Domino Dungeons

A while back I posted a way to trace your dice to make a quick, random, but semi-realistic dungeon. That technique is more suitable for caves and caverns, though, because there's no rhyme or reason, just random placement. And dungeons made by sentient creatures, even if centuries decayed, presumably had some reasons behind why they were made.

So I wanted to make a way to quickly and easily generate dungeons that were man made, or at least made.

Two possible ways to approach this are Greywulf's Sudoku Dungeons and Zak's way to use tarot cards to make a more grid like dungeon. Here's my take using dominoes:

1. pull 12 dominoes
2. place one at a time
3. connect low faces first
4. first tile connected is straight, after that turn the tile based on whether the outer number is higher or lower than the connecting number: low=left, high=right
5. place orphans to the sides

Face numbers mean:

o - chasm
1 - water
2 - corridor
3 - storage/commercial
4 - martial
5 - religious
6 - arcane

Pretty simple. There is some fuzziness in there as with most simple rules, but the idea, as always is to push you to come up with creative interpretations that you might not normally. Step number three in the directions tends to push rooms away from each other and towards the periphery but they will still be connected via various passageways. Also, because we are connecting numbers, complexes of like-purposed rooms tend to form.

Let me walk you through an example:I randomly pick 12 bones (I have a set of travel dominoes that makes them easier to use in a small space, and I shake them up in a bag).
The first of the twelve I flip over to reveal the 1-3. Place it in the center.


Next come a 0-4. Uh oh, what to do with that. We'll just put it off to the side for now hoping it will link up somehow later.


And 2-5, likewise, we'll put it on the other side.



With 0-1 we see rule #3 come into play; this tile could connect in two places but we'll go with the low, 0, side.


With the 5-6 our other side gets a little love.


The 1-2 and 3-4 are pretty straightforward so I'll just show this pic after both are placed.


With the 4-5 we see the first invocation of rule #4 (otherwise we'd have a bunch of cruciform random dungeons) and because the 5 face is higher than the connecting face we turn it to the right. You can move your side dominoes farther out to make for islands of rooms in a big megdungeon (presumably connected vertically or magically) or you can smoosh them together as I did here, which is nice because it moves away from strictly rule based connections.


I place doubles horizontal and tend to think of them as the largest and most impressive of their type.


This poses one of the fuzzy problems I mentioned above, where to put the 0-0? But I wouldn't think to hard about it, any of the 6 possible placements I can think of are going to result in an impressive chasm, so I just placed it to the left.


Likewise with the 3-3. I suppose I'm defaulting to try to link up our orphan tiles.


And our last bone is another double.

Okay, now what do we make of this? Well, water next to a chasm seems a natural for a waterfall. And water separating rooms seems a cool place to put boats or a ferry. Here's a humble map I made of our domino dungeon:
I said I thought of doubles as an impressive incarnation of their type, so I thought our double 2 might be a massive, grand stairway. One of the limitations with this system
is that it doesn't deal with variations in depth, so if our interpretations can add those all the better.

For storage/commercial (green) my thinking is that it can be anything from mines to mushroom farms to mundane storage rooms. Because the double 3 is connected to the grand stair, it probably isn't a mine-- unless the mine uncovered the stair?! It could also be an ancient chamber relegated to storage by new inhabitants.

I would probably say the entrance is the little bit of corridor (blue) and that players will need to cross an underground lake where they will have to decide to go left or right.

The double 4 could be a throne room. I put a pair of rope bridges across the great chasm et voilà we have a dungeon. It seems a lot here, but you can generate these things in about 2 minutes.

Hope this is useful. Let me know if you have any ideas to improve the process.

Simple Domino Mechanic

I've blogged a few times about dominoes before. To cut to the chase, here is the simple mechanic I used successfully in play the other day.

Pull out the dominoes seen above. Turn over. Shake up.

Ask the player to draw:

• No doubles ~70%
• Either Double ~ 30 %
• Double Blank ~15%

If you want to give it some campaign flavor you can. I called the three challenges: God's Teeth, God's Jaws, God's Eyes.

