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.)