Role-Playing for Dummies

Chapter 5: About dice roleplaying

---

Dices, from BESM, Slayers D20 and D&D to Elftown

There are several types of dice games and dices to use while role-playing. The most common I’ve run across is the obvious Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve never personally played and have heard the rules somewhat change depending on the volumes you play by.

Basically when it comes to dices you mainly need them in moments of conflict such as battles, detecting lies, finding hidden things, luck and so on. The GM or game rules decide what dice you will be rolling and what number(s) you need in order to resolve the conflict.

Now, some of you just like me, maybe not own any D&D dices. Yeah, they are kind of expensive and you don’t really need to buy any anyways. There are several programs and websites on the internet that generate random numbers between 1 and 20 to 1 and 100. Also if you haven’t noticed, every Elftown wiki page had a d20 dice in the wiki-page data. The dice’s number simply changes every time you edit the page.

---

Dice Based Battles

All right, so we covered free form fighting, I’ll go over some dice based fighting.

Basically, in free form fighting we’ve seen what to do and what to not do. In dice based fighting, it’s about the same except in the end a dice calculates the full impact of your attack.

You have to remember there are different dice systems out there. Some are simply and some are a little more complex. I’ll start off by going over a rather easy system and go off into more complicated details later on.

First off, when it comes to dice based fighting, you have a dice based game so your characters have stats and your equipment is likely to have stats as well. There are several methods and a minimum amount of stats in use in a role-playing game. The basic stats I’m most familiar with are the following:

Strength, intelligence, dexterity and luck

Now, some people often use different names for the same stats or tend to add more stats, which could be called sub-stats. Amongst these are the following:

Agility, speed, accuracy, constitution, defense, vitality, attack, charisma, knowledge (could be intelligence) and magic (could also be intelligence)

On a character sheet there will often be an even number of stats. This even number makes it easier to decide which stat counters which and allows a number of combination for character build strategies. These will be covered later in the tutorial.

So, basically when fighting a dice based battle, it’s important to develop a strategy and take a look at your opponent’s stats and sometimes skills, if they have any, in order to develop a strategy and counter points depending on what action you anticipate they might take. To be able to develop these you must know which stat counters which. Normally…

Strength counters defense
Dexterity counters agility or dexterity (depending on if dexterity is both used for accuracy and speed or not)
Luck counters luck

Some of the stats are a little more complicated to counter such as intelligence. It can be counter by more than one stat, it all depend son the situation.

When fighting magic with magic: Intelligence counters intelligence
When fighting defense with magic: Intelligence counters defense or constitution

Now depending on the type of magic you cast, another stats may be the counter stat. I tend to categorize my spells in two categories: direct magic and indirect magic.

Direct magic: Mainly spells that affect a character physically.

Indirect magic: Mainly spells that affect a character spiritually or indirectly.

When it comes to indirect magic intelligence can be countered with intelligence or constitution. Now, remember that these are not accurate counters and that they may vary depending on the system, the amount of stats and the GM that owns the role-playing game.

Once you’ve figured out the stat counters, you add up equipment bonuses to the stats depending on the anticipation. If the opponent will be attacking with a specific weapon you only need to add the stats of the weapon to the base stats as well as the stats from the armor and accessories that affect the character constantly (boots, gloves, hats and jewelry). Having that you can anticipate the opponents best attack move with out skills or magic. You simply need to do the same with armor and constantly affecting equipments to know the maximal defense of the character. If you anticipate any skill add-ons to the attack or defense, you simply add them as well. By doing the following you will be able to determine the maximum abilities of your opponent and be able to counter them effectively. This method obviously works best on forum and slow going role-playing games because it’s a slightly difficult and long process.

If you see that any adjustments may be necessary or things to correct please notify me.

---

Dice Game Definitions

Atk : Attack
Str : Strength
Def : Defence
Vit : Vitality
Dex : Dexterity
Agi : Agility
Spd : Speed
Int : Intelligence
Mag : Magic
Psy : Psychic
Dex : Dexterity
Luk : Luck
Cha : Charisma
Con : Constitution
HP : Health Points
MP : Magic Points
SP :Spell Points or Skill Points
2D20, 3D10, 1D100, etc. : Basically the number before the D stands for the ammount of dices, D stands for dice and the number after the D for the number of faces on the dice.

---

Return to Role Playing for Dummies
On to Chapter 6. Conclusion