The Fate Points

I’ve had a couple of DMs use the Fate Points.  The incarnations I’ve played allowed players to re-roll their bad rolls, or re-roll the DM’s good roll.  Fate Points give you that extra safety net for the bad dice moments.  For DMs running casual sorts of games, this is a nice option to give players a little more control over the dice.

The Player-Requested Option

Dante, as our DM, is a pretty easy-going DM.  And he’s been a pretty good guy during those battles when we have bad dice nights.  Like all groups, we’ve had nights where players have had REALLY bad dice nights, and Dante has given in to our fate requests.  Here are a couple of examples:

Double Rolls. When Tali the Barbarian went almost any entire night without rolling a hit, she asked if she could roll two d20s and take the best roll.  Low and behold, when given this fateful option, she managed to roll a crit.  It was a one-time Fate roll, but it made the night a little more fun for Tali.

Self-Roll. Akta the Warlord was running out of hit points rapidly, and she was having a difficult time trying to kill her attacker.  She’d used her second wind, all other healing options were exhausted, and no one was close enough to help her.  She asked Dante if she could roll her attacker’s attack roll.  That way, she could control her fate a bit.  Fortuitously, she missed herself.  Again, this was a one-time Fate roll, but it gave her control of her fate.

It’s tough to be a player invested in your character and watch that character die.  While these may not be rules you find in any source book, Fate rules give a player control over their character’s fate.  And even that little bit of control can make everything a little easier to accept even bad dice nights.

During a break one night, some of the guys were flinging dice around the room out of some golf locks they had found at Walmart. Surprising to us all, the walls of the room were not immune to thrown weapons, and a diamond shape was imprinted on the wall from the corner of a d6, and a second d6 had left a small mark.

We all appreciate how much damage we can do in-game by rolling our dice, we should also raise awareness of how much damage dice can do to us. We’ve all all seen the warning-d4-can-damage-your-foot shirts. We need to take it a step further. Maybe we should consider a warning-thrown-d6-can-scar-your-drywall cross-stitch sampler. Or a warning-multitude-of-d20′s-on-the-floor-can-be-as-slippery-as-marbles poster.

If we don’t tell the world how much damage our polyhedrals can do, who will?

That got me wondering why we roll for stat points when we create our characters. And that got me thinking about how it’d be super keen if we could just have a pool of stat points to distribute however we wanted. Then I remembered that there were already point buy systems in D&D and I hated them.

Well THAT got me thinking why I hated them. Sure, it’s fair and you can construct your character however you choose. But I don’t like to point buy because it encourages a lot of seriously bland, mediocre characters maximized for a purpose. If you roll your stats at random, you might wind up with some uberstats and some horrible ones, all uber, all crap, all mediocre — you don’t know what you’re gonna get. You can base a character around their strong points and their flaws, and you could do that with the point buy too. But a lot of times, that’s how an idea for a character pops into my head — Lumbar came about when I had high STR and high WIS and a low CON. So I decided he was a powerful warrior who drank heavily but couldn’t hold his liquor (or stay conscious in battle) due to inheriting his father’s “delicate constitution”. You can draw inspiration from LOTS of places — this happens to be one of my favorites.

Life might not be random, per se, but it’s certainly not constant and invariable — sometimes you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get hit with next. Randomness gives us a little taste of that. I’m very very curious to see how 4E is going to handle such things, as they seem to be taking a much more hands-on approach to character development this time around, what with the new skill and ability trees.

Personally, I’m a little worried that they’re going to blandify things. Dante is currently alternating between trying to ease my mind with reassuring words and silencing my nervous bleating with the Official DM Half-Nelson. Stupid carotid artery. Either way, one of these months I will awaken from being rendered unconscious and we will see how this “fourth edition” plays out.

Some say it takes away from the spirit of the game or sucks the magic out. I’ve seen go so far as to accuse the guy running a dieroller program of cheating. I have to say, I don’t really get either of those.

In Which Vanir Divulges The OTHER Reason He Is Surprised He Successfully Wed

I’m a computer programmer by trade, and I’ve been coding since I was literally about 5. Granted, the programs back then were about the Dukes of Hazzard and didn’t really do much aside from:

10 PRINT "BOSS HOGG IS MEAN"

20 GOTO 10

Regardless, once I got a little older and learned about generating random numbers, it wasn’t really a giant mental leap when I realized rolling dice was just random number generation for luddites. And while I can say there is a definite thrill in rolling a d20 during a critical moment and having everyone watch the die roll from your hand, hearts leaping in anticipation with every bounce to see if they all live or die — well, that anticipation is still there if the player clicks “ROLL” in his die roller. It does suck a little that everyone can’t see what you rolled, but then again I know lots of people who use DM screens or simply just have too much junk on the table for people to see what got rolled. And I can’t honestly say I haven’t still cheered when one of our laptop-die-rollers saves the day.

“But”, you say, “dierollers aren’t TRULY RANDOM!” Well, no. But it’s close enough. Computers usually use what’s called pseudorandom numbers, which in a nutshell means the computer takes some number it has access to that is going to change rapidly and often (like the computer’s internal clock) and does some math on it that produces a number that is, for most intents and purposes, random. If you’re going to run quantum physics experiments, or you’re a hardcore computer scientist, or you’re just THAT ANAL, then yeah, pseudorandom numbers might not work for you. Rolling d20 to hit a goblin? Not really an issue so much!

Dirty Rotten Cheaters

As far as cheating, anybody who thinks dice are 100% fair is kidding themselves. Loaded dice have been around ever since it became profitable to cheat, and they even sell loaded polyhedrals at Gen Con. And I can remember attempting to come up with harebrained schemes at a teenager with a friend of mine on how to influence our die rolls by spinning the dice or palming a certain number up. It didn’t always work, but it did sometimes. I’d be willing to bet holding the dice funny would get you really closely watched at a casino at the very least!

Sure, writing a computer program that cooked the results wouldn’t be very hard. And I suppose it might be a little harder to detect if cheating had occurred. But if you’re rolling 19 or 20 every other roll, people are going to look at you funny no matter what you’re using.

Besides, people who cheat at D&D need to die from blunt force cranial trauma from a PHB regardless of method.

Die Roller Resources

For those of you who want to use a die roller on your PC or Mac, here’s a good one that probably does WAAAAAY more than you need it to.

http://www.aroooo.com/rpg_stuff/dice_roller/

Linux guys, sorry — they don’t have a version of that out for you. But if you install Ruby, you can use this instead! (Or write your own, I know how you guys are.)

http://www.rubyquiz.com/quiz61.html

There’s a swell web-based die roller at Pen, Paper, Pixel:

http://www.penpaperpixel.org/tools/d20dicebag.htm

If you have an iPhone, you could always try out this web-based iPhone dice roller (but don’t tell Yax — he didn’t much care for it!)

http://yoav.org/dice/index.html

Me, I stick to real dice most of the time but if I’m playing somewhere without a real table to roll on I’m using a homebrew application on my Nintendo DS (you’ll need a cartridge that lets you run homebrew).

http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php?p=14642664&postcount=2

No matter what you use, it’s always a good idea to check in with your DM to make sure using your shiny new die roller is kosher. PHB’s don’t do subdual!