We asked Balthazar to open a Pound o’ Dice and give us his impressions of what he found inside. Balthazar got lucky with a particularly ugly 7-set and did not hold any punches.
Ultimately the Pound o’ Dice is a mix of awesome Chessex premium dice combined with less stellar dice, combined with strange frankenstein dice. What it gives you is a solid pound of dice, which usually averages to around 100 dice, though the exact count varies from pound to pound. Despite the mix of good and ugly — or perhaps because of it — the Pound o’ Dice remains a favorite of die hard gamers everywhere. It’s a great way to get a heck of a lot of dice for a very low price.
Something we’ve been trying to get our hand on for a while here at Awesome Dice finally arrived — sweet dice jewelry. Specifically in the form of awesome dice pendant necklaces.
The unique thing about this dice jewelry is that you can actually change out the dice in the pendant at any time — so you aren’t stuck with just one die forever. The pendants do come with a dark red die in them, but it can be replaced with any 16mm (standard dice size) die of the same type. The way the die mounting piece is shaped means that you can only use d4s in the d4 pendant, and d20s in the d20 pendant.
We have pendants in stock that will hold a d4, a d10, or a d20. With the d20 or d10 you are ready to game at a moment’s notice, depending on your game of choice. The d4 is probably the least useful from a practical gaming perspective (unless you’re being chased by a barefoot assailant) but in our opinions is one of the coolest looking pendants — the d4 actually looks like a shape that you might normally find.
But if you’re a Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder player you can have that d20 on hand, and if World of Darkness is more your flavor you can have a d10 at the ready. And if you’re really into jewelry, you can have them all!
My extended group of gamer friends are getting together for our annual RPG excess this coming weekend — sort of like a house con, with 3-4 games running per slot and 30+ people invading my house for a weekend. I’m only running one game this year, a Call of Cthulhu one-shot, which I have yet to write.
I know the premise of the game, and I know how it’s going to end (not necessarily with everyone dead, depending) but I don’t yet know how I’m getting there.
However, over the years of running Call of Cthulhu games, I’ve developed the generic Cthulhu formula that covers most good Call of Cthulhu one-shots.
The Call of Cthulhu Progression of Creepy
The key to the game is the slow progression of creepy. You can just jump straight into full on horror — you have to build up to it, you have to lure the players into it slowly, which is tough because of course they all know they’re playing Call of Cthulhu. Here is the progression:
Setting the stage: The characters meet up or interact for a bit, establishing their roleplaying personas and the situation/setting in which the game begins.
Investigation or motivation: The characters are supposed to investigate something mundane — even if it’s a haunted house, they don’t believe in ghosts so the investigation is mundane in nature. This could also be a simple task that doesn’t involve investigation, as simple as “fly to France” but investigation is the more common Cthulhu plot hook.
Mystery: The investigation or action reveals a mystery — there’s something going on here! Secret doors, clues, the plan is hijacked — this is what gets the plot moving and gets the characters engaged in the plot, rather than just in themselves.
The inexplicable: Something(s) inexplicable happens. There is no apparent logical explanation for this that the characters can think of… this is odd. Around this point — or earlier — the characters must be isolated. They need to be in a location and/or situation in which they can’t just decide to go home or let the police deal with things. They in a plane, on an island, in the isolated haunted house and the storm is causing cell phones not to work. They can also be isolated by motivation — they’re obsessed with the answer to who killed their mother, or the bomb planted in their brain will blow up if they leave.
Something downright creepy and/or mildly horrifying happens, but not necessarily supernatural. A dead body is found, or blood is dripping from upstairs. Something is now very seriously wrong — it’s not just a suspicion anymore, there’s proof — this is the first opportunity and motivation the characters have to bolt, which is why they must be isolated beforehand. This should be something where the characters have to investigate, but they pretty much know the investigation will lead to worse things (like the source of the dripping blood). This builds the tension.
Knowledge and horror: Something else horrifying happens, possibly the reveal from the intro above, possibly something new. Very likely this revelation is directly tied to the investigation/actions the characters are taking — the more they learn about the deep secret of the game, the more horrifying things happen. The dead body follows them downstairs and corners them in the basement, the blood is coming from the bathtub, and in it they find something horrible that attacks. This section can last for some time, or be fairly short. The longer you can stretch it out, however, the more memorable the game is — keeping players peaked in the horror atmosphere that Cthulhu is all about.
The awful truth. The typical end mixes the pinnacle of horror with the final revelation of information: what is actually going on. You’re all infected with the zombie virus, you’re the only ones left alive in the world, you accidentally unleashed an Old One on your home town, etc. Or possibly it’s a twist — none of it ever happened and it’s just implanted memories, or you’re actually the cultists and the “bad guys” were the heroes. Either way there’s a big revelation that ideally has been hidden up until the climax, and is a combination of knowledge and horror.
