the world, and have them turn to me and say "I don't know, what do you think is...." I'm not here for "author stance", I'm here to experience a "world" through the lens of a "person" (the character).

...

None of that sounds like creating stories to me, other than in the colloquial sense of giving you something after the fact to tell stories about in retrospect. It sounds like the DM giving a world (fantasy environment) and circumstances, and the players playing their characters as if their characters are living in that fantasy environment and circumstances, and making decisions for them.

As I've said before, personally I live through events, I don't create a story of my life. And playing a character (or running a game for others playing characters) isn't different for me.

^ THIS.

I have nothing against those who want some storytelling in their RPGs. It's their experience, their enjoyment, and their choice.

I have no patience for those who insist that playing an RPG is inherently and inevitably an act of storytelling. No one gets to tell me how I experience or engage with the things I do, or how I get enjoyment out of the things I enjoy.

[PhoenixPhyre]

None of that sounds like creating stories to me, other than in the colloquial sense of giving you something after the fact to tell stories about in retrospect. It sounds like the DM giving a world (fantasy environment) and circumstances, and the players playing their characters as if their characters are living in that fantasy environment and circumstances, and making decisions for them.

As I've said before, personally I live through events, I don't create a story of my life. And playing a character (or running a game for others playing characters) isn't different for me.

We fundamentally disagree on the basic definitions of what it means to "create a story", so yeah. Not going to take that digression further; I probably shouldn't have even put that parenthetical in there.

[Xervous]

We fundamentally disagree on the basic definitions of what it means to "create a story", so yeah. Not going to take that digression further; I probably shouldn't have even put that parenthetical in there.

I’d hazard a guess that within a broad definition of “everything is a story if you look at it this way” one person may be producing a story by another’s metric without that being the intent or focus of the first person’s actions. For instance I fold pieces of paper to pass the time in a boring high school class. Others call the good looking pieces art, but those pieces are just byproducts of a task whose purpose was the task itself. Or road trip vs. driving to a specific destination.

[Max_Killjoy]

I’d hazard a guess that within a broad definition of “everything is a story if you look at it this way” one person may be producing a story by another’s metric without that being the intent or focus of the first person’s actions. For instance I fold pieces of paper to pass the time in a boring high school class. Others call the good looking pieces art, but those pieces are just byproducts of a task whose purpose was the task itself. Or road trip vs. driving to a specific destination.

Under broad enough definitions, anything is everything.

But intent and motivation matter.

You'll see people claim that brushing your teeth every night is a "ritual", totally ignoring what makes a ritual a ritual, and not just part of your routine.

[kyoryu]

Under broad enough definitions, anything is everything.

But intent and motivation matter.

You'll see people claim that brushing your teeth every night is a "ritual", totally ignoring what makes a ritual a ritual, and not just part of your routine.

I've seen two arguments for the "it's all storytelling" angle.

1) You're sitting around talking about events. That's storytelling.
2) All human activity creates story, we're inherently storytelling creatures.

So.... I think the first is defensible, but is a bit of a stretch, and not really useful in any interesting way. I think the most useful thing for it is bringing certain people into the hobby that might recoil from "game" and "roleplaying", but "storytelling" sounds hipster enough to pique their interest.

The second one is just so ridiculously broad that everything is storytelling. Driving your car to work is storytelling.

The big problem is that in almost every case either of these are used in a kind of narrow/broad swap. It starts out with "all roleplaying is storytelling" using one of the very broad definitions, and then draws conclusions on what should happen in RPGs based on a much more narrow definition of storytelling.

[KorvinStarmast]

The first rule of D&D Club is if it is DM vs Player you are Doing It Wrong (TM)

+1.

Most players want to play, they don't want to do the GMs work for them.

I spent so many years in DM / GM stance as my default that it's easy for me to slip in to DM/GM brain mode, and I have to sometimes force myself into "player only" mode. I'm glad when I can.

It's just you usually need to hit a large convention or play online to find them.

Me going to a con any time soon is a no-go until or unless my wife has a change of heart. She, for sure, doesn't want to hang around a few thousand geek/nerds/gamers at a Con.

People really misunderstand the nature of old school D&D - probably because they played it when they were 10 at best, or heard about it from people that played it when they were 10. And 10 year olds are usually pretty bad GMs, especially in a system that gives them a lot of freedom.

