

A Pair Of Dice Which Never Roll 7 - avner
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/dice/

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boredguy8
I don't like the "after a couple of rounds, 7s are allowed". It undermines
part of the randomness. Our 'house game' simply had the problem that the
robber arrives too quickly. So we made the rule that the robber can't advance
until Player 1 is rolling for the third time. From that point forward, the
robber advances. This gives the advantage of allowing more development, but
without obviating the 'randomness' of robber landing.

Also: Free settlers-like multiplayer: <http://games.asobrain.com/>

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psb217
With three d10s and one d6 you could do this: d10 a: 6,6,6,6,6,8,8,8,8,8 d10
b: 4,4,4,10,10,10,3,3,11,11 d10 c: 5,5,5,5,9,9,9,9,1,12 d6:
d10a,d10a,d10b,d10b,d10c,d10c

One roll, no relabeling. d6 tells which d10 to pull your number from.

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time_management
This is interesting, but this is a bit more hackish than simply re-rolling the
dice. Most people would just reroll.

My personal opinion is that dice-hacks should be done to reduce the amount of
thinking necessary, not increase it while producing a slightly better result.

I designed a role-playing system once based on the median of 5 d10s. That
worked pretty well. It generates a similar bell-curve distribution to the one
you get by adding dice, but doesn't require mental arithmetic with large
numbers (e.g. 5d10 involves a range of 5-50). I think m5d10 is better than
5d10 because it's easy to develop a feel for "difficulty 7" vs. "difficulty
8"... whereas if the numbers are 37 vs. 38, it gets to the point where 1 point
doesn't mean much, and the numbers seem completely made up (which, of course,
they are, but they shouldn't _seem_ so).

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Hexstream
"This is interesting, but this is a bit more hackish than simply re-rolling
the dice. Most people would just reroll."

It's the point...

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dissenter
1\. Rerolling the dice is still a faster (and thus better) way of solving this
problem.

2\. He could've used the time he spent writing that article to release a free
dice rolling iPhone app that implements his special Settlers roll. It could
even keep track of when to stop rerolling sevens. There are several similar
apps already in the store. It would be trivial to write one that auto-rerolled
sevens. This is something that might actually be of use to people, though,
then again, maybe not.

To me it looks like the author wasted his time.

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hugh
_1\. Rerolling the dice is still a faster (and thus better) way of solving
this problem._

Ah, but it's not guaranteed to terminate.

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litewulf
Frankly, if I discovered that a pair of die were summing to seven, it would be
more fun to roll over and over than actually playing a game.

