Fun with Dice

I am often rolling my dice; sometimes for no purpose other that to see what I get. One of the fun things that some of my players have liked is gambling dice games while the characters are spending time in town. The usual choice of games is…. Knucklebones. I’m unsure where we picked this little gem up and I did a little research, but if you have some idea, please post a comment.

So, Knucklebones is played with 2d6. Each player tries to roll as high as possible, once it gets back to the starting player, he has the option to reroll. If he chooses to reroll, each participant has the option to reroll or keep what they got. If he chooses not to reroll, then everyone is stuck with their initial roll. So this can be fun if everyone buys into it, add a little role-playing and you could possibly spend the entire evening at the knucklebones table.

The last part I want to leave is with card games… card games have never gone over too well because they take a lot more time. Well, while I was at the local thrift shop, I came across the game ‘Vegas 21′ by Fundex Games. This is a blackjack dice game with 6d12 numbered two thru ace. There is a missing number on each die as there isn’t enough sides for thirteen cards (the number is different for each die). Now this has made ‘rolling’ a poker hand pretty quick. If you have a player that fancies himself as a cardshark, this may allow him to play some quick hands without monopolizing game time.

What games of chance have you added to your games?

Timing is Everything

So your players have just crashed in on your nefarious mastermind behind the current adventure. After some light banter, one of your players make an unexpected maneuver and may possibly end the encounter prematurely. You really hadn’t planned for them to punk your billy bad guy, but they are a creative lot. What should you do?

Well, if you are like me you may have a tendency to to use your on-the-fly thwarting spell. This is like a contingency spell, but it magically conforms itself to thwart any actions of a player character that may end a scene prematurely. I can not say how much this irritates players, and rightly so. If your players feel that whatever they do has no effect on the game, they may loose interest. Your players want to be epic, and they want to do it their way.

So what do you do? Let them have their moment. If a player jumps up and fires an arrow at their nemesis during the recital of his dastardly plan and manages to score a critical hit, maxing out damage, and some how causes enough to just barely knock him unconscious… let him. It might not be the way you planned it to go down, but your players will talk about it for years to come. Remember, you control the rest of the world and they may have punked that necromancer, but what did they do about all his minions? That abused young man the character rescued could, in fact, be be a fiercely loyal apprentice to the necromancer.