Dice Stack Mechanic

 I had an idea for a mechanic that might be fun for in-person games.  I'm always on the lookout for mechanics that 1) use stuff people have around (like cards or dominoes), 2) is dramatic fun (players gather round to see how it will turn out), and 3) kind of matches up with the situation in game (a Jenga tower feels like an oncoming inevitable disaster).  So, what about stacking dice?  We all have them, it will be amusing to watch, and it can simulate pushing your luck to get some gain.  Here are some ideas of what you might use it for:

• DM places down a d20 to start the Dreaded Stack. Any time a player gets a damage roll they don't like, place that die on the stack and roll again with a different die to try for a better result.  But, when the stack tumbles that player's weapon breaks.  Or, maybe, you roll an additional immediate encounter.
• Magic user variant that uses dice for casting determines how many dice they use for a battle/session by stacking.  The stack tumbles, you  get half that many.
• Skill use, the shopkeep's wisdom is worth 5 dice, you've got to stack more dice than that for him to believe your lie.
  

Obviously, some dice are easier to stack than others.  I can't stack my precision d4s at all.  But anyone rolling d4s for damage is probably not going to want to re-roll anyway.  If you needed to give players a pool of random dice to stack from and want to vary which ones they have to work with, you could grab a handful, roll them, and then let the player choose dice from all the even results.

Anyway, I might try it for a simple mini-game at least.

Little Games for Your Big Game

In case you missed it, the gift I made for Santicore was posted here.  I was fulfilling this request:

A game that can be played by the characters in the game world. Could be dice, cards, or board, as long as it reaches a conclusion quickly. If Santicore is feeling generous, perhaps he could provide a gambling game for taverns and flesh-pots, and an abstract board game played by sages and courtiers. [Some variation on Yahtzee or Mornington Crescent will be totally acceptable]

This was challenging for me because creating a game is, well, hard.  You've got chess and checkers and cards and craps, who am I to do better than those.  But I thought hard on it for about a week, thinking about it as I fell asleep and as I woke up.  I carried around a print out of a checker board for a while thinking I might make some sort of mini-domain strategy game out of it.  I played around with a deck of cards.  Here were some of my design goals:

As always, I wanted to use items likely to be in any household, cards, dominoes, six sided dice.  I tried for several days to make the Millet Trader game work with only dominoes, essentially making dominoes the "cards" and "poker chips."  At one point this meant requiring two sets of differently colored dominoes (which is really breaking this design goal in trying to follow it).  In the end, it was too complicated and I could never get it to work right so I compromised and figured folks having something like poker chips wasn't too much of a stretch.  This goal was contradicted by the next.

I wanted something fresh.  I have a book called 180 Ways to Play Solitaire and have read it with interest.  People have been playing games for centuries, but I wanted to find some new angle.  Sets of funny dice are relatively new, so while Pit Fight, requires something an everyday household might not have, I knew Santicore readers would have them and tried to add the Telecanter simplicity touch to a dice game.  Another possible place for something new is our game itself with its sophisticated layers of involvement for a parlour game. I tried to utilize that as a fresh game angle and it coincides with my next goal.

I wanted games that could be a simple "okay, let's roll some dice in the tavern" diversion (Pit Fight) but also am very aware that we are supposed to be playing D&D and not in fact playing cards, or dominoes, or poker, or we could, you know, just call it a poker night.  So Braggart and Tryst are games that, while you could play them straight like Pictionary or something, they sacrifice a bit of good gameness for being games that you can roleplay.  The intention behind them is to offer opportunities to roleplay while playing them in the game world.

As always, when making something for others I'm never sure what people want or like, so I wanted variety.  That includes allowing for different social class of games.  Well, and another goal is to give what the requester asked for and he mentioned possible varieties too.

I didn't get to playtest them all.  I did play pit fight with a friend and I thought it was fun.  I hope there aren't any big flaws lurking under the surface.  If you try any of them out let me know how it goes.  Also, the name "Millet Trader" is in honor of a comment Black Vulmea made that made me chuckle.  A game intentionally named to be dull, hah!

The Greatest Dice Rolling Apparatus Ever

Possibly.

I've been scouring thrift stores for a while looking for wooden receptacles. But recently my familial duties revealed to me two redwood offering plates. I like that they have a little lip that helps keep dice from hopping off my cloth store felt. I like that it's round so it offers maximum rolling area without hogging the whole table:


Need to have a session to try it out. Unfortunately, if you all want one they're asking ~ $ 40 online.

d30

I'm sure I must have seen thirty sided dice advertised in Dragon; my high school DM had a whole shelf of the magazine and I read them religiously, even borrowing some to read at home.

I even managed to pick up a d34 somewhere, but I never physically saw a d30 until this week.

I'd completely forgotten about them until I read a post on Dungeon and Digressions that gave a 1-30 chart and mentioned the Order of the d30. I knew vaguely that The Armory was one of the only companies besides Gamescience that made precision dice and that they'd gone out of business (or at least stopped making dice).

Anyway, surprise, surprise, you can still get precision d30s. I just bought 2 on Amazon. I'm happy with the quality.


Now the question is, how do I use them. What I mean is, I can make charts for myself all day long but I really enjoy sharing with others. But I don't know how common d30s are among people out in the world. Should I incorporate a d30 in Grim's Roll All the Dice method, for example? Should I start making d30 charts?

Do you have a d30? Would you use a chart that required one?