Yeah, and a lot of teenagers are poor DMs although some are very good.

I might also play with letting players not involved in the current scene come up with stuff to keep them involved.

Another way to keep them off of their cell phones during play time.

But the "EVERYTHING MUST BE MADE UP BY THE PLAYERS" (okay, I overemphasize slightly) crowd is real, and they're very vocal, and I frankly push back against them where I can (I do have a bit of a voice in the Fate community overall).

Fight the good fight.

It encourages discovering the story of the characters as they explore a world.

I like to phrase it this way: the PCs go out and do things, and then they tell stories, after the fact, about the stuff that happened. Kind of like real life. Dramatic "aw crap" moments (like my bard's rolling a 1 on a persuasion check the other knight) can make for fun story telling in a way that killing off three Grells might not.

And for me, world building is much of the fun. Having people interact with the world in character stance, not in author stance.

Yeah, the players hang the flesh onto the bones of some parts of the imagined world.

I actively tell players in my Fate/PbtA games not to do things "to make a better story". Story comes between the players, their goals, and the opposition to them. And, yes, things spiral in interesting ways.

The time we played Fellowship it took us all (each of us first time through) a bit of time to get the bonds between PCs thing going ... but it made for some fun spirals.

Most decisions in PbtA games can be framed as player-facing.

Our Fellowship run was like that; the GM was pretty experienced with that game, which I think helped.

But, as I've said, there's also that very vocal "hyper-narrative" crowd that asserts everything must be cooperative GM, full author stance, blah blah blah stuff even that's very weakly supported by the texts of the games themselves.

Echoes from The Forge, perhaps.

Baker's tone is very divisive and often unnecessary. And yeah, a lot of the fans are just waaaay too vocal.

Forge-ites did get a bit of a rep, perhaps for a good reason.

None of that sounds like creating stories to me, other than in the colloquial sense of giving you something after the fact to tell stories about in retrospect. It sounds like the DM giving a world (fantasy environment) and circumstances, and the players playing their characters as if their characters are living in that fantasy environment and circumstances, and making decisions for them.

As I've said before, personally I live through events, I don't create a story of my life. And playing a character (or running a game for others playing characters) isn't different for me.

You tell stories about the interesting bits that happened along the way. Similar thing to Sea Stories told among salty old Navy veterans. You aren't telling the stories about the mind numbing tedium of many of the mundane things you did at sea: you tell stories about the highlights, or the unusual stuff, like the guy hanging onto the lifelines behind the high power turning aircraft, pretending to be Superman as the exhaust and prop wash tried to blow him overboard ... yeah, truth is stranger than fiction.

First, "D&D" and "simulationist" (to the degree one takes the GNS model seriously in 2021) don't belong in the same sentence without a lot of qualifiers.
Second, as a player, the last thing I want to do is to ask the GM a question about the world, and have them turn to me and say "I don't know, what do you think is...." I'm not here for "author stance", I'm here to experience a "world" through the lens of a "person" (the character).

*nods*

I have no patience for those who insist that playing an RPG is inherently and inevitably an act of storytelling. No one gets to tell me how I experience or engage with the things I do, or how I get enjoyment out of the things I enjoy.

IIRC, Robin Laws had a great essay on "the various way people engage with, or get enjoyment out of, RPGs" that put a nice finger on a point I had vaguely understood before.

The big problem is that in almost every case either of these are used in a kind of narrow/broad swap. It starts out with "all roleplaying is storytelling" using one of the very broad definitions, and then draws conclusions on what should happen in RPGs based on a much more narrow definition of storytelling.

Almost a bait and switch approach.

[Max_Killjoy]

I've seen two arguments for the "it's all storytelling" angle.

1) You're sitting around talking about events. That's storytelling.
2) All human activity creates story, we're inherently storytelling creatures.

So.... I think the first is defensible, but is a bit of a stretch, and not really useful in any interesting way. I think the most useful thing for it is bringing certain people into the hobby that might recoil from "game" and "roleplaying", but "storytelling" sounds hipster enough to pique their interest.

The second one is just so ridiculously broad that everything is storytelling. Driving your car to work is storytelling.

The big problem is that in almost every case either of these are used in a kind of narrow/broad swap. It starts out with "all roleplaying is storytelling" using one of the very broad definitions, and then draws conclusions on what should happen in RPGs based on a much more narrow definition of storytelling.

