Non-transitive Dice with Cards

Non-transitive dice are a fascinating phenomenon. However, I don't really want to buy more dice*, especially dice that look, at a glance, like all my other dice. So I've been trying to think up a way to have non-transitive dice without actually needing new dice.

Example of non-transitive dice (opposite sides are same) (Image Source: Wikimedia Commons).

By far the simplest thing I've found, is to make each "die" from a stack of playing cards. This has several advantages:

• If all piles are the same size, then they will appear identical when face-down. This means that each pile can be chosen with incomplete knowledge or assigned at random.
• As cards are played, they may be discarded by some rule. Thus, while the stacks may initially be non-transitive, their relation can change over the course of a game.
• Playing cards are readily available, and can be used to emulate any set of dice that doesn't need numbers higher than 13.

I don't personally have a use for them yet, but if you come up with one I'd love to know.

* = This is a lie.

Scattered Thoughts

Notes from my summer activities and my first month of blogging. Mostly with at least half-hearted attempts to make them gaming-relevant.

Summer Reading:

 

The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)

An exciting classic "science fiction" trilogy. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although at times the overt Christian themes were grating on my secular humanist upbringing. The villains in That Hideous Strength were particularly strong, and I hope my own games can have villains that good. I also took extensive notes on the language as I went, and eventually I'll share those somehow (hopefully without diluting the content of this blog).

The Long Earth by Stephen Baxter & Terry Pratchett

A grand exploration of infinity, with some bizarre characters. Reminded me that dinosaurs are awesome.

Railsea by China Miéville

Great world-building with good proportions of secrets, bizarre new things, and enough familiar things to stay grounded.

Doc Savage Stories

I got back to my pulp roots with some old Doc Savage books ("The Land of Always-Night", "Mad Mesa", "The Dust of Death", and "The Stone Man"). This directly inspired Pulp Materials.

Things in Museums:

My favorite part of visiting the UK is the museums. Here are some things I thought it worth making a note of when I saw them.

• A German "schwerdt" (which unhelpfully appears to mean sword) was 4-6' long, and was not used in heavy over-head swings, but for fencing. The technique was to keep your off-hand just under the hilt as a pivot, and to control the motion of it with your good hand from the pommel. (Pitt-Rivers Museum)
• War quoits (chakrams) are basically sharpened rings, thrown like Frisbees held from the inside. I imagine they'd just be like exotic throwing knives in a game. (Pitt-Rivers Museum)
• In Guyana, traditional duels involve each participant standing close to the other and pressing their shields together. The first to lose their footing loses the duel. (Pitt-Rivers Museum)
• Instead of a traditional knife-bayonet, some early pistols had a sort of mace-head attachment on the barrel. I wish I'd taken a picture of this. (Tower of London)
• Before the formalization of molar theory, molar equivalencies were found using a slide-rule with salts marked in the positions of their molar weights. (Museum of the History of Science)
• When Copernicus first proposed his heliocentric model, people started using it for its accuracy, while simultaneously denying the validity of its assumptions. Essentially, it was used as an empirical model, but its implications ignored. (Museum of the History of Science)

 

Old Music:

• Long John effected an escape wearing shoes with a heel in front and a heel behind. Consequently, he was very difficult to track.

A Month of Blogging:

In my eagerness to post, or general confusion, I seem to have missed some things.

Fire!Fire!

Quench bears are obviously inspired by Smokey Bear. I would have used an image, except that I couldn't for the life of me parse the Smokey Bear Act, and decided to err on the side of caution.

Snake Oil

I could not remember for the whole time I was composing that table that the name I was looking for was "patent medicine". If I revisit the table someday, I'll keep that in mind.

Spider Racial Track

The post was going to have an image, but I forgot it. I'm just editing it in now . . .

Pulp Materials

Somewhere between Fire!Fire! and here, I forgot how to make a table in Blogger. Maybe I did it directly in html? At any rate, the table isn't really big enough to justify its seclusion in a Google Doc.

Pub Names

Nonsensical pub names are apparently a long tradition--and just as old a complaint. From what I understand they are frequently mutations of older names that may have made more sense.

The Future:

Classes have started now, but it remains to be seen what effect this might have on this blog. On the one hand, I'll have less time to myself and more other work to be doing. But on the two hand, I'll probably actually get a game going, and be doing more directly involving gaming. As I have no set schedule for the blog anyway, I don't expect any of these changes will be noticed.

Debasing Mage Knight

I've got a pile of old Mage Knight figures, and there's really not a whole lot you can do with them. No stores will touch them, nobody will buy them, the bases are too large to play nice with other figures, and a lot of the sculpts and paint-jobs are decidedly mediocre. After pledging to the Reaper Bones Kickstarter*, I thought maybe I'd use them to practice my (non-existant) painting skills until May when the bones ship.

An outline of the process I'm looking at:

1. Remove the figures from their bases.
2. Remove the paint from the figures.
3. Attach the figures to new bases.
4. Paint the figures.

In this post, I am just considering the first step: removing the figures from their bases.

From this . . .

. . . to this.

