Time Efficient & Bragging Rights

I live in a state of wonder.

Yesterday, Homer2101 wrote of my decay rules,

"New items' markup doesn't justify the 2.5 extra average degradation rolls. The discount for worn and shabby items doesn't offset their reduced life expectancy under stress. Used items are always most cost-efficient ..."

I honestly don't know how people who live in this world can exist so blithely unaware of how human beings think.  How pervasive is the shot in the image shown, of people waiting many hours for the first touch of a phone they could buy without waiting a week later?  Does Homer not realize that there are players ~ some who I have had play in my game ~ who would throw away an item the second it became "used"?  Just because?  That is how they would see their characters.

I think it's great that Homer crunched the numbers.  It's useful information, and the fact that numbers can be crunched shows how potentially reliable the system is for actual play.  But we do ourselves a disservice when we think the game boils down to how the numbers dictate we should play.  And it astounds me that ~ although there are many people who will never buy anything new, on principle ~ that anyone talking about the subject can be so cognitively dissonant about the way that humans think.  People won't buy "new" because it is cost effective.  They'll buy new because it is "new."  They don't care about the cost.  The gold in their pocket doesn't mean as much to them, as it might to others.  They're adventurers.  There will always be more gold.  But something that is new, is fleeting.

Hell.  Even a new gold piece has a special worthiness that surpasses the value of the metal.  If I were playing a character, and had just bought a new shield, I would look at my fellow player and his used shield and smirk.  "Are you still using that crappy old thing?  Mine is new!"  Oh, what a prick I would be, bragging about my new shield.

Another example, another concern.  The image on the left is the ThinQ Alexa "smart" refridgerator.  You've most likely heard about it.  It is a micromanager that enables you to scan every item of food you put into your refridgerator, so that you can scan it again as you take it out, so the item can keep track of what you have and what you've eaten.  Presumedly, how many calories you're consuming, and from the things I'm reading, speakers for playing music and a voice that carps at you for eating the wrong foods.

There are some things that puzzle me about it.  There are quite a lot of foods that I don't keep in a refridgerator, like flour, sugar, beans, canned items and so on ... and these things get added to the refridgerator after they're cooked together into meals that I make without measuring, because after decades of working as a professional cook I eyeball everything, including most of the common baking I do.  So once I make a meal, out of substances both from and not from the refridgerator, then put them in the refridgerator as left-overs, I'm curious how I scan those left-overs in.  Or, for that matter, if I cut seven slices of cheese off a block, and return the slightly smaller block to the refridgerator, does the refridgerator weigh the cheese?  Or any of the other things I shave down as I'm cooking?  I don't buy pre-packaged foods ... and I'm definitely wondering how I scan out one potato.  Oh well.  There's probably some way it manages this.

If this is the amount of niggling micromanagement we're willing to install into our daily food-consuming activities, some five or six times a day, why would anyone care about having to roll 40 dice to account for equipment decay?

Is it that my readers, and their players, don't know how to speed up the die-rolling process?

I imagine a player with forty items rolling a die, getting a decay result, putting down the die, picking put an eraser, scratching out the "n" next to the character sheet, picking up a pencil, writing in a "u," putting down the pencil, picking up the die, rolling a decay result, putting down the die ...

Are your players really like this?  Homer postulated six seconds per roll.  Mon dieu!

Suppose that it was determined that, out of 60 pieces of equipment, 22 were new.  Some of those wouldn't need to roll at all; if the characters take the effort to pack all the extra uncommonly used articles in a single backpack that doesn't get opened or adjusted, then only the backpack need make a check.  Thoughtful storage would reduce wear and tear.  But let's say, I have 22 items to roll, and I have to use a d4.

First, I can simply roll the dice quickly, in batches of six, noting out loud, "fine, fine, down, fine, down, fine" ~ down meaning an item is downgraded.  Then I make a quick check on my character sheet on the 3rd and 5th item, and begin rolling again.  This way, I can easily do six rolls in six seconds.

Obviously, I'm not using a dice tower.  Dice towers are game momentum killers.  If you're at all interested in the pace of your game, make your players get rid of them.  They're only a way for the player to glom more attention to themselves as they fetishize their die rolls, making others wait and creating unneeded noise at the table.  But what am I saying?  Most of you have already figured this out.

I can speed the process still faster by having my neighbor roll dice, calling off the twenty-two items as I make ticks on my character sheet.  Or, I can roll the dice and my neighbor can make the ticks.  Unless, of course, both you and your neighbor are such profoundly distrustful prats that you can't trust one another to be both honest and faithful ... in which case, why the fuck are you playing with this person, much less sitting next to them?

With the two-person method, I can make 22 rolls in twenty seconds, and probably less.  The checks, once made, don't even need to be addressed during the game session.  The character sheet can be adjusted later, when we're not playing.  Or does that make too much sense?

I'm more than a little astounded that this doesn't seem obvious.  With five minutes and a little sense, with me rolling the dice and the players making ticks on their paper, I could manage five players' equipment.  They would trust my dice, because they trust me, and I would trust them to give the correct number of things that needed a check and to apply the checks to the rolls that hurt worst of all.  I know I could trust my players to do this, because if a player is the sort that won't, it will soon become obvious not only to me, but to every other player I have.  Before I settle in to address the issue, I will probably have two other players separately come to me and say, "You know, I saw Jack doing ..."  These are the kind of players I have.  They don't want to cheat.  They like playing fair.

It must be hard having so little mastery over your game, or the fundamental mechanics of your game, like dice rolling, that you have to make concessions so often for the sake of players who perceive that checks are egregious.  I had been thinking the decay system was a bridge too far, but in retrospect I'm seeing that I've created something rather simplistically elegant.

I refuse to hold myself to a standard of "time saving" with people who will drive all over town for hours on a Saturday to find just the right household towel, between 6-hour sessions playing fortnite and a four-hour football game, but won't sit for five minutes and roll 60 dice.  Fooey!