The luck roll

I'm going to start this site off by talking about my favorite TTRPG tool, the luck roll. Loads of groups do something along these lines, but here's mine.

This is a procedure for resolving those questions that can't be answered by the established fiction, the GM's notes, or the player characters' actions—things like "Is there a fire extinguisher handy?" or "How many patrons are in this bar?" or "Did anyone notice all the commotion we just made?" First, you rephrase the question in yes-or-no format, so something more like "Is the bar crowded?" I kinda prefer to ask in a way that makes "yes" the better result for the player characters, but that's not really important.

Then, you just roll a d6 and interpret the result as follows.

1. No, and...
2. No.
3. No, but...
4. Yes, but...
5. Yes.
6. Yes, and...

The "and" results intensify the answer. The "but" results mitigate it. For example:

"Is there a fire extinguisher handy?" "No, and there isn't one in the whole building."

"Is the bar crowded?" "Yes, but you don't know anyone here."

It's extremely simple, but easily applied to an infinite range of situations. As a GM, I find it really fun to fill in those and/but details. I also love to roll a die and find our whole game taken in a new direction by the result.

I also use the luck roll during session prep to come up with background details, and occasionally base other random-roll tables on the same basic format. For example, I had my players roll on this "Do I escape the trap?" table when they wandered into a dungeon room with a falling cage trap.

1. No, and... they're hit by the cage for 2d10 bludgeoning damage, and stuck inside it.
2. No. They're stuck inside the cage.
3. No, but... they're near the cage wall as it falls, and notice in time to try to escape. They can make a Dexterity save to jump away, but at a risk: Save result 10-, they're pinned underneath the cage for 4d10 bludgeoning damage, restrained, and prone. Result 10–14, they're hit for 2d10 bludgeoning damage, but escape. 15+, they escape completely.
4. Yes, but... they're clipped by the cage's edge or falling debris, and take 1d10 bludgeoning damage.
5. Yes. They're outside the cage when it falls.
6. Yes, and... the trap isn't even triggered if everyone in the room rolls result.

I should point out that this idea was very much influenced by FU: the Freeform Universal RPG. That game arranges its results slightly differently on the die, but it's pretty much the source of that Yes/No/And/But language for me, far as I remember. I've never actually used FU itself, though! Which is a shame, because it looks brilliantly simple.

Anyway: That's the luck roll. It's handy.

So I wanted to have a website again...

Hey, all. I've been getting tired of platform-delivered, algorithm-managed media for a while now, and kind of yearning for the era of personal sites, webrings, hand-coded HTML, and the freedom to build whatever I wanted. So I've been saying-in all my social—media places, like Bluesky and Twitch and whatever—that it's time to return to the Old Ways. Then I watched that recent Homestar Runner "Back 2 a Website" cartoon and I realized it was finally time to actually do it.

So, here it is: The latest version of the Groove Pit—which is what I've called the various incarnations of my personal website since literally some time in the 1990s.

I'll probably mostly put TTRPG stuff here, and arrange it in a blog-like format. I don't think I'll add an actual blog, because content management systems are always vulnerable to hacks, or to comment spam, or to just rotting away over time. But if I build my site out of regular-ass HTML, and NeoCities gets rolled up in some corporate Katamari, I can just take the same files and put them up somewhere else.

That said, I will probably make an RSS feed! RSS is cool; it's absolutely one of those technologies that folks should rediscover.

Anyway, this whole thing is very much a work in progress. I'll spare you the "under construction" animated GIF, though.