@the-dm-experience / the-dm-experience.tumblr.com
I thought I was so clever.
Elves live for centuries, unfettered by our primitive notions of gender.
So, what better name for my elf PC than that of Virginia Woolf’s immortal, transgender poet?
My DM: Dude…
Me: (smug) I know. Deep cut, right?
DM: You named your elf after Orlando BLOOM?!
when you remember Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf but forget about Legolas himself Orlando Bloom
I would like to pet the cat.
“…Are you sure?”
I attempt to pet the cat. What kind of saving throw do I have to roll?
Roll for animal handling
does a 9 work?
Any modifiers?
Yeah no, that’s including all my modifiers.
You attempt to pet the cat however as you approach it looks directly into your eyes and you suddenly feel a sharp pain in your temple forcing you to fall to your knees in pain.
You take 11 psychic damage.
Great! I’m gonna continue to pet the cat.
What They Tell Us: Tabletop RPG dice don’t have the greatest quality control, and often have large air bubbles or pockets of unfused plastic powder inside them. Additionally, most commercially made dice have their casting sprues removed by tumbling them in a modified rock polisher rather than filing them off by hand, which can render the dice imperceptibly lopsided. These two factors taken together mean that many – perhaps most – tabletop RPG dice are unintentonally “loaded”, and that’s why certain dice seem to favour certain numbers more than ideal probability would suggest.
What We Know: Those dice are rat bastards, is what they are.
So dice superstition is founded?
Yes and no. It’s based on real observations, but the cause of the issue is an intrinsic, physical flaw in the dice, and cannot be corrected by punishing them.
Well, except for the microwave thing, oddly enough. Depending on the composition of the offending die, microwaving it may cause the plastic to deform slightly and effectively re-load it toward a different number. I strongly suspect that whoever “invented” the idea of punishing misbehaving dice by microwaving them was well aware of this fact!
(Also: do not microwave your dice to punish them. Not only can they potentially emit toxic fumes, but if the misbehaving die is loaded because of a hidden air bubble rather than an uneven shape, microwaving it may cause it to explode.)
Who has the most balanced dice, if you happen to know?
If you’re truly concerned about randomness, your best bet is to play with a system that exclusively uses d6s and get your hands on some “retired” casino dice. Any dice that have seen actual use in a casino will have been rigorously tested for fairness, and any irregularities caused by wear and tear or being marked as retired – typically with a stamp or small drilled hole – will be insignificant for RPG purposes.
Beyond that, none of the major tabletop RPG dice manufacturers particularly have a better track record than the others. Just buy translucent dice (i.e., so that it’s easy to visually inspect them for interior flaws), and if you’re really keen, buy them unpolished and hand-polish them yourself. Most RPG dice that are sold as “precision” dice fall into this category; marketing claims aside, they’re typically 100% identical to the non-”precision” dice sold by the same manufacturer, the only difference being that the tumble-polishing step has been omitted.
it’s thursday. you tune in for your favorite tabletop rpg stream, critical role. on the screen you see the dungeon master, matt mercer. but something seems… off about him.
*places battle map on the table*
*map bursts into flames*
If you’re wondering what the whole drama regarding tieflings is in the Dungeons & Dragons fandom: basically, capitalism ruined tieflings, and for once that’s not even slightly a joke.
Tieflings were first introduced as a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, via the Planescape campaign in 1994. At the time, there were no particular rules regarding what a tiefling was supposed to look like. The text explicitly stated that their basic physiology could vary wildly depending on what their fiendish ancestor was, and one of the first major Planescape supplements even included a table for randomly generating your tiefling’s appearance, if you were into that sort of thing.
This continued to be the case up through the game’s Third Edition. However, when the Fourth Edition rolled around in 2008, the game’s text suddenly became very particular about insisting that all tieflings looked pretty much the same. Some campaign settings even provided iin-character explanations for why all tieflings now had a standardised appearance. Understandably, this made a lot of people very annoyed.
There was naturally a great deal of speculation concerning what had motivated this change. It was widely cited as “proof” that Dungeons & Dragons was trying to appeal to the World of Warcraft fanbase – which was nonsense, of course; nearly all of the Fourth Edition’s allegedly MMO-like features were things that popular MMOs had borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, and to the extent that tieflings’ new look resembled a particular WoW race, it was in that they were both extraordinarily generic.
In reality, it was a change that had been lurking for some time. Though Dungeons & Dragons is directly published by Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast is in turn owned by Hasbro, and Hasbro has long regarded the D&D core rulebooks as a vehicle for promoting D&D-branded merch – in particular, licensed miniature figures.
This was a bugbear that had reared its head before. When the Third Edition received major revisions in 2003, Hasbro corporate had ordered the game’s editors to completely remove any discussion of how to improvise minifigs for large battles, and replace it with an advertisement for the then-current Dungeons & Dragons Heroes product line. Implying that purchasing licensed minis wasn’t 100% mandatory simply would not do.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already guessed where this is going: tieflings having no standard appearance made it difficult to sell tiefling minifigs, as any given minifig design would only be suitable for a small subset of tiefling characters. In the brutally reductive logic of the corporate mind, Hasbro reasoned: well, if we tell tiefling players that all of their characters now look the same, we can sell them all the same minifigs. So that’s what the game did, going so far as to write justifications into several published settings for magically transforming all existing tiefling characters to fit the new mould!
This worked about as well as anyone who isn’t a corporate drone would naturally anticipate – and that’s the story of how capitalism ruined tieflings.
Here’s that table, btw. I really dig the art in the old Planescape books.
I already made a post talking about how varied Pathfinder allows/encourages Tieflings to be, but this seemed like a good excuse to just post a bunch of the official Tiefling art that really shows it off
There’s so much variety and flavor :D
4 Sets of barbaric dice are ready to get sanded and inked. That will take some time I guess.
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Tonight we decided to make a crack AU of our strahd campaign based on mean girls. This was the best thing to come from it
i love how the 10 ppl in the cos fandom here are collectively freaking out abt van richtens guide to ravenloft
