Genius DM Fixes [Archive] - Wizards Community

Genius DM Fixes [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
Rhomphaia
07-07-06, 09:48 AM We always hear about great DMs or (hellishly much more often) bad ones. One thing I have never seen is stories about how a DM corrected a blantant, craptastic situation brought about either by himself or another player. For example, take my most notable story.

Way, way, way back, when I first actually started playing, I began on 1e AD&D. As many of you remember, you had to have sky-high ability scores to get any sort of bonus out of them. Anyway, our DM, to save time, said we could roll our ability scores and make our characters there in the house, but we didn't need to have his direct supervision (mainly due to him having Taco-Bell induced digestive tract issues and he needed somewhat frequent breaks).

Anyway, we all rolled up our characters, using the classic '4d6, drop lowest, place as desired' fix that actually came up with playable characters. DM comes out and looks at all of our character sheets to see our progress, then he gets to Tom. From my understanding, the rest of us rolled scores in the 8-16 range, averaging around 12-14 from what I saw of the characters. Tom rolled 18, 18, 18, 17, 17, 18. The suspicion was strong that he was using loaded dice. The DM called him on it with the following words (as close as I can remember them).

"Tom, this is a little unbelievable. I have seen you roll absurdly high in the past and I see it now...again. I won't make you scrap this character out of hand, yet, but there's a catch. You take the same dice you rolled this character with, and roll three times. If you roll 12 or less three times in a row, then you can keep this character. If even one roll gets 13 or up, you use my dice to roll up a new character and place the stats in the order that you rolled them, or you can hit the road."

Now everyone knew that the DM had some downright craptastic six sided dice, never once rolling above a three. Tom borrowed my dice and rolled up a new character.

I love this one because while the DM didn't railroad Tom out of his character, he did force Tom into a choice between proving those six rolls were luck (impossible) and taking punishment if he failed (almost a certainty), or taking the safe road and rolling up a character using normal dice.
TarlSS
07-07-06, 11:14 AM Hrmm. How do you tell if dice are loaded? Do you roll 100 times and see if the average is too high?
Victor_Phoenix
07-07-06, 11:35 AM Loaded Dice are pretty easy to figure out by watching them roll, they will roll slight irregularity, bending at unnatural spins and angles to end up with a 6 facing up,” remember well made dice do less of this unatural rolling but a single set of these can run as high as $40 per set of dice and its very rare to find other types of dice other than D6s that are well made loads”.
Also if you pick them up you will feel a difference in its weight.

Another simple cheat dice is a replace dice, the lowest number in this case a 1 is replaced with the highest number in this case a 6 so that the dice has 2 sides that read 6.

The hardest cheat dice to detect is shaved dice. Shaved dice do not roll always 6's or 5's but are shaved on the edges and corners in such a way as to favor such rolls.
These dice look normal, don’t roll strangley and have the appropriate amount of numbers. If you have a player who cheats with level of deception he needs to be knocking over banks, not playing D&D.
Rerecros
07-07-06, 04:49 PM I can't possibly understand why anyone would cheat at D&D.
"Greed for imaginary treasure"?
Some_call_me_Tim
07-07-06, 06:20 PM Hrmm. How do you tell if dice are loaded? Do you roll 100 times and see if the average is too high?Yes, that is one method although you should actually use a statistical process called chi-squared. Depending on how out of balance the dice are it should be able to tell you fairly quickly. If the numbers shown above are acurate (and assuming the dropped die was indeed random) that is enough to prove (99.999997% certainty) they are loaded. The odds of this happening are about 3.2 million to 1 against.

The other method is dice balancing calipers. Basically these hold the die by opposite corners while it is spun. If it wobbles it is loaded. You can do this with out the calipers if you have the right touch and the dice a really outta wack.
Pegasos989
07-07-06, 07:10 PM As I have used loaded dice quite often (no, not in DnD or any other social game. long story.), I can tell that you can feel it when you take them in your hand. They feel diffrent and unbalanced. Maybe not the most expensive ones, but atleast the normal ones always do.

Then again, if I ever felt that my player was cheating, I would slap myself in the face and say "Why do I play with him if I can't even trust him?" and then forget the lucky rolls.

I have yet to find a player actually cheating in DnD. Or well... There was one time when one player tried to cheat that he failed stabilization rolls when he didn't (he want to try out other char xD) but it is not quite the same...
green_yawgmoth
07-08-06, 12:46 AM I can't possibly understand why anyone would cheat at D&D.
"Greed for imaginary treasure"?
Some people have to "win" at D&D to feel good about themselves. They have to have the super amazing character that can do everything and bake a cake at the same time, because the rest of their life is crappy. I've dealt with kids like this; they usually want to play the half-dragon (with no LA) gestalt monk/warlock with a vampire bloodline, or some such.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v91/yawgmoth/kittyjig.gif
moto
07-08-06, 01:01 AM Well Back on topic.

