November 2016 – TechNo Prisoners

Whose Dice Is It Anyway?

Some GMs are masters of making things up as they go along. Winging it. Improvisation. They are never short of new, interesting locations, and characterful NPCs. Plot lines seem to grow organically as the game moves along.

I am not one of those GMs.

Players will, inevitably, come up with new and innovative ways to side-step challenges, derail story-lines, and chase tangent-bunnies. When they do, I tend to run into the GMing equivalent of writers’ block. Over my many years of GMing, I have come up with coping-strategies to keep the game flowing, rather than stumble through, uming and erring over details.

The first tactic I use is to try to keep the geographic scope of my campaigns quite small. This allows for locations to be reused many times, and detail to build up over time. The NorthHills sprawlzone that I used for my cyberpunk campaigns started as a rough map, and as we played, built up into a well-detailed area. The Mall had shops (with staff) noted, and was visited many times. I ran several adventures using The Crow Bar, and it has built up a history of its own. I particularly like Fates Worse Than Death for this, as it is set exclusively on Manhattan Island. Large enough to allow quite a lot of scope, but small enough to keep coming back to the same places, meeting the same people.

Another ploy is to keep sets of lists handy. People’s names. Business names. Emotions and attitudes. Some of these I pen myself, between sessions. Others I pull from many sources. Particular favourites are Lee’s Lists and Random Generator. Vajra have some good random creators, specifically for their FWTD setting, but it can easily be used for other games.

Some games produce very good source-books for this, and I particulalry like Shadowrun’s Sprawl Sites. Containing details on quite a few potential locations, plus a whole list of encounters, it provides useful inspiration should ideas dry up.

Also, keep a thesaurus handy. Treeware versions are fine, but nowadays I tend to rely on thesaurus.com for ~~getting good words~~ appropriating superior lexicons.

And, of course, I have my many years of experience to draw upon! I have been known to use ‘similar’ NPCs from game to game, even radically different settings, and tweak locations from one game to fit another. Even plots and adventures are lifted wholesale! Sometimes it is obvious, even highlighted, other times more subtle. (Notable example: When I ran an AD&D campaign many moons ago, one player created character sheets for the 30-40 NPCs in his care (the “We Hate The Dark Lord” club). As they, in turn, inevitably met their fates, they were handed to me, to re-use as ready-made NPCs for that, or any other, game. I still have that folder.)

With these tools at the ready, I tend to spread my preparation thinly, sketching several fledgling ideas, ready to develop the ones that the players interact with, adding detail as play progresses.

So, my improvisation is not about on-the-fly winging it. It is the result of much preparation. Roll a dice on this table. Choose an appropriate item from that list. Pull a character sheet from that folder. All prepped beforehand, ready to be improvised on-the-spot!

Roll Dem Bones!

Well, electronic bones, actually.

(Skip the text and jump straight to the Exalted Dice Roller)

Exalted (3rd Edition, from Onyx Path) uses a reasonably simple dice structure. Add your Attribute and Ability, roll that many d10, and any that come up 7+ are Successes. Compare your number of Successes against the Difficulty to see if, and by how much, you beat it. Nothing to it.

But … firstly, if you roll a “10”, it counts double. No trouble. Then, you get into the realm of Charms (Not Spells. At all. No. A foolish mistake. Mystical Abilities, maybe. But NOT Spells!). These can double other numbers (from 9 down to 7), allow you to reroll some dice (e.g. “Reroll any “1”s until you have no “1”s left“), add Automatic Successes on top of any you roll, add extra dice (sometimes capped by your Attribute + Ability, sometimes not) and other effects.

Bucket o' Dice — Typical Exalted Dice Roll

As your characters are Favoured of the Sun God, you can end up rolling quite a few dice (A common roll in your Prime area could be Attribute 5, Ability 5, doubled by basic Charm, plus 1 for a Speciality, and 2 Stunt Dice for a nice description: 23 dice!). Assuming you have 23d10, you may then need to reroll some of these, and then count up all of the Successes (remembering to Double 10s, and maybe others). Still with me?

As this can become quite cumbersome, I decided to test out my coding skills, and put together an Online Dice Roller!

You enter how many dice you wish to roll, along with any Specials, such as Stunts, Rerolls, etc, and “CLICK!”, the Dice Faeries on my web-server roll (and reroll) the dice, add them all up and present the result!

I have tried to include all of the common adjustments, and for those of you who have a Character registered in the TNP database, you can call upon a roll by Attribute/Ability, without having to remember what scores you have!

Why not try it out, and see if your game would benefit!

Exalted Dice Roller

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Welcome to TechNo Prisoners. This is the latest incarnation of a decades-long project to bring you the finest RPG Resources known to Man, Elf, Cyborg or Cardassian*.

News and Views, Fact and Opinion. Hopefully some pretty pictures. All these are on my list of things to get around to one day!

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*The aliens from Star Trek. I’m not sure how much Kim, Kourtney and Khloe know about Role Playing Games. Possibly more than you would imagine. Or want to imagine.