@AncientSwordRage Right, but what rule explicitly says I cant?

@ThomasMarkov I mean, if I were a TTRPG writer, these kinds of rules are exactly the kinds of rules I'd be putting in the first ten pages of the game manual.

@Xirema That you can change the d20 results? That's a neat game!

@Xirema And that is why I downvoted that question. I don't care about the impact of the exploit and I don't think you're actually going to try it. I'm pushing back against the idea of exploits.

@Xirema And you would still miss some because the space of rules I can make up is infinitely larger than the space you have to write rules.

I crit! No, I crit!

@NautArch I've told you before, it's "I crat!"

@MarkWells Cratted?

I personally thought @MarkWells approach was brilliant.

@ThomasMarkov I thought we were trying to define what cheating is?

@AncientSwordRage ask my ex, hey-o!

Becuase not following the rules ==/== cheating

@NautArch Pour one out for this homie

Maybe it's a Venn diagram with overlap, but at least one half of that is subjective

@ThomasMarkov I am mostly well past that :P

Have a much better wife now.

From a game design perspective, the definition is real fuzzy, but usually it requires (1) a player (2) bypassing the intended rules in order to (3) gain an advantage in a way that would be considered unfair within the context of the game's assumptions of fairness.

@ThomasMarkov I'm not actually certain that's true in practice. Sentences like "dice results shouldn't be altered after rolling unless the DM agrees to it or a feature says you can" and "this game uses these dice [...]; the DM can permit other dice on a case-by-case basis, but features in the game are written with the expectation of using these dice" cover a lot of ground without requiring pages and pages of corner-patching.

@MikeQ the game has no concept of fairness, your gaming group does

@AncientSwordRage Unless youre a goliath.

dndbeyond.com/sources/vgtm/character-races#FairPlay

I... Woosh? Can you ELI5?

There are some baseline assumptions, for example, all players are assumed to be subject to the same rules. It would typically be considered unfair if everyone is expected to roll a random number but one player chooses the number instead, because they're not following the same rules as everyone else.

@Xirema So why cant I select the outcome after rolling the d20?

Gotcha

@ThomasMarkov Because your DM has houseruled that it's not allowed.

> Goliaths rarely keep such opinions to themselves, and mock folk who rely on society’s structures or rules to maintain power.

So it's a house rule that I cant do that?

@ThomasMarkov Probably!

Cant really argue with that. The silliness speaks for itself.

I mean, there's still a majority of 5e players and DMs that keep referring to this mysterious concept of a "Skill check", and the houserules governing such rolls continue to confound me.

@ThomasMarkov monopoly has very different rules from what people play. Claiming tax money etc is a house rule. But it's extremely common for people to play by them.... Doesn't make it not a house rule.

@ThomasMarkov This is the kind of thing that's supposed to be covered by the implicit knowledge of how rolling dice works (similar to how the rules of many games assume you know about "taking turns"). The rules don't say anywhere that numbers in these rules are in base ten; you're supposed to know that.

@MarkWells Right, that's my point expressed much better than I have lol

@AncientSwordRage The officially licensed video game adaptations of monopoly don't even follow the rules either, and have houseruled in that all Income Tax incidences simply subtract $200, even though the one advantage a computer game has is the fact that it could perfectly, instantly calculate the correct value without waiting for the player to figure it out.

@Xirema seems to be denying that this implicit knowledge is a feature of the game.

@MarkWells I've explicitly ruled that all numbers in my campaign are in base 12, and are simply expressed to the players in base 10 as a notational convenience.

@Xirema I've played this game before

@Xirema that is a next-level Middle-Earth campaign there

@ThomasMarkov think they're highlighting that it's not a feature...?

@ThomasMarkov TBH, there's already too much "wait, but that's how it works in D&D, are you saying that's not how it works in PbtA?" when it comes to esoterica about rules and dice and etc.

So I don't think it's unreasonable for TTRPG systems that, if their goal is to stand on their own and not just live in D&D's shadow, to say "look, this might be obvious to some of you, but here's the basic rules about how dice work"

(I also intend to argue the same applies to actual D&D games that don't want to just live in the shadow of their predecessors)

I dunno, i've been playing with dice long before D&D and I understand how they work.

@NautArch when I first learnt to play magic the gathering, I was taught that to determine who went first, you cut your deck and compare the mana value. I understood how the game worked, as far as I was concerned.

I can think of no better way to get out of D&D's shadow than to explain in your rules how you arent like D&D.

@AncientSwordRage As in pull a random card?

