RPG Dice and cheats

New RPG players need to be warned about a certain type of player. You’ll eventually figure it out yourself, but there’s no reason you should learn through hard hitting school. A certain type of highly competitive role player tends to manipulate their die rolls.

I’m not talking about the gamemaster who is rolling particularly hot and manipulating the roll of the die to prevent something horrible from happening to the group. That is the tactic of the white hat dice. I mean the player who cheats on his dice rolls. These are some of the tactics to consider.

Dice tactics

The d100 is a great source of cheats in tabletop RPGs. Since most people don’t have a real 100-sided die (they exist), most people use two d10s or two d20s (using the last digit in two-digit numbers) to simulate the d100 experience. In either case, one die represents single-digit or single-digit numbers (0-9) and the other represents two-digit numbers (counting from ten to ten: 10, 20, 30 …).

But if you have two dice in one roll, what is the 1-digit number and what is the factor of 10 can be confused. That is especially true if both dice are the same or nearly the same color. My friend rolled two blue dice. While they weren’t the same color, they were almost the same color, close enough that the others at the table weren’t in the middle of simulated close combat to pay close attention. This created the opportunity to cheat.

Imagine that rolling a low number on a d100 was important in this game. So if your character had 70% on a particular skill, any normal RPG player has a 70% chance of succeeding. But his chances were higher. He could roll a “0” and an “8”. It can be “08” or “80”. I would simply choose the smaller of the two numbers: a simple “8”. If you rolled a “4” and a “9” then you could have rolled a “49” or a “94”. “49” was preferable, so that’s the number I’d call.

Cheating role players

A group may not realize this tactic at first. They may not realize it for a while. But eventually, they will notice. When we did, this player became famous among our group of RPGs. When you realize that someone has such a small character that they will cheat in a fantasy game where everyone is supposed to cooperate, you really tend to develop a low opinion of that cheater.

Rational adults would have avoided or rejected this person. As we were children happy to have an extra player in the group, we continued to play with this person. The eventual solution was found when we started playing Amber Diceless Roleplaying, a type of game where random elements are controlled by the gamemaster’s own discretion. But that is another story.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *