Comments on: Flipping Coins: Dice for a Desert Island

By: Dagoth Grundz

Dagoth Grundz — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:58:26 +0000

Castle Falkenstein used decks of cards too, and was a very sexy book to boot!

By: Andy Short

Andy Short — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 03:07:13 +0000

Actually, playing cards make a brilliant substitute for dice, and if you work out an appropriate system, you can actually use court cards, jokers and the suits etc to provide extra information. The numbered cards alone give you D10 values, or you can ascribe values to the suits to act as a D4. Draw a joker and call it a critical.

A new RPG system coming out soon called No Dice (at http://www.nodicerpg.com if you’re interested) does this really well; suits are used to represent aspects of your character’s stats, act as indicators for bonuses and penalties when drawing skill checks, and can be used to show different fighting styles in combat. Draw a card, and if you’re on suit for that kind of attack you get a bonus, get the wrong suit and you suffer a penalty. Court cards can be used to trigger special attacks (draw your assigned court card on-suit for the ultimate critical!). The GM can even use the suits to get extra information about his NPC’s reactions to you.

Also, dominoes.

By: ben robbins

ben robbins — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:23:56 +0000

That’s very cool Mak.

By: Mak

Mak — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:53:50 +0000

For a while when my son was 8 and 9 we RPGed a lot while in the car, driving to lessons, to visit relatives, etc. Good way to pass time. Since we often didn’t have dice on hand, I used a couple of different methods of generating pseudo-random numbers.

One of the simplest ones we used was the digital clock on the dash, which my son couldn’t see from his seat in the back. Even or odd? Simple 50% probability. Of course you can’t make more than one such check in close succession; fortunately, kids don’t tend to be great at estimating the passage of time. To mix things up, sometimes I used the “scan” feature on the radio, with the volume turned down. As long as there’s more than three or four radio stations, you’ll end up with a series of “random” numbers. You can “scan” twice or three times, backwards or forwards to mix up the order in which the numbers will appear.

A more systematic method I discovered on the ‘net somewhere; the author recommended it for RPGing while hiking. It requires the use of a digital watch. You set the chronometer running, and after waiting a breath or two, you stop it and check the hundreds of a second. Basically, you’re rolling percentile dice. A great way to play with children who understand the basics of probability and percentages. Drawback is you have to take your eyes off the road briefly to look at your watchface.

A deck of cards also does the trick if you’re visiting at Grandma’s house. By discarding face cards, you can easily simulate a d10 roll; discard 7s to 10s and you have d6s. Leave a joker or two in to simulate a wild die or critical successes or failures!

As far as game systems go for that situation, the basic form of RISUS could work well.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:52:30 +0000

I used Shadows while baby-sitting my 5 and 7 year old daughters after church (my wife had a meeting). I didn’t have a d6 and we just used a coin to determine whether my daughter or her shadow got what she wanted. I recommend it as a fun, easy start-up game for camping, travel, or baby-sitting.

By: Gerald Cameron

Gerald Cameron — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:22:29 +0000

May I suggest Shadows for times like this? It's a page of rules, uses dice, but common d6s are fine, and it is intended for play with younger children, but is adaptable to any age group (even adults, I would argue). I haven't played it yet, but it seems tailor made to the situation in question.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:02:59 +0000

My friend and I did this one time back on a boy scout camp out with a checkers piece. Neither of us really analyzed the numbers or the probabilistic similarities to real dice (we were in like 5th grade), but we did a basic pass-fail flip followed by a confirmation flip to see by how much one passed or failed. It was crude, but my friend ad-libbed a whole adventure that way. We usually remembered our dice after that, but I’ll keep your post in mind if I ever end up doing this again.

By: Asmor

Asmor — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:04:39 +0000

1: What self-respecting geek doesn’t have his dice handy at all times? I usually keep my dice in my messenger bag that I take to school and elsewhere.

2: I hate my relatives.

3: Nonetheless, cool idea.