D&D Urban Legends: I new this guy who...

[Rel]

I do almost the same thing, but the opposite way - I set my dice to low (1) if I want high (20) and vice-versa, the idea being that having the die show a number makes it subtly less probable that I will roll that number. Like how rolling a 20 is 1-in-20, but rolling it twice in a row is 1-in-400...

I hate to break it to you, Torm, but statistically speaking, you're not doing yourself any favors here.

I shouldn't talk however. I'm a pretty "rational" person but I'll "fire" a particular d20 after a lengthy run of bad luck and set it aside in favor of another die that I haven't been using.

 

[cdsaint]

Idle thought: Would a female DM be a Dungeon Mistress, instead?

I'm all in favor of that! All hail the Dungeon Mistress! She would have to wear lots of black or red leather of course.

 

[Daedrova]

Well, it has been a while since I have been able to post (though I havent had too many posts yet) God bless internet access from work. Anyway, it is good to "be back".

To add to our Urban Legends here: I did have the "advantage" of growing up in an extremely religious home. (I say that of course sarcastically, but not as a slam on the relgious. I myself still have Christian beliefs). My father loved his scrouples though, and many of my family members were quite taken back when I expressed interest in RPGs. I had previously heard of the many horror stories (which include most of the "demonic involvment" stories above), but decided to take a slightly more reasonable approach to looking at the game (i.e. looking at the books themselves that Gaming friends of mine had). At the point I began to play my father, being the concerned type, did look into the game finding all pertinent information he could. Unfortunately he didnt manage to take a look at the game itself, but every fantical write up he could find "proving" the evils of Role-playing.
One such was this:
The "original creators" of the Dungeons and Dragons game were heavily involved in the occult. "They" even had close ties to a satanic priest who could call forth demons. To have as much realism as possible in D&D, the creators went to the home of this priest and studied all of the rituals and spells that are used in the game...
Anyone else heard this one before? <grin> This he printed out for me from a web site. I think it still be found via search engines for topics on D&D. Interesting that the name "Gygax" isn't even mentioned though...
I could just imagine being able to actually cast fireball.
Who then would rule this world?...

 

[DanMcS]

My own superstition is thus: Before the game and after I have rolled my dice, I will place them with the most favorable number sticking up(20 on the d20 for example). There is a theory I have that if a dice was sat this way long enough, the molecules would slide downward and make the dice heavier on the opposite. I get this from seeing old windows in houses that are thinner on the top than on the bottom. It has to be caused by gravity pulling the molecules downwards.

I do the same thing with my dice, best side up, but for a much more logical reason: I'm teaching them what their proper positions are. The 20 goes on the side farthest from the table, silly die.

 

[Vahktang]

visiting the US went to a convention and saw Gary Gygax run a game…

Net every GM is mature enough to 'let the dice fall where they may.'
Also, I understand he's always been like that.
A buddy had a party with one member a munchkin, did like a thousand points a damage a round with one ability.
When asked how to satisfactorily solve this balance problem, Gygax replied:
"Multiply the HD of all creatures facing him by a factor of 100."

Oneday we went into the closet, and the map was nowhere to be found.

That was the blue guys' fault.
Every second the universe is created then destroyed. The old stuff, the past, that we can no longer experience, is placed up time for us to experience again (conservation of energy) Sometimes when this happens, the people that do this (the blue guys) don't place everything back where it once was. Then, a moment later, it is back where it once was. This is why.
Read it in a SF story, saw it on a twilight zone episode, 'A matter of Minutes'

I included Paladin and Assassin because I heard it from two different people who could not possibly know each other. details were almost exactly the same. I wondered if anyone else had "heard" this friend of a friend tale.

Steam engine time.
Similiar things occuring with similiar things to build upon, but in areas separated by distance. The bubonic plague was discovered at the same time in two different places. Bell got the patent on the telephone by six hours.
I'm from the west coast. I made up a joke. Several weeks later, I'm on the east coast and the joke is there. Either that is simultaneous creation or my joke travelled 3000+ miles to meet me on the east coast.

How do you know the Gazebo and Head of Vecna are true stories?? They both sound very engineered to me.

They're too wierd not to be real.

More later,

Vahktang

 

[MarauderX]

No. That's a daffy old urban legend made up by tour guides and other ignorant goobs to explain why glass at the bottom of old windowpanes is thicker than glass at the top. The real explanation is that it was MADE that way.