I like that it is simple, but seems more dramatic than dice (everything is a die roll but he was petitioning his god!). And it seemed pretty easy for him to understand the likelihood of success, in a way it might not if I said "Roll a 1-3 on this d4, next time you'll need to roll a 1-2 on a d6."

You can mess with the domino pool you're drawing from, but keep in mind it takes space to shake those things around ( I think 7 is the limit) and that I picked the blanks because they are simpler, and visually easier to read.

Tools - Dominoes II

Okay, I'm a goofenheimer; in trying to ascertain the usefulness of a regular set of double 6 dominoes for randomization, I decided the probabilities produced weren't very useful. But I didn't think of limiting the dominoes to draw from!

And because dominoes have the odd quality of including blanks, you can pull all the blanks (except the double blank) and have six tiles from 1-6. The chance of pulling a number is exactly the same as rolling the same number on a d6.

So, there you have it, I have solved the great stranded-on-a-desert-island-with-no-dice-but-ahh-we-have-dominoes-problem. Pull the one through six blanks, put them in a black velvet bag (all DM's have one right?) and let the player draw a tile. After drawing, place tile back in. Stir. Repeat.

Actually, by selecting the dominoes available for your drawing pool (so you have to choose 1 of the four tiles that have pips adding up to 6, for example) you can produce numbers with linear probability (each equally probable) for:

• 1-6
• 1-7
• 1-8
• 1-9
• 1-10
• 1-11
• 1-12

So, now our lovely, shiny bones can also substitute for our d8, d10, and d12s with other numbers thrown in!

You could also, add zero to all of those ranges by adding the double blank tile. And, technically, you could generate a number from 1-28, but that would require you to assign numbers that don't correspond to the tile faces (the 6-2 stands for 13, etc.) and that would be confusing, require a chart and defeat the whole purpose.

Of course, this is just fun mental exercise, never practical in play except for some kind of limited minigame. But it's that possibility of minigame that's still tickling the back of my brain. I'll try to flesh this out and post something soon.

Along those lines, I read on some forum about Shadowrun (?) using a deck of playing cards to resolve NPC encounter reactions. Is anyone familiar with that? Can you direct me to it on the web anywhere?

Tools - Dominoes

I was sort of obsessing over dominoes over the weekend. I love the way they are so similar to a six sider, like a d6 exploded, like some tesseract version of a d6.

So, some things I sat down and figured out that I hadn't known before: in a double six set of dominoes there are 28 tiles total. Each number, 0-6, has seven tiles. There are seven doubles.

Because of the way the pips work, there are more occurrences of some numbers than others. I made a little chart of occurrences over pip total.
Hmm, not so much a bell curve as a step pyramid.

So, if you threw all these bones in a bag, what would be the probability of drawing a tile with a particular pip total? Well, keep in mind I'm no math expert, but I calculate to get a tile with only one occurrence would be ~3.6%. To draw a tile with two occurrences would be ~7%. To draw a 4, 5, 7, or 8-- numbers appearing 3 times-- would be ~10.7%. And finally, to draw a 6 would be ~14.3%.

To compare that to the more common six sided die toss, rolling one d6 has an equal chance of getting 1-6 at 16.67%. And the bell curve that results from tossing 2d6 will get you a 6 13.89% of the time.

So, if you find yourself stuck in a vacation cottage with no dice but a set of double six dominoes, even though the number range is so similar, it isn't really possible to simulate six siders. Telling your player to draw a 6 from the bag of dominoes is less than the chance of rolling a 1 on a d6.

If you tell your player to draw any tile with a certain number on the tile-- not the pip total, but one of the sides of the domino-- the chance of success is 25%. Drawing either one or another number, say any tile with a 5 or a 6 on it, would be a 50% chance. The chance of drawing any particular tile, say the 5/6 is ~3.6%.

Again, doesn't seem too useful a range of probabilities to use in play to determine outcomes, but I haven't given up on the shiny bones! I was racking my brains trying to think of a way to use them to produce a simple dungeon generator. I also think they may be a cool way to do a NPC reaction minigame. I'll post more on those two possibilities later.

In the meantime, have you used dominoes in a roleplaying game? Have you heard of them being used?