Random Rules

 

A bunch of dice-rolling rubrics I've adopted for stuff that keeps coming up in our campaign:

 

SEXUALITY (AND GENDER, HALF-ASSEDLY)

Certain of my players want to know how attractive everybody they meet is, what their sexual orientation is, and whether the PCs can try to seduce them or at least gainfully flirt with them. So I'll roll a d8 and…

1. This person is a 0 on the Kinsey scale (they are strictly heterosexual)
2. Kinsey 1
3. Kinsey 2
4. Kinsey 3 (bisexual, or maybe pansexual—our man Kinsey is a bit of an antique at this point, after all)
5. Kinsey 4
6. Kinsey 5
7. Kinsey 6 (strictly homosexual)
8. This person doesn't land anywhere on the Kinsey scale. Maybe they're asexual; maybe they don't fit a gender binary and so “heterosexual” and “homosexual” don't apply to them (in which case I might reroll and substitute gynosexual/androsexual, or just figure they're pansexual, or whatever; this is very much a “make it up by GM fiat” result).

This is all then filtered through a cultural lens. In an egalitarian, civil-libertarian society, people will just act on their desires as they please. In a more restrictive one, some people will accommodate themselves to social mores and expectations. On a low-tech planet with a quasi-medieval society that's big on hierarchy, patriarchy, “traditional values,” etc., everybody from 1 through 6 is probably going to be “straight,” or at least strongly present that way. Only those who cannot accommodate themselves to heteronormative relationships at all are going to be out enough, or indiscreet enough (or miserable enough), to be perceptible to the PCs.

For the most part, trans men and women are just subsumed into superordinate categories here: men are men, women are women. If I were trying to publish this table in some manner of Official Rules, this would probably gnaw at me (big “on the one hand…but on the other hand” feelings re: representation, erasure, segregation) but for a home game where some of my players just want to be louche horndogs, it works fine. We are tastefully fading to black before anybody's genitals enter the picture, at any rate.

 

SEXINESS

When they ask, “How hot is this guy?” I just roll a d10 and give them the result. Would it make more sense, anthropologically speaking, to come up with some die roll that generates something like a normal distribution and then convert that to a 10-point scale so that most people are in the 4-to-6 range and actual 10s are vanishingly rare? Yes. But 1) that's more work and 2) it's more fun when every tenth guy they meet is a total smokeshow and Mustang and Sarai start fighting over him.

 …on the other hand, even as I write this, it occurs to me that doing something like (3d6+2)/2, rounded down, might be kind of fun too. That way, a 10 is incredibly rare, nobody suffers the indignity of being a 1, and the average person is a solid 6, which experience has taught us is good enough for Sarai, assuming they have a nice personality / know all the best restaurants around here.

 

WHAT TIME IS IT HERE?

We have a universal 24-hour clock for our space adventures to make timekeeping simple and comprehensible. Universal time is used on ships, on stations, in underground arcologies, etc. But on planet surfaces, people are probably going to have local timekeeping, and even if they don't, we want to know the position of the sun in the sky, how much daylight is left, etc. Thus, a d6 roll:

1. The middle of the night (~0200, in a 24-hour day)
2. Around dawn (~600)
3. Late in the morning (~1000)
4. Early in the afternoon (~1400)
5. Around dusk (~1800)
6. Late in the evening (~2200)

 

THE ORACULAR d20 (OR 2d6 SOMETIMES)

Everybody does this, right? On a 20, it's exactly what the players want to hear; on a 1, it's pretty much the opposite. In between, all sorts of shades of “no, but” and “yes, but.”

The players ask, “Did our mark walk to the same bar we met Ms. Whomever at?” Figure there are probably 10 bars around here, at least, but even if there are 20 or more, higher odds are more fun, so if we hit a 19 or 20, yes, it's the very same one. 15–18 will be (practically?) next door. A 3? It's halfway around the space-station ring (or fully on the opposite end of town). A 1? Maybe it's not even open to the public.

Did the guy whose hotel room they're snooping around in just leave his compad on the desk, power on, logged in, no security? That would be quite a stroke of luck for the PCs—only a 20 will do it. But maybe on a 19, he writes all of his passwords in a paper notebook that he left in his unlocked desk. On an 18, maybe the desk is locked but easily broken into. On a 17, maybe he didn't write the password down, but it's just really easy to crack. On a 1, of course, he took the incriminating compad with him.

Sometimes the oracle takes the form of 2d6, like a reaction roll. How'd these aliens like Sarai's cooking? Well, on a 7 they thought it was fine, on a 12 it was the best thing they've ever eaten, and on a 2 they'd be throwing hands if they weren't busy with some form of extraterrestrial emesis. (I guess that is a reaction roll, really.)

The Ends of the World

We're all freaking out, right? We're all coping in different ways. One of my least productive, most unhealthy ways of coping has been to trawl through some of the darker corners of Reddit not actually looking for concrete advice about how to arm myself or how to prepare myself for disaster but just sort of…window shopping for unhinged behavior. Determining that if I did belatedly decide to become a gun guy, I would get a Mini-14. That if I did decide to gird my proverbial loins for the crumbling of American society, I should have two months' worth of rice, beans, and water down in the basement.