Wrong. Glass(glazing) is never and was never 'made that way'. Glass has no structural capabilities and no one who ever made glass for exterior exposures purposefully made it thin on the top and thick on the bottom. Old glass tends to drop more than new glass because the tempering process for making it has become much more advanced. Impurities are bled out and the glass is adjusted for shading coefficients and R value.

And on top of being an architectural engineer I also happen to be a tour guide (docent), and think what you like but the last thing we do on our tours is make things up. We use up all of our improvising at the game table

 

[Narfellus]

Ul

gravity pulling the molecules down! Who would have ever thought????? Maybe i'll try that one day.

I've heard all the stories over the years. My parents were GREATLY against it. It was a fight every month when Dragon came. I had to try and sneak the magazine out of the mailbox. Of course my mom would find the rare issues that had a boob or ass shot and hide it from me. Oh, the woes of living at home.

 

[Verequus]

Could someone explain the Gazebo and Head of Vecna stories? I've never heard from them.

 

[lkj]

Gotta love that after all this time lurking my first post is off topic. But what the heck. The following is pulled off the Scientific American website. Take it for what it's worth.

Is glass really a liquid? How can this be?
Michael Te Arawa Bennett
New Zealand

Steve W. Martin, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Iowa State University, was happy to tackle this question:

The seeming paradox that a glass is at the same time a liquid and a solid is not easily reconciled. Glasses are "solids" produced by cooling a molten liquid fast enough that crystallization does not occur at the normal freezing point. Instead, the liquid supercools into the thermodynamic never-never land of metastability: kinetically settled enough to exist as a well-defined state of matter, yet not truly thermodynamically stable. As the supercooled liquid cools to lower and lower temperatures, the viscosity of the liquid increases dramatically. That happens because as thermal energy becomes ever less available, chemical bonds within the liquid constrain the atomic motion more and more.
As the glass cools, the time it needs to demonstrate liquid behavior (the "viscous relaxation time") increases and eventually reaches extremes. At the so-called glass transition temperature, the relaxation time is on the order of a few minutes. On a short timescale, the "liquid" glass will appear solid, but after a short while, it can be seen to be slowly flowing, like incredibly thick syrup. At still lower temperatures, the relaxation time reaches values that are truly geologic, i.e., many millions of years. Window glass at room temperature has a nearly incalculable relaxation time, approaching the age of the universe itself. For all practical observations, this glass is a solid. But its solidity is in the eye of the beholder.

(For more information about glass and glass making, see the Corning Glass Museum web site.)
Answer posted on October 21, 1999

 

[Kalendraf]

Beware the Dice Demon!

In the mid-80's, my original gaming group played in a friend's basement for many of our sessions. His family lived in a typical 3 bedroom rambler which had an unfinished basement with painted block walls and a smooth concrete floor. Our gaming area of the basement consisted of a folding table, surrounded by a couch, an old recliner and some other wooden chairs. Besides a nearby pool table, pinball machine and bookcase, and some laundry stuff way on the other side, the room was empty. Next to the table was a large open floor area to play darts, nerf hoops, etc.

Over the span of many sessions, whenever dice would roll off the table onto the floor, they often would never be seen again. We'd search for a while looking under all the furniture, etc, but we couldn't ever locate the dice. Other items that fell off (figurines, pencils, food, etc) would always be easy to find, but the dice simply vanished as if swallowed into a vortex. Pretty much anytime a dice went off the table, it was simply gone...period. There were no pets, no cracks in the floor and no young siblings wandering around that could explain this.

It wasn't another player stealing them either. More than once I saw a dice hit the floor and roll into the wide open nerf hoop zone, yet when I went to pick it up from where it's momentum should have left it, there was simply nothing there. Nothing within 10 feet any direction. And no one else had gotten up to get it either. It simply ceased to be there.

This continued over the span of several years, with the lost dice tally probably reaching several dozen by the end. We began attributing this loss of dice to the "Dice Demon". We theorized that this demon was probably a relative of the Sock Demon who causes your socks to vanish, but this one has an appetite for small geometric shapes instead. On the bright side, we did develop some lightning fast reflexes to catch our dice before the fell to the floor.

Eventually, his family moved and we no longer played at that house. In the many years since, I've played at numerous other houses, but I have only lost a couple dice. To this day, each of us still has no scientific explanation for the massive loss of dice in that particular basement.

Maybe there really was/is a dice demon.