This process is about as simple as it seems, the figures pry off of their bases fairly easily with a craft knife. I recommend practising on some figures you don't care about first, such as these "Feral Bloodsuckers" (I chose the same ones because I plan to test solvents on them, so they should all be similar).

There are a few tips I can offer however:

• Freezing the minis does help them come off easier (unless they're wet from washing, then the ice just mucks things up).
• Wear gloves. You will cut yourself. You'll cut away from your hands, you'll keep the mini in a clamp, you'll think "I'm smarter than that", and then you'll go and cut up a finger.
• The motion isn't really a "cutting" motion so much as a "prying" motion. Which isn't to say that you should pry the figure off with the craft knife, but that the gap is already there and you just need to widen it.

Join me at an indeterminate point in the future, when I test an array of household (and exotic) solvents and cleaners on these.

* - Incidentally, if you missed out on the kickstarter, it looks like you can still get in here.

Meet Your Representative

The 48,151 duly-appointed members of the elemental parliament are in charge of shaping the material plane. The four major parties correspond to the four classical elements and each hold a large amount of power. There are also countless smaller parties representing various other "elements": poison, ice, smoke, electricity, etc. More puissant interests (magic, gravity, time, etc.) do not participate in the parliament but may retain a token representative, while positive and negative energy were not invited and are generally viewed with great suspicion by the rest. In addition, the parliament employs huge numbers of workers, aides, emissaries, diplomats, couriers, and soldiers to enact its will.

Like this, but all the people are elementals, and there's more of them (image source: Wikimedia Commons).

The parliament's schemes often reach beyond spans of mortal comprehension, and it generally does not liaise with mortal politicians or involve itself in material-plane politics. However, during delicate political negotiations, most parties are not above using mortal cat's-paws to get what they want.

The parliament has a bicameral structure, with a general assembly and a high council of the four largest parties. Motions can only be introduced by the high council, and the high council members all have veto power. If a resolution is not vetoed, it must pass a simple majority in the general assembly (quorum is also a simple majority, which arises often because at any given moment representatives are all over the place).

The high council currently consists of:

• The Flaming League (Fire)
• The Allied Waters (Water)
• The Free Atmospheric Union (Air)
• The Venerable Chthonic Party (Earth)

Notable lesser parties include:

• Crystal
• Electricity (The Storm)
• Ice (Her Lady of the Glacier's Party)
• Lava (The Ancient Flame)
• Light
• Metal
• Mud
• Poison
• Rot (The Life Reform Party, or "Rotters")
• Sand
• Shadow
• Smoke
• Sound (The Sonic Party)
• Steam
• Vapor
• Water
• Wood

I'm not yet sure I want to use the parliament directly in any sense, but if nothing else I think it will help create interesting situations. I plan to detail individual parties in future posts, as I work through their motivations, their methods, and their interactions with other parties.

Incidentally, 48,151 is a lot of members to divide up, and I'd like to do it roughly by importance. I've made a poll, where I invite you to rate the various elements by importance and interest. It doesn't close or anything, I'll just leave it up as an evolving thing.

The Devil's Darning Needle

Dragonflies have long had a bad reputation. Called "ear cutters", "eye-pokers", "eye-snatchers", and "adder's servants" in parts of Europe, the story I grew up with was that they were "the devil's darning needles", and they would sew your lips and eyelids shut.
I actually think dragonflies are pretty cool, and obviously they don't hurt people at all, but if they did . . .

The Devil's Darning Needle (Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

A devil's darning needle looks similar to a dragonfly except that when it flies it always flies "backwards". They are encountered alone, in pairs, or in swarms of 2d20, and are a favorite summon of Beelzebub and his ilk when enforcing contracts. The darning needle attacks by poking, prodding, and piercing its prey, weaving it with invisible magic cords while it does. Eventually the prey is immobilized, at which point the darning needles wait for it to die before feeding on the carrion.

For statistics, use a sprite, except that its type is magical beast and every hit deals an additional 1 point Dex damage and they generally have 1 hp.

The Antalop

Here is the antelope, from a Latin bestiary (antalops) interpreted as a fearsome critter.

The Antalop (source: Wikimedia Commons).

The antalop is about the size and shape of a deer, except that its antlers are like saw blades. It uses these to cut branches off trees and graze on the leafy upper foliage, but in a pinch it can also use them to collapse trees on pursuers or defend itself directly. Owing to this and its notable speed, it is difficult and dangerous to hunt, although if its antlers become entangled in something it may be caught.

An antalop has stats as a mule, but with an antler attack as a short sword.

Modular Dice

I've been using "d50"s without noticing for some time. You can get huge, strange 50-sided dice, but that's not what I'm talking about. Instead, I roll d% and if the tens-place is greater than 5, I "wrap around". I'm sure this is something that's not uncommon, it saves re-rolling if the die is an even multiple.

I decided to investigate this further. For a uniform distribution it's not that interesting, but starting from a normal distribution it's a neat way to get two peaks. Figure 1 shows the effects of different moduli on the 3d6 distribution.

Figure 1

If you'd like to play with this in anydice here's the function I've written:

function: A:n mod B:n {
    if A > B {result: [(A - B) mod B]}
    result: A
}