Using OOC dices in IC games

[Skulty]

I wanted to know your opinion on using real dices (or virtual, OOC ones) for deciding your character's actions, specifically for games.
For example, suppose two characters would want to make a race between them, could their players use dices to randomize the way the race happens and possibly making it more fair? For example, if they get a 6, things are going very well, and a 1 they trip, or something like that.
I'm supposing they won't cheat (there are websites which let you roll a dice and everyone who goes there can see who rolled and how much they rolled so that avoids cheating), and I'm also supposing they can somehow decide on how to use the dices without using much or any OOC talk.
What I want to know is just, do you think using dices to randomize actions or making games more fair is nice, lame, or is it some kind of CRB?

[DylPickle]

I've actually thought about the potential of this for town-based "minigame" type things. I just figured most people wouldn't actually go along with it. I know of a couple games that actually work within the game mechanics, but the options are VERY limited.

I've done something similar in the past though. For a lottery, I actually put names in a paper and made the random draw outside the game. And I also RPed flipping a flat stone, and flipped a coin in real life.

Honestly, I don't know why they never put a dice object in the game. It's been suggested many a time.

[wichita]

The level of OOC organization it would take and encourage would probably end up looking like a CRB.


Cool thought, though. I sure do miss pencil, paper, dice, and Dungeons and Dragons.

[SekoETC]

Sounds like a good idea. People can produce random numbers in Cantr by seeing the last digit of grams when a project is finished but that's slow.

[Doug R.]

but that's slow.

And that's also assuming that there is an equal probability of 0-9 appearing, an assumption I wouldn't make without knowing exactly how the randomized project returns are generated.

[*Wiro]

If using any kind of OOC information to decide/alter events in the game is considered a CRB, then this would be as well.
But for something like this an exception could (and should!) be made.
Just play it well. Have some wood in your inventory and drop 1 gram on the ground. Then use some RNG on the internet or a dice and then act like the dice you rolled in-game shows that number.
Then pick the 1 grams of wood up again and roll again!

[CrashBlizz]

I once thought about this for a game one of my characters invented during a long boat trip.

My solution was to make a series of notes with the same title and with numbers, 1 - whatever, written as the main text. Have one person drop all the notes on the ground in a random order and then someone else has to pick one up. The number they pick up is random.

(only works if the person picking up can be trusted not to look at the notes before hand)

If you wanted to use it ina race or something then you could do it once for however many people are there and the highest number wins.

[mikki]

The way I have done something of this sort is to randomly hand out pieces of paper with numbers on it, without knowing which number I have handed out.. Then here at my desk, I write numbers on pieces of paper, put them in a hat or cup or whatever I have next to me at the time and draw from it to pick whichever number is going to be called out.. It has worked for me..

[Skulty]

Ok, it looks like the you think pretty much the same as I do, that using IC dices would be nice if they existed, and using OOC dices to decide actions (or outcomes of games) is ok as long as we manage to do it without showing in game that we're these OOC dices. Now I just have to think how to do just that, but I'll do that when I'm not this sleepy....

[Gran]

As previously stated in the topic we made at the portuguese forum, I see no problem with that.

Since HTML and Php can be used on notes but unknown to chars, and even used to make simple animated maps or notes that can be easily explained by rp therefore we can use dices as a resort to add randomness into rpied games. They are unknown to chars, and only exist to make the dispute fair, it's not like they are going to look at the skies see gigantic dices and enter in a Holy War against the Non-Dicer infidels.

[joo]

You can use PHP in notes? I had no idea. If that's true, then the hacking potential would be great! <?php while (1) {} ?> anyone?

[joo]

I tried it and <php> tags cannot be used in a note - and neither can <script> or <style> tags. However, stylesheets can be attached using <link> and in an element's style property.

I haven't had time to try this, but presumably if it were possible to embed objects in notes such as shockwave or flash content, they could be used to communicate with the browser and execute javascript.

[SekoETC]

Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should. I've seen some weird application on a note but it didn't work. Maybe it was linked to an outside script. But anyway, notes shouldn't be anything besides notes. They might contain internal links to speed up finding a certain paragraph, but those can be seen as bookmarks.

[Gran]

I saw a map which by clicking in a certain resource at a list, it shows it in the map. But hell, Ctr + F does that, and as I understand, that's only my char looking for that resource.

[joo]

It's also possible to have client-side image maps in notes, which would allow you to give an image such as a map clickable regions to scroll to the appropriate part of the note. This would be very useful in large maps.