A substitute system for Dice (In places where dice are not allowed)

[aramis erak]

a deck of cards is useful where dice are not.

If your talking about using this today there are tons of dice apps for your phone. Why over complicate it. Unless you talking about a prison that would be the only reason you couldn’t use dice or a phone

There are places in the US where use of cards or dice on Sundays are still on the books as criminal acts. (Whether that would stand up in court is irrelevant to the inevitable local harassment which would ensue were someone to fight the ticket. Such areas tend to be extreme cases of social structures staying 50+ years behind the modern...)

And, despite the lack of visibility of it on the internet, there are still a lot of people in the US who lack portable electronics. (according to the US Census Bureau, about 1-in-4 lacks computing. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/acs/acs-37.pdf )

 

[Jonathan Tweet]

GM picks a number, 1 through X.

Player announces a number, 1 through X.

If the sum is X or below, that's the result.

If the sum is greater than X, subtract X for the result.

That's the way to do it. You can get any die range you want.

 

[aramis erak]

That's the way to do it. You can get any die range you want.

Except that, as has been noted by statisticians, this very quickly becomes predictable. RSP is essentially a similar issue.

 

[GMMichael]

Except that, as has been noted by statisticians, this very quickly becomes predictable. RSP is essentially a similar issue.

Psh. Statisticians. What do they know?

I thought about predictability when I was pondering the system. It's only as predictable as your opponent is (and there's a counter to every move). That's an issue in RSP when each player is out to win. But when one player is the GM, that player's goal isn't to win, but to provide a random result. I'd think that would introduce enough variety to keep the system from ruining a game session with predictability.

The bigger problem with it is speed. If you're emulating a d20, picking a number off a table is probably much faster than thinking, "so what's 13 + 18 - 20?"