10 June, 2021

Only One Way

A common feature in many tabletop games is that of fractional numbers.  Commonly these come in halves, but they can also frequently be thirds.  There are even games that ask you to use square roots in some situations, so you can really end up with just about any rational non-whole number.

Non-whole numbers aren't convenient to work with in games, so players are most often asked to round these numbers.  Typically, games will have a consistent method of "Up" or "Down" but I remember one 90s era game that had three different rounding methods requested within the character creation process alone:  "Up", "Down", and "To the nearest whole number".

I was never sure if the designers felt strongly about how to arrive at the desired whole number, or if they were just having a laugh.

03 June, 2021

Die Drop Automata is Knitting

I've always had a bit of a love for die-drop tables. You can do a lot of clever things with them, as they give you several dimensions of data at once and also leave room for interpretation.

When the dice fall on a chart, you have spacial information about where they have fallen, their position relative to each other, various axis of scalar values that might be the size, colour, and face-value of each die.