Exactly.

The assertion almost always starts out with the broad definition as a supposed descriptive, and then flips to a very narrow definition as a prescriptive.

[Max_Killjoy]

I like to phrase it this way: the PCs go out and do things, and then they tell stories, after the fact, about the stuff that happened. Kind of like real life. Dramatic "aw crap" moments (like my bard's rolling a 1 on a persuasion check the other knight) can make for fun story telling in a way that killing off three Grells might not.

Which is a lot like life. We can tell stories about life, but we're not making stories just by living our lives.

Echoes from The Forge, perhaps.
Forge-ites did get a bit of a rep, perhaps for a good reason.

I still have a bit of Forge-induced twitch... in case it's not obvious. Ran into a lot of those hyper-narrative, hyper-author-stance, hyper-players-do-everything types who were aggressive and disdainful towards any other approach.

And even before that, there was the start on Usenet when someone dropped into the RPG groups and started saying, much like above, "all gaming is about story, if you're not doing story, you're doing it wrong".

IIRC, Robin Laws had a great essay on "the various way people engage with, or get enjoyment out of, RPGs" that put a nice finger on a point I had vaguely understood before.

I think I've read that before.

Almost a bait and switch approach.

That's the first thing I thought of to, bait and switch.

[Luccan]

I used to think grid combat was overly complicated and a pain to set up. I still think it's often a pain to set up but I prefer if to TotM now, at least for big/important combats, because you can point at a map or grid and say "that's where you are, that's where the bad guy is" without people having to correct their mental picture of everyone's position. Honestly, the main reason I haven't switched over to a VTT for live groups is because I don't know how to use any and not everyone in my group owns a tablet or small laptop that would make using those practical during an IRL game.

[Willie the Duck]

I spent so many years in DM / GM stance as my default that it's easy for me to slip in to DM/GM brain mode, and I have to sometimes force myself into "player only" mode. I'm glad when I can.

I find trying to make sure I always have one group where I am a player, even if I'm usually DMing, helps me keep out of the a monomindset. Even if it is a pickup, once-every-six-weeks kind of game.

Me going to a con any time soon is a no-go until or unless my wife has a change of heart. She, for sure, doesn't want to hang around a few thousand geek/nerds/gamers at a Con.

Snort! My wife too, although she has no trouble with me going. If your wife likes antiquing or wine tours, there'd be things for her to do if you ever wanted to hit up ConVergence.

IIRC, Robin Laws had a great essay on "the various way people engage with, or get enjoyment out of, RPGs" that put a nice finger on a point I had vaguely understood before.
Almost a bait and switch approach.

Good read that. I like the 'this is a way to divide people's approaches, but it's just a model' attitude over the 'this is what people are doing!' one we seem to be discussing that gets people into trouble.

I still have a bit of Forge-induced twitch... in case it's not obvious. Ran into a lot of those hyper-narrative, hyper-author-stance, hyper-players-do-everything types who were aggressive and disdainful towards any other approach.
And even before that, there was the start on Usenet when someone dropped into the RPG groups and started saying, much like above, "all gaming is about story, if you're not doing story, you're doing it wrong"

This explains things.
I keep revising my guesstimate regarding how many people here are old enough to have been on Usenet. I bet that means you remember 'Roleplay, not Rollplay?'

I used to think grid combat was overly complicated and a pain to set up. I still think it's often a pain to set up but I prefer if to TotM now, at least for big/important combats, because you can point at a map or grid and say "that's where you are, that's where the bad guy is" without people having to correct their mental picture of everyone's position. Honestly, the main reason I haven't switched over to a VTT for live groups is because I don't know how to use any and not everyone in my group owns a tablet or small laptop that would make using those practical during an IRL game.

My group chafes at (required) grids, but having one around at least for relative position is fairly mandatory for us now. If someone had one of the old wargamer sandtables, we'd use that.

[Max_Killjoy]

This explains things.
I keep revising my guesstimate regarding how many people here are old enough to have been on Usenet. I bet that means you remember 'Roleplay, not Rollplay?'

I do.

Usenet is also where I interacted with the old staff at White Wolf and saw their snobby attitude first hand.