I would think this is pretty common, but a DM i'm playing with now has decided to allow sorcs to use quicken spell meta magic without a penaltie. No only one char is playing a sorc/rogue but its still a fix I agree with.

( Don't comment on this if you don't agree. Keep it on topic or make a new thread. )
Fusecase
07-08-06, 02:12 AM Ok a group of 6 level 5's or 6's + horde of ogres = 10 Psion/ 10 Metamind temporal excelerating, font of powering, and assimilating 10 ogres???

Yea it happened, no it made no sense.
Millennium
07-08-06, 10:29 AM Hrmm. How do you tell if dice are loaded? Do you roll 100 times and see if the average is too high?
You can do that, though a chi-square test is better. The Dragon Compendium has an article on how to do this. However, most of the time you don't need to analyze the dice statistically. Most loaded dice are unevenly weighted, to the point where you can feel the difference just by rolling them around in your hands. Loaded dice produced this way feel very different from fair dice.

Better loaded dice exist that will get past this test, but you probably don't have to worry about them. "Professional" loaded dice like these are meant to only show their bias after they've been rolled hundreds of times: they're for gamblers who can afford to win over time. A professional loaded die is not significantly better for rolling a character than a fair die would be, because you only roll six times. That's not enough for the bias to make any real difference. In order for a die's bias to be strong enough that it's suitable for rolling characters, it has to be done in ways which, fortunately for the DM, are easier to detect.

However, also keep in mind that absurdly-high rolls like this do happen sometimes, even with totally fair dice and rolls. I've seen my wife do it. What I recommend doing is this: if you see someone roll that high, offer everyone else the opportunity to reroll their characters with those same dice. The players can choose to take the old character or the new one, but every player has to roll for himself. If everyone rolls similarly high numbers and nobody comments on how the dice feel funny, then roll them around yourself and see if they feel loaded. Based on that, you can decide what to do.

