As a kid, I used to play while hiking, and we came up with a crude RNG system where the DM would be secretly holding up some selection of fingers representing a number in binary (did I mention that we were huge nerds?). Then the player would guess a number in the appropriate range, and it would be compared. An exact match was the maximum result, and otherwise the result was based on the difference between them.
Nice. We used to play makeshift D&D on the school bus, and we had a grid drawn on the back of our notebooks with a bunch of random numbers. The player would poke at the grid with his finger while his eyes were closed, while the notebook holder would erratically move the grid around.
Before we had dice, we had cutout numbers, and tried to feel around in the box for the one that felt like the 20 without the DM calling BS.
We used to strike a piece of a mastodon bone with flint until it roughly resembled a cube. Then we would chisel scratches on each face to represent numbers.
I was 12 and my parents wouldn’t drive me across town to the hobby store, which was the only place in town that had such weird dice. My starter copy of DnD actually had glossy plastic sheets of numbers to cut out and use for exactly that purpose.
It looked like this:
Haha nerds!
I doubt the inmates have smart phones but if they did they could use Natural 20 for iOS and CritDice for Android.
Fuck the BB and Windows Phone -using inmates though.
Whoa, you really are an old-timer. By the time I got into it, we already had turtle shells.
In my school days, when we used to play wherever and whenever, including on the bus, and thus could have dice but often couldn’t use them, we used to use the stopwatch function on our watches for a d100. If you don’t look, timing a couple seconds and then using the hundredths-of-a-second (or reversing the digits, or doing it twice and using the last digits) for your roll gave you a decent result. They let you have watches in prison, right?
My friends and I used this exact technique, both on buses and car rides
Could use cards very easily too.
And for the Fate Core/Accelerated fans in the audience:
For a d6, have one player secretly choose and write down a number from 1-6 and another player secretly choose and write down a number from 0-5. Reveal both and subtract the smaller one from the bigger one. Produces a number from 1-6 with a flat distribution as long as both original numbers are chosen randomly. You could do this with fingers behind the back for efficiency.
EDIT: No that won’t quite work, but something similar would. I’m too tired to figure it out though.
I would guess, since dice aren’t allowed because they can be used for gambling, that cards would fall into a similar category.
Wow. Talk about disappointing. The article AND the comments. Both are like Steve Martin’s joke about “How to make a million dollars and never pay taxes”. I was expecting some breakthrough in gaming systems that would eliminate the random number generator. But noooOOOOOooooo.
All seriousness aside, isn’t there some other way to simulate events or resolve conflicts in a game other than using random numbers or table lookup?
You can use a book has a random number generator.
Simply open the book in a random page, pick the last number of the nº of page.
My public school banned dice and cards at some point. That was annoying because we played lots of bridge and D&D. One day I brought in this board game called “Nuclear War”. There was an old video game that was modelled very closely on it, actually. You played Fidel, Kaddafi, etc etc. You could launch 10 megaton and up missiles. You could launch bullshit propaganda attacks. The object was to reduce the enemies’s population to 0.
The teacher came over since we were obviously having Fun and skirting the no-gambling rules. She was like, no dice. But we being clever smartasses were like, look no dice, it’s a spinner. She kinda stared at it a second and must have struggled with what I now recognize is the unwillingness to enforce a goddamn stupid bureaucratic rule. She let us played.
It was a crappy game but it let us have something to do in the lunchroom while we cut class. Ironically, the only game where people gambled money was with chess, which was not banned anyway.
That gets you what’s known as a triangular distribution as you probably figured out. Actually I think that would be a fairly reasonable approximation to multi-dice rolls (e.g. 6d6) which do end up approximating a normal distribution. You’d have slightly less common high and low rolls.