In my experience with running Cthulhu one-shots, the hardest part is that stretch of horror before the revelation. Mysteries to investigate are easy. Ways to isolate characters are easy. Even the awful truth is easy, because that awful truth is often the original idea behind the game, so it’s the starting point. But building slowly up from inexplicable to creepy to horrifying and then staying at horrifying — that’s the tough part.
And that’s the part that I’m stuck on for my game at the moment. I started with awful truth as the game idea. I have a setting and know who the characters will be. But getting them from the starting point to a point of horror is tough — especially since in this case the characters are all going to be sort of cultist lackeys — the servants to the powerful master cultists, who must guard the home base from the assaults of rival cultists while their masters try to summon the Old Ones. So they’re going to start identifying themselves as evil, which makes it harder to make the horror seem horrible.
Fortunately the characters will have no significant powers or spells — that again lessens the sense of horror — since they’re just lackeys and wannabies. But it’s still rough. And I run the game in Friday. Three days from now. Gulp.
I was at the ACD Game Fair this past weekend, a trade show held by one of the largest gaming distributors, and while I was there I had a chance to talk with Aaron Witten of Game Station who I know from years back. Game Station bought out GameScience a while back and Aaron was talking about some of the GameScience plans.
Among them was the introduction of recycled dice. These dice will be GameScience precision dice made of recycled plastic and packaged in biodegradable packaging. This is not, however, post-consumer waste recycled product, but instead is recycling unused plastic from the manufacturing process of the original dice that is currently just thrown away.
GameScience Recycled Dice
As we discussed in how dice are made, the dice are manufactured via plastic injection molding. This means that the product to come out of the manufacturer is a bunch of dice connected by a thin plastic gridwork, kind of like how plastic pieces used to come in old board games where we had to cut our pieces off the plastic. Dice are made the same way, and the dice are cut off the tree by the manufacturer. These plastic trees are then thrown away.
GameScience has been experimenting with reusing that plastic and has found that it’s just as good as using virgin plastic in terms of dice quality. Unfortunately you can’t just toss the plastic trees back into the machine: instead they have to go through an additional process to grind them back into the plastic pellets that go into the injection molding machines (and thus they actually cost a bit more, rather than costing less).
Aaron guessed that they should be able to sell the first of the recycled dice in June — they’re still working out the precise colors now (the dice will be a mix of existing colors). The big downside of the recycled dice, in my opinion, is that they plan to only sell them in the 12-dice “Zocchi pack” selections. This is all the standard D&D dice in a 7-dice set plus the odd-sized GameScience dice (d3, d5, d24, etc). This means you essentially have to buy a bunch of dice that, quite honestly, you’re probably never going to use in order to get the dice that you will be using at your game. Thus a pack of the recycled GameScience dice are probably going to cost you about $25.
Still, we can hope that if the recycled dice are at all popular perhaps GameScience will consider releasing them in the standard 7-dice sets that fits the needs of 95% of the gamers out there.
Balthazar returns to Awesome Dice with another informational video, this time on the subject of dice bags. We gave Balthazar a handful of different dice bags to give us his rundown and opinion, and as always Balthazar did not disappoint.
In fact, Balthazar went a step further and gave some advice on what kind of gamer would prefer to use each kind of dice bag. Check it out:
Back when I worked at FFG I spent a lot of time with a lot of talented game designers (and even had one as a roommate). Talking with designers a lot infected me somewhat with their way of thinking about game mechanics — they look at them very abstractly, and pick them apart. They literally categorize mechanics into what kinds of mechanics are fun, which add strategy, and which just add complexity without depth. Heck, they even categorize fun into different kinds of fun.
A friend and I have been messing around with RPG mechanics for a while now, and this process has got me thinking about them a lot more, and thinking about what I think is the main mechanical flaw of the D&D system.
D&D Probability is a Line
Dungeons & Dragons has no probability curve. Because you roll just one die, there is no real distinction between an average result and an extremely good or extremely poor result. To some extent D&D tries to get around this by having more results average and only one really bad result and one or two good ones, but the core mechanical problem is that you’re only rolling one die.
If you roll 1d6, the odds of getting a 1, or a 6, or a 3 are exactly identical. If you roll a d20, same thing. The odds of getting a dead average result of 10 is the same (5%) as rolling a critical hit with a natural 20.
But go back to that d6 and change it to two d6 that you add together. Now suddenly the odds of getting a 7 are higher than any other number. The odds of rolling a 6 or an 8 are pretty good. The odds of rolling a 2 or a 12 are lower than anything else. The best possible result and the worst possible result are less likely than the most common result. You have a probability curve, rather than a straight line. Getting a remarkable success or failure is suddenly remarkable. It’s not exactly as likely as getting the most common result.
