Favorite System of Randomization

[Dominique]

Fairly certain this is the right place...

Anyways, what's your favorite way to randomize things in a game? Are there certain dice mechanics you adore, or are you more of a card-drawing person?

Personally, I like dice, because... I dunno, rolling I guess. I like it when a stat is tied to a number of dice, like a dice pool. I've been trying to branch out into other types of dice mechanics, but I usually always go back to good ol' pools.

How about you?

[Onix]

I am fond of the d100, it' creates an easy way of recognizing probability which is important to the feel of some of the games I like to play. The other advantage is that stats are very granular and that leads to a lot of fine grain tweaking and even power progression.

I liked the d6 system of dice pools in WEG Star Wars, it had it's up sides for feel but also had some pretty hefty limitations. Each roll seemed like any result was possible (when really only certain results were likely). But as far as granularity it lacked a lot.

I'm also intrigued by forgoing dice but it's not easy to do. Most diceless systems leave a lot to be desired in my view.

I'm usually not a fan of cards but I'm planning on using them for a game of Star Wars to simulate force use a little closer to what is in the movies. I'm just waiting for a player to return.

[J.K.Mosher]

I like Dice & Cards.

Dice . . . I like to use for action/conflict resolution . . . mainly because they're fast and it's
fun to watch them bounce along the table . . .

Cards . . . I like to use for encounter/site randomization. Works well for solo-rpgs with no
Dungeon/Game/Story Master to dicttate/guide the action.

[Evil Scientist]

[misterecho]

Unfortunately I don't have the capacity for true randomness as part of my cybernetic upgrade, but I use a Pseudorandom number generator seeded with truly random numbers determined by dice rolls.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

I like cards. None of my games use them due to all the extra work involved, but if you accept the difficulty there is a lot of ways to manipulate them.

Each die you roll give you one piece of information - what number came up. A standard poker-deck can give you four bits at once - value, color, face or not, and suit. Thus you could have all sorts of interesting conditions like "Your shot will hit succeed so long as you don't draw a spade, with the number indicating the damage inflicted, and a face card determining if someone else joins the fight". Probabilities can be adjusted by adding or removing cards from the deck, changing how many are drawn, or allowing the players to have a hand to play as they see fit.

Of course, taking this beyond standard randomizer - you could assign magical effects to various tarot arcana, or play out rounds of blackjack to test the character's luck. Artwork on the cards can set a theme for the game.

[Chris Johnstone]

I tend to like d10s and d20s just for the easiness of them I guess. The Fudge dice system is elegant and neat (and free). I don't know how well it works, but I've seen some games that do things like vary the result depending on colours of dice you include (where maybe black = aggressive, white = defensive, blue = tricksy, or something). I presume (but am not sure) that the way this works is you gather up your dice in secret and then roll them at the same time as an opponent. If there were a simple paper/scissors/rock thing going on, then this could work quite well.

I've never much tried getting into cards for randomisation, though I expect they can work well if done right.

Chris

[misterecho]

I really love tables. Rolling on a treasure table or a random illness table are some of my favourite moments in a game. I love Cyberpunk 2020's (although not played in years) character generation because you have really cool tables to work out the characters' backgrounds and motivations etc.

[Rob Lang]

[I_luv_magick]

I like d20's and d100's because of large number of sides. Have never tried cards, but IMHO they would be great for random encounters( though rolling on a table might produce the same results, you can manipulate probability much easier by adding/removing cards instead of changing random encounter tables ).