When I came back to play in a tournament I was quickly disabused of that notion

@NautArch divide the deck in two, and show the face of the card

@AncientSwordRage so basically pull a random card :)

@AncientSwordRage Ugh, my brother insists that we use that method. We got into magic at basically the same time, but for some reason I have to keep explaining to him that if two decks are non-identical then it doesn't work as a method for determining turn order fairly

On a related note, I very much like the new viking-themed set they jsut released

@RevenantBacon I hadn't even thought if that! I just know now it's secret info that shouldn't be revealed

Unless you 'cheat' like james bond

@RevenantBacon why not just roshambo

@NautArch I guess it's equivalent

@ThomasMarkov Exactly! Although we mostly play multiplayer EDH so we roll dice for first. Last week we had like 5 rounds of roll-offs because we kept getting 3-way ties

@RevenantBacon You need intransitive dice

@RevenantBacon I once helped write and run a sci-fi and fantasy quiz that ended up in a 3 way tie

I mean heck, if I were designing an actual computer game and said "the damage of this weapon is a random integer between 3 and 7", you better believe that I'm putting a "oh by the way, the way we generate random numbers is by using a 'subtract-and-carry engine', with [...] parameters, and we DON'T use the raw output, we use this algorithm [...] to extract bits from the engine and convert them into usable data, such that we truly generate a uniform distribution".

?

Does the blank side count as 0?

@RevenantBacon reroll maybe? I added a link to my message with a basic example.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because you KNOW that some chucklehead is going to see that first sentence on its own and say "okay, cool! :)" and write damage = rand() % 5 + 3 and then I end up sobbing in a corner wailing "the bits aren't uniform, the bits! they're! not! uniform!" like a lunatic.

Either way, that's to much math to be a quick way determine who plays first.

@Xirema Yes, because computers are dumb and have to be told what to do. An RPG should make use of the players' implicit knowledge. It's part of how you connect with them.

@Xirema rAnDoM nUmBeRs ArE sEeDeD fRoM uSeR iNpUtS

@MarkWells Hmm. It's okay for TTRPGs to make use of players' implicit knowledge. But they shouldn't depend on it.

int randomInteger(int base) { return (int)time() % base; }

@AncientSwordRage I continue to be astounded that this actually ended up working.

@Xirema what's the difference between making use of and depending?

@Xirema it's fantastic

Cheating? Maybe, but the speed run community has accepted it

@AncientSwordRage If I hand the foundational texts (for 5e, that would be the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual) to my teenaged nieces and nephews, none of whom have any TTRPG experience at all, they should be able to run a game without having to ask me how basic concepts work. If they can't, it probably means the texts are relying too much on what the players and DMs already knew before going into it.

Also, is looking at the ground cheating?

@AncientSwordRage I'd say it's an exploit. Up to the org to decide if it's cheating or not.

I mean, look at the whole King of Kong controversy

The 5e starter's kit arguably satisfies my requirement, although I haven't referenced it in a long time.

The what of what?

@NautArch exactly

Cheating is a subjective opinion

@AncientSwordRage I think it is somewhat, but not entirely.

And, to support @Xirema, there are calls for D3s in the game.

lol I answered that question.

@NautArch I mean at what point do you call agreement to be universal concensus?

@AncientSwordRage I'm not actually sure?

Depends on context. Speedrunning is a good example, because runners will typically use exploits that the developers didn't intend, but then the speedrunning host may impose rules about which exploits are or aren't allowed.

That to me means it should always be considered subjective, even if the answer seems 'obvious'

@NautArch That was also something I was thinking about when I wrote my question, because the rules on dice say rather explicitly "if you need to roll a d3, you do it by taking a d6 and halving the results (rounding up)".

Which TBH is almost proof that the game doesn't allow natural d3s, because if it did, there would be no reason to specify that.

@Xirema True, but it also doesn't change the general issue with the question in that it is clearly for an exploit. I can't think of any other purpose than to game a result, and that gives me the icky icky.

And if the game doesn't allow natural d3s, then that's evidence that the game explicitly doesn't permit just any dice, and justifies saying "the game only allows the dice it specifies [d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20], because if it implicitly allowed any other dice, there would be no reason to have a special clause for d3"

This still seems like much more analysis than is necessary. Also known as...stackable!

@MikeQ Although it's worth bearing in mind that in most contexts, the "rules" just amount to "you have to play in a different category".

Like, when they forbid major glitches in Mirror's Edge, that doesn't make the Any% category vanish.

It just means there's now "No Glitches", "No OOB", and "Any%".

The only time I've ever seen specific glitches outright banned is if runs relying on them are physically hazardous for some bizarre reason.

Gets flashbacks to blistering my palm trying to rotate an N64 joystick...

@Xirema I quite passionately hated games that did this.

@Xirema Then there's glitches like this, which.....

When I was 10 I felt I was physically incapable of spinning the stick any faster and that was an unfair physical limitation that had nothing to do with my skills at the game.

@ThomasMarkov I bought one of those joysticks for the NES that had a 'turbo' button so you didn't have to press fast. I was not capable at that age to press it fast enough fo rthe olympics games.

And yes, I did buy it at Crazy Eddies in NYC.

@NautArch He'll club this seal to make a deal!

@MarkWells hello fellow northeasterner!

@NautArch what, no, I'm from California. I just know the parody of the character from UHF.

@Xirema that was an education

@AncientSwordRage yoink

That 💯, dang.