[kyoryu]

I used to think grid combat was overly complicated and a pain to set up. I still think it's often a pain to set up but I prefer if to TotM now, at least for big/important combats, because you can point at a map or grid and say "that's where you are, that's where the bad guy is" without people having to correct their mental picture of everyone's position. Honestly, the main reason I haven't switched over to a VTT for live groups is because I don't know how to use any and not everyone in my group owns a tablet or small laptop that would make using those practical during an IRL game.

I think this is interesting, because I consider a very rough diagram to show general positioning indispensable for TotM. I can't imagine doing TotM without it, and I don't think it makes it suddenly map-based, because it's just a reference to keep people on the same page, rather than the actual "space" that's being played on.

[Luccan]

I think this is interesting, because I consider a very rough diagram to show general positioning indispensable for TotM. I can't imagine doing TotM without it, and I don't think it makes it suddenly map-based, because it's just a reference to keep people on the same page, rather than the actual "space" that's being played on.

I think I can recall a handful of times we used rough maps in my TotM games. So maybe that would help. It would certainly avoid what I recall often being the case, which was basically always fighting on a flat plane. And here's the thing, I'm still totally down to play that way if that's what a group prefers, because I'm always down to play more TTRPGs. It's just that as was pointed out earlier in the thread* there are games that are less TotM friendly and I happen to play mostly those types of games. At least I happen to think they are.

*Wish I'd finished reading before posting my initial response, please don't read it as an attempt to rehash anything from earlier.

My group chafes at (required) grids, but having one around at least for relative position is fairly mandatory for us now. If someone had one of the old wargamer sandtables, we'd use that.

Yeah, maybe it's just a visual aid is helpful, not grids specifically, but I do like a grid or hexmap for exactness when a game is being exact in its areas. For something with a system of vague ranges (like melee, near, far) it's not necessary.

[kyoryu]

I think I can recall a handful of times we used rough maps in my TotM games. So maybe that would help. It would certainly avoid what I recall often being the case, which was basically always fighting on a flat plane. And here's the thing, I'm still totally down to play that way if that's what a group prefers, because I'm always down to play more TTRPGs. It's just that as was pointed out earlier in the thread* there are games that are less TotM friendly and I happen to play mostly those types of games. At least I happen to think they are.

*Wish I'd finished reading before posting my initial response, please don't read it as an attempt to rehash anything from earlier.

I 100% agree that there are games that are not TotM friendly. Anything that relies heavily on specific positioning and ranges would be a nightmare to play TotM. I'd generally include any WotC D&D in this group, with an emphasis on 4e.

[137beth]

Disclaimer: I haven't read the whole thread, so I am just responding to the OP.


1)Anything that involves a significant amount of record-keeping. I'd rather play such a game on a computer and let the computer do the record-keeping. I don't have time for it anymore.

2)Any sort of connection between a character's species and whether they are a good guy or a bad guy. Admittedly, this is less specific to tabletop RPGs and more a general preference in fantasy and sci-fi. Most of my current favorite fantasy and sci-fi fiction doesn't have "evil species," and one that does (OOTS) use them to critique the existence of evil species in other fiction. However, I have a stronger objection to this sort of thing in stories where I am expected to take an active role in determining the plot.

[False God]

I 100% agree that there are games that are not TotM friendly. Anything that relies heavily on specific positioning and ranges would be a nightmare to play TotM. I'd generally include any WotC D&D in this group, with an emphasis on 4e.

At least 4E told you "You need a grid for this."

I'll add along these lines: I've no time for games that can't make up their mind if they want you to just imagine it or they want you to pull out the rulers and graph paper. PICK ONE. There's no wrong answer. Some games will serve better with a grid, 4E was explicitly designed for grid use. Some games will serve better without a grid, like TTRPGS that bill themselves as "storytelling" games.

[Lucas Yew]

Personally, all dice other than the standard d6 (crazy, right?), because of the local availability. It's laughably easy to acquire any number of d6's, but other D&D dice types, especially the d10 and d100, are nearly impossible unless you delve through dubious online malls, and I'm extremely untrusting of those evil places...

----

For me I have the opposite experience to many here - I used to enjoy rules-light systems with simple mechanics, but I really don't anymore. (good stuff)

I used to think realism was super important, but it's not. It was verisimilitude the whole time that I wanted, internal consistency. I don't mind that horses are too slow or too fast, as long as the game makes sense for how fast horses are. I don't mind if fire is an element, just as long as the game sticks to antique physics the whole way through.