The lack of a probability curve in D&D causes all kinds of weirdness that you don’t see in more modern RPGs (well…. every RPG would be a more modern one, I suppose). Games like White Wolf’s RPGs have you roll a pool of dice, and add up the successes, bringing in a probability curve that lets you both reasonably estimate the likelihood of criticals, and have them be random enough to be exciting and cool. You can introduce other mechanics that change the shape of that probability curve, or that take advantage of specific places on the curve as a way of balancing, since you know the relative likelihood of each spot on the curve.
But in D&D you just got a line, which you can make longer or shorter, but the chance of rolling any one number is always the same.
A Solution?
I’m mostly just talking here, not suggesting that D&D needs a mechanical change. Rolling the single d20 is a signature of D&D and has been for decades, and it’s probably a sacred cow that you can’t do away with. Ultimately to get a curve you need multiple dice rolled, and for D&D rolling more than one die to attack just wouldn’t feel like D&D.
But from a pure game mechanic viewpoint, it’s pretty clumsy.
What can you do with 13,138 dice standard six-sided dice? Why, you can make a portrait, of course! Artist Frederick McSwain created this massive dice portrait to commemorate the death of his friend. The dice are laid out on the floor with no adhesive.
It is awesome. We need one of these of Gary Gygax, I think.
We asked Balthazar if he would record a video about the 5th edition news, and his thoughts on 5th edition as one of the world’s leading Dungeons & Dragons players. What we received was over an hour of footage of Balthazar alternately ranting and raving in between lulls of philosophical musing. This video is some highlights of Balthazar’s thoughts on D&D editions.
While we don’t necessarily always agree with Balthazar, it has to be agreed that 4E was largely a reaction to MMOs and World of Warcraft in particular — and certainly an RPG is never going to be as good as a MMO at being a MMO. I agree with Balthazar that it was, thematically, the wrong direction to take D&D and I think the move has demonstrably hurt the brand and Paizo’s Pathfinder has reaped the benefit. But as D&D players, we’re paying the price with an increasingly fractured playerbase.
I’m very curious to see what direction Wizard’s takes with 5th edition, and whether it’s at all possible to capture a bit of that 3rd edition magic again.
Balthazar on D&D 5th Edition Transcription:
Oh hello. I’m Balthazar. Yes, the Balthazar.
You know there’s all this talk about the announcement of fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons and how it’s going to go into development and oh they want your opinion? Well in my opinion, 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons has been completed for quite some time and it’s called … Pathfinder!
Let’s be honest. D&D 4th edition was a piece of #%!$, or #%!$ if you’re British. We all know that they basically just ripped off World of Warcraft and as we all know World of Warcraft sucks ass — a bunch of #%!$ing lonely people sit in their basement on their computers. And being lonely and in a basement, that’s fine, that’s #%!$ing tradition, but having a computer there, that’s just #%!$ing weird!
If I wanted to play World of Warcraft I would just cut off my balls with surgical precision, move back in with my mother and just sit there tippity tippity tippity on my little computer. No, I need a man’s game, with pencils and graphs and dice and #%!$.
I don’t know man, I don’t know what happened with Wizards of the Coast. They had all this awesome pool of talent for 3rd edition but then just pfffff.
Monte Cook: one of the creator’s of 3rd edition went on to create his own successful game line.
Chris Pramas left and created his own company, Green Ronin, and created Mutants & Masterminds, two great things that go great together.
Cindi Rice: intelligent, resourceful, hot — even though she’s kind of responsible for the Dungeons & Dragons movie, we’re going to let that slide.
Erik Mona: RPGA, editor of Dragon Magazine… kind of obsessed with Greyhawk. And what happened to him? Oh! He’s making Pathfinder! Mother#%!$!
Screw 5th edition, screw Wizards of the Coast, the real Dungeons & Dragons is Pathfinder, yeah bitch!
When we asked Balthazar about Call of Cthulhu, he was surprisingly enthusiastic and promised to get us a video on Call of Cthulhu dice. Well, he delivered and here is Balthazar expounding on Call of Cthulhu dice. He reveals that he is also one of the world’s greatest Call of Cthulhu players, apparently.
Awesome Dice is thrilled to introduce the Dungeons & Dragons World Champion, Balthazar, as our official spokesperson. Balthazar seized the D&D World Champion title in 2005 and has defended it every year since. For those of you unfamiliar with the D&D World Championships, Balthazar gives a behind the scenes look at this exclusive invite-only tournament in his intro video:
Awesome Dice is sponsoring Balthazar in his 2012 run at the D&D World Championships, and we’ll be shooting many more videos with Balthazar leading up to the tournament. If you have any questions for Balthazar. just drop a comment below and we’ll pass them along (though our next several video shoots are already planned).
We are thrilled to have Balthazar on board and personally recommending Awesome Dice: the only dice that are certified awesome by Balthazar himself, and guaranteed to roll more or less randomly.
Share this post:
Welcome!
Welcome to the Awesome Dice Blog -- the official blog of AwesomeDice.com. Here we discuss not only all things dice related, but also the gamers who use the dice, and the RPG games that we play.
