Friday, January 11, 2013

Mythic with d6

Sometime last week CS was talking about simplifying the Mythic dice rolling process for GM Emulation here.

He was talking about funny dice and dice fiddliness (is that even a word?) and it got me thinking that there must be someway to do this with d6.

At the time I begged off because I was waking up at 2 or 3AM every morning but things haven't improved much since I returned home. That coupled with going out for a few pints last night may make the following seem a little more incoherent than usual.

The basic gist is this. At certain times in the Mythic process of answering questions you come up with a random event. You then have to roll for the Focus, Action, and Subject. Anyhow since it is all d10, d100 based you usually have a table of 100 words or phrases. Sounds simple right? Well lets say that I don't have any of those fancy gaming dice and I raided all of my copies of Yahtzee, Risk, Monopoly etc for dice. I can get fairly close to 100 with just four d6.

Hopefully I can find one of  a different color and three that are the same. I roll all four together and cross reference the colored die with the sum of the other three on a table like this:


1
2
3
4
5
6
3






4






5






6






7






8






9






10






11






12






13






14






15






16






17






18







16 * 6 = 96 so pretty close to 100. I know this isn't rocket science but it was just one of those things that got stuck in my craw.

I was also reminded that I hadn't done this yet by Ricardo's post here where he also reminded me of the Enquiry Table here. This gives a d36, basically 2d6, which is another nice distillation of mythic.

There is also a file floating around somewhere that converts Mythic into THW terms using the ubiquitous d6, but I can't seem to locate it right now.

I know I need to get back to an actual tutorial for heraldry and I want to focus on banners next in that series as well.

*** Addendum 1/12/13 ***

As Colgar pointed out the only problem with this is that by using the 3d6 you get a bell shaped distribution.

from http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/troll.msp
So more likely to get the values around 10 or 11. This could be useful and you could load your table accordingly, but was not really my intention. For some reason I had convinced myself that rolling 2d10 or 2d20 as percentile dice would some how also give me a bell shaped distribution. But it does not. My guess is that, because we are not adding the face values, we don't. In trying to figure it out I did learn how to write the expression a few different ways. d100, d10*10+d10 or (d10-1)*10+(d10-1).

I also re-found the links to Troll Roller and Any Dice which looks a little nicer. So I don't know if it's back to the drawing board per se but you have an equal 1% chance of rolling anything with percentile dice that you don't have with my solution. Sort of par for the course for me.

But then I had another idea (stupid ideas always coming up when I'm about to finish posting). I looked at the enquiry table d36 arrangement and found that it has a equal 2.78% chance for nay value. Hmm. Looks like a second post.

1 comment:

  1. Of course, if you roll 3d6 and sum them then you'll skew the results towards the middle results (10 or 11) and away from the extremes (3 and 18). But maybe that's OK in this case?

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