That's right: I've been on r/preppers. And you know what? They have lots of good advice! Good advice about first aid training and water purification techniques and home gardening and lots of other stuff I intend to learn about. But you know what else they have? Well, yes, guns. Way too many guns. But also jargon! Jargon for days. More initialisms than the DoD. And there are several initialisms they particularly love that communicate something dark about the prepper mindset (and maybe about the American mindset in general): SHTF, WROL, TEOTWAWKI. These are when the Shit Hits The Fan, when we are living Without Rule Of Law, and The End Of The World As We Know It.

SHTF is a bit vague, kind of an all-purpose label for “things get bad enough that I actually get to put my preps into action.” Not so sinister on its own, but in light of what it turns out many preppers' strongest fixations are, the yearning for that moment starts to feel ugly. WROL is probably the most telling one, because “rule of law” actually means something, and it's not this—a society without rule of law is something we've struggled with, to a greater or lesser degree, for pretty much the entirety of civilization, or at least the part of civilizational history that actually aspired to establishing rule of law. We're definitely living without rule of law in the United States right now, in a particularly significant and dangerous way. But to the gun fetishists, the survivalists, the far-right fantasists, a state “without rule of law” is, in short, one where they get to shoot Black people without consequences. Or, excuse me, rioters and looters. Bandits. Criminals breaking into their houses.

It's an imagined emergency scenario that blends the fictions of postapocalyptic games and zombie shows with the quasi-history of the American frontier and decades of deranged right-wing news coverage. It's not something that has ever really happened in human history; periods of true anarchy tend to be extraordinarily short, because there's always some wannabe government (a barbarian tribe, a rebel general, a gang, a guerilla army, a crime syndicate, a militia) ready and willing to step in, for better or (usually) worse, when the preceding government recedes or collapses. Looting is something soldiers do in wartime; it's not something neighbors do to each other in emergencies, even prolonged ones. The preoccupation with “looters” and “scavengers” is closely tied to news coverage of American riots and natural disasters (as well as films, shows, and games that have reproduced the concept, often in even more lurid form), and that news coverage is propaganda. People steal the occasional TV, sure, but they mostly take essentials—food, sanitary products—that they have no other access to. And they take them from abandoned stores, not from each other, not from family homes.

But we have a lot of people yearning for this fantasy scenario, itching for a lawless state in which they can become the law (and gun down dangerous dark-skinned criminals). They keep dreaming even as actual rule of law dissolves and the Republic with it.

It's TEOTWAWKI that really gets me. Child of the 90s that I am, the phrase never fails to conjure up for me the REM classic “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and specifically the Roland Emmerich classic Independence Day. Alien invasion! The White House blowing up! Mass destruction across the world, governments decapitated, military forces obliterated. This is essentially what a lot of preppers seem to have in mind as TEOTWAWKI—maybe not the literal aliens, but some cataclysm that obliterates all governments and most of the world's population. Global nuclear war, or in recent years an impossibly virulent and deadly pandemic. A vanishingly improbable event that, if it does come, they will almost certainly not survive.

Meanwhile, the world is ending every day, in ways large and small. The change is usually gradual enough not to feel jarring, but the world never stops turning. Think back to just 10 years ago. How inconceivable did a Donald Trump regime and all its attendant absurdities and humiliations seem? Think back 25 years. Could anybody imagine the erosion of American hegemony, the failure of the new international order, imperialist or revanchist states invading each other across the globe in naked attempts to impose puppet regimes or seize territory? Go back 40 years. Forget the fall of the Soviet Union; who could have imagined the internet? Smartphones? Machine translation?

There's some worldbuilding advice here, something to keep in mind when putting a TTRPG campaign setting together: There is no such thing as global collapse. The Black Death didn't do it; nothing short of complete annihilation will. We will not reexperience the Dark Ages and see worldwide technological regression. (The supposed Dark Ages weren't really all that dark, anyway, even in Europe.) There's arguably not even such a thing as regional or civilizational collapse. The histories we have of collapse, of decline and fall, of civilizational ruin, are nearly all elite narratives. If you were a Roman patrician in 476 CE, the Ostrogothic conquest of the city surely felt like the end of the world. If you were a plebe, or a slave, you could have been forgiven for hardly having noticed. Local government didn't change. The Senate didn't go away. Everybody still spoke Latin. No perceptible catastrophe occurred. The world kept turning. It always does. Things change, and often for the worse, but often in dreary, grinding, unspectacular ways.

There are lulls in history, too, of course, but they're shorter and more contingent and more localized than you might think. The European Middle Ages, particularly in Western Europe—the basis for the traditional fantasy settings that underpin so much of the TTRPG world—seem fairly socially and technologically static to many contemporary observers, but at the same time than England and France were slogging through their Hundred Years' War and building the zillion frontier castles that dot our imagined fantasy landscapes, enormous changes were taking place as nearby as Iberia, and of course French and English people were sailing off to the Crusades (and extraordinary things were happening in the Americas, and in Africa, and in Asia).

And there are counterparts to even the relative lulls. “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen,” as Lenin actually probably never did say. The shit is mostly definitely hitting the fan now. None of us were prepared.