Quoted for support. I highly value symmetric + crunchy rules too, even when a contrary rule might have better production values and/or ease of play...
(maybe even worship if they're legally free at the very least like the 3.X SRD)

[noob]

Personally, all dice other than the standard d6 (crazy, right?), because of the local availability. It's laughably easy to acquire any number of d6's, but other D&D dice types, especially the d10 and d100, are nearly impossible unless you delve through dubious online malls, and I'm extremely untrusting of those evil places...

That is a legitimate concern that probably goes well with the issue of parts that can be lost such as cards: having cards specific for your rpg is an issue because you can hardly replace them unlike regular poker cards.

[Hytheter]

Personally, all dice other than the standard d6 (crazy, right?), because of the local availability. It's laughably easy to acquire any number of d6's, but other D&D dice types, especially the d10 and d100, are nearly impossible

You don't have any gaming stores near you? I've never had any troubles buying dice before, personally, but maybe it's harder in the covid climate.

[Cluedrew]

To Hytheter: Now I do, but neither the town I grew up in nor the (smallish) city we would go to for shopping trips - and that would usually be a day trip - had gaming stores. You could however get boxes of "dice", aimed at people who didn't realise there was more than one kind, in town. Because of this all the systems I design have been d6 based unless they particularly make use of differing die sizes and those I still shy away from.

[OldTrees1]

To Hytheter: Now I do, but neither the town I grew up in nor the (smallish) city we would go to for shopping trips - and that would usually be a day trip - had gaming stores. You could however get boxes of "dice", aimed at people who didn't realise there was more than one kind, in town. Because of this all the systems I design have been d6 based unless they particularly make use of differing die sizes and those I still shy away from.

If someone is in a similar situation, is there good advice on how to convert a XdY into a Zd6? Are there better conversions than these?
1d20 -> 3d6
1d4 -> 1d6-1
1d8 - > 1d6+1
1d12 -> 2d6
1d10 -> 1d6+2 or 2d6-1
1d100 -> 1d(6^3) with the chart converted to base 6 because 216 ~= 200 ???

[JNAProductions]

If someone is in a similar situation, is there good advice on how to convert a XdY into a Zd6? Are there better conversions than these?
1d20 -> 3d6
1d4 -> 1d6-1
1d8 - > 1d6+1
1d12 -> 2d6
1d10 -> 1d6+2 or 2d6-1
1d100 -> 1d(6^3) with the chart converted to base 6 because 216 ~= 200 ???

Using multiple dice gives you a bell curve-not an inherently bad thing, but it DEFINITELY changes the math.

[OldTrees1]

Using multiple dice gives you a bell curve-not an inherently bad thing, but it DEFINITELY changes the math.

True.

In cases like weapon damage (Greataxe 1d12 -> 2d6) the bell curve would definately change the math. It might also change some mechanical interactions. However generally it could work.

In cases like random month of the year going from 1d12 to 2d6 would not make any sense. Suddenly January and December disappear and July becomes very common.

[Max_Killjoy]

Dice are fairly easy to get, I think.

Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, superstore chains, local gaming stores, etc.

Not sure if Drive Thru RPG sells dice.

[Telwar]

To Hytheter: Now I do, but neither the town I grew up in nor the (smallish) city we would go to for shopping trips - and that would usually be a day trip - had gaming stores. You could however get boxes of "dice", aimed at people who didn't realise there was more than one kind, in town. Because of this all the systems I design have been d6 based unless they particularly make use of differing die sizes and those I still shy away from.

We didn't have a dedicated gaming store, but the hobby train store in The Town With The Mall An Hour Away did have a small rpg section. I feel like they had dice, too. The bookstores also had small gaming sections. But this is in the '90s and before Barnes and Noble and Borders and Amazon became things.

Though that's also why the beginners boxes always have dice.

[Jay R]

Where in the world are you buying games that won't also sell the dice you need to play them?

Amazon and other reputable companies sell dice online.

You can also use "=randbetween(1, 6)" in Excel, or roll20.net.

A quick Google search for "online dice roller had 10 million hits.

Or click here for the one from Wizards of the Coast:
WotC Dice Rolling page.

[oxybe]

I love that of all things from ancient vestiges of the old WotC site to still exist and work... is their dice roller.