Another option would be to get some cancelled casino dice. Most game stores have these: they're large, clear red cubes, and the pips are always filled in. They're stamped "VOID" so that you can't use them in an actual casino again, because casinos take their dice very seriously. You can't get a fairer d6, so get three or four of them and have your players use them whenever they roll up a character.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Rhomphaia 07-07-06, 09:48 AM	We always hear about great DMs or (hellishly much more often) bad ones. One thing I have never seen is stories about how a DM corrected a blantant, craptastic situation brought about either by himself or another player. For example, take my most notable story. Way, way, way back, when I first actually started playing, I began on 1e AD&D. As many of you remember, you had to have sky-high ability scores to get any sort of bonus out of them. Anyway, our DM, to save time, said we could roll our ability scores and make our characters there in the house, but we didn't need to have his direct supervision (mainly due to him having Taco-Bell induced digestive tract issues and he needed somewhat frequent breaks). Anyway, we all rolled up our characters, using the classic '4d6, drop lowest, place as desired' fix that actually came up with playable characters. DM comes out and looks at all of our character sheets to see our progress, then he gets to Tom. From my understanding, the rest of us rolled scores in the 8-16 range, averaging around 12-14 from what I saw of the characters. Tom rolled 18, 18, 18, 17, 17, 18. The suspicion was strong that he was using loaded dice. The DM called him on it with the following words (as close as I can remember them). "Tom, this is a little unbelievable. I have seen you roll absurdly high in the past and I see it now...again. I won't make you scrap this character out of hand, yet, but there's a catch. You take the same dice you rolled this character with, and roll three times. If you roll 12 or less three times in a row, then you can keep this character. If even one roll gets 13 or up, you use my dice to roll up a new character and place the stats in the order that you rolled them, or you can hit the road." Now everyone knew that the DM had some downright craptastic six sided dice, never once rolling above a three. Tom borrowed my dice and rolled up a new character. I love this one because while the DM didn't railroad Tom out of his character, he did force Tom into a choice between proving those six rolls were luck (impossible) and taking punishment if he failed (almost a certainty), or taking the safe road and rolling up a character using normal dice.
TarlSS 07-07-06, 11:14 AM	Hrmm. How do you tell if dice are loaded? Do you roll 100 times and see if the average is too high?
Victor_Phoenix 07-07-06, 11:35 AM	Loaded Dice are pretty easy to figure out by watching them roll, they will roll slight irregularity, bending at unnatural spins and angles to end up with a 6 facing up,” remember well made dice do less of this unatural rolling but a single set of these can run as high as $40 per set of dice and its very rare to find other types of dice other than D6s that are well made loads”. Also if you pick them up you will feel a difference in its weight. Another simple cheat dice is a replace dice, the lowest number in this case a 1 is replaced with the highest number in this case a 6 so that the dice has 2 sides that read 6. The hardest cheat dice to detect is shaved dice. Shaved dice do not roll always 6's or 5's but are shaved on the edges and corners in such a way as to favor such rolls. These dice look normal, don’t roll strangley and have the appropriate amount of numbers. If you have a player who cheats with level of deception he needs to be knocking over banks, not playing D&D.
Rerecros 07-07-06, 04:49 PM	I can't possibly understand why anyone would cheat at D&D. "Greed for imaginary treasure"?
Some_call_me_Tim 07-07-06, 06:20 PM	Hrmm. How do you tell if dice are loaded? Do you roll 100 times and see if the average is too high?Yes, that is one method although you should actually use a statistical process called chi-squared. Depending on how out of balance the dice are it should be able to tell you fairly quickly. If the numbers shown above are acurate (and assuming the dropped die was indeed random) that is enough to prove (99.999997% certainty) they are loaded. The odds of this happening are about 3.2 million to 1 against. The other method is dice balancing calipers. Basically these hold the die by opposite corners while it is spun. If it wobbles it is loaded. You can do this with out the calipers if you have the right touch and the dice a really outta wack.
Pegasos989 07-07-06, 07:10 PM	As I have used loaded dice quite often (no, not in DnD or any other social game. long story.), I can tell that you can feel it when you take them in your hand. They feel diffrent and unbalanced. Maybe not the most expensive ones, but atleast the normal ones always do. Then again, if I ever felt that my player was cheating, I would slap myself in the face and say "Why do I play with him if I can't even trust him?" and then forget the lucky rolls. I have yet to find a player actually cheating in DnD. Or well... There was one time when one player tried to cheat that he failed stabilization rolls when he didn't (he want to try out other char xD) but it is not quite the same...
green_yawgmoth 07-08-06, 12:46 AM	I can't possibly understand why anyone would cheat at D&D. "Greed for imaginary treasure"? Some people have to "win" at D&D to feel good about themselves. They have to have the super amazing character that can do everything and bake a cake at the same time, because the rest of their life is crappy. I've dealt with kids like this; they usually want to play the half-dragon (with no LA) gestalt monk/warlock with a vampire bloodline, or some such. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v91/yawgmoth/kittyjig.gif
moto 07-08-06, 01:01 AM	Well Back on topic. I would think this is pretty common, but a DM i'm playing with now has decided to allow sorcs to use quicken spell meta magic without a penaltie. No only one char is playing a sorc/rogue but its still a fix I agree with. ( Don't comment on this if you don't agree. Keep it on topic or make a new thread. )
Fusecase 07-08-06, 02:12 AM	Ok a group of 6 level 5's or 6's + horde of ogres = 10 Psion/ 10 Metamind temporal excelerating, font of powering, and assimilating 10 ogres??? Yea it happened, no it made no sense.
Millennium 07-08-06, 10:29 AM	Hrmm. How do you tell if dice are loaded? Do you roll 100 times and see if the average is too high? You can do that, though a chi-square test is better. The Dragon Compendium has an article on how to do this. However, most of the time you don't need to analyze the dice statistically. Most loaded dice are unevenly weighted, to the point where you can feel the difference just by rolling them around in your hands. Loaded dice produced this way feel very different from fair dice. Better loaded dice exist that will get past this test, but you probably don't have to worry about them. "Professional" loaded dice like these are meant to only show their bias after they've been rolled hundreds of times: they're for gamblers who can afford to win over time. A professional loaded die is not significantly better for rolling a character than a fair die would be, because you only roll six times. That's not enough for the bias to make any real difference. In order for a die's bias to be strong enough that it's suitable for rolling characters, it has to be done in ways which, fortunately for the DM, are easier to detect. However, also keep in mind that absurdly-high rolls like this do happen sometimes, even with totally fair dice and rolls. I've seen my wife do it. What I recommend doing is this: if you see someone roll that high, offer everyone else the opportunity to reroll their characters with those same dice. The players can choose to take the old character or the new one, but every player has to roll for himself. If everyone rolls similarly high numbers and nobody comments on how the dice feel funny, then roll them around yourself and see if they feel loaded. Based on that, you can decide what to do. Another option would be to get some cancelled casino dice. Most game stores have these: they're large, clear red cubes, and the pips are always filled in. They're stamped "VOID" so that you can't use them in an actual casino again, because casinos take their dice very seriously. You can't get a fairer d6, so get three or four of them and have your players use them whenever they roll up a character.