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How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

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Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#71

Post by avs733 »

scarmig wrote: post #32
paulddraper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminal justice is for reforming but also deterring criminals. If it were only for the former reason, capital punishment wouldn't exist.

Whether prisons are effective for deterrence is an empirical question. As it turns out, they're not particularly effective. The people who go and hold up a convenience store aren't doing it because of a reasoned cost-benefit analysis based on risk of capture, differential value of prison vs freedom, and future discount rates. They're doing it because they don't do those things. That leaves three real reasons: 1) Refo…

>As it turns out, they're not particularly effective.

..In the US.[0]

Everything you say after that needs to be filtered through the same lens. You seem to be making a global statement about why people commit crimes without a lot of support for it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-...

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#72

Post by DoreenMichele »

iamdave wrote: post #67
dfee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think this is a representative sample or a bizarre situational experience?

Ever hear of the Jehovah's Witnesses? Ever hear how people who managed to pull themselves out of that looney bin talk about the way they view the outside world and especially games like DnD? It's more common than you think. Nothing in that comment surprised me and made me wonder if that kid was raised in a JW household before finally getting out of the house and turning hard into the party life. It's way too common o…

I don't know if it was a JW household. Poverty stricken single mother, iirc.

This was in Georgia, deep in The Bible Belt. Hellfire and Brimstone types seem to vastly outnumber the Christians who read the parts of the Bible about love thy neighbor and judge not lest ye be judged.

I've known sincere Christians that I respected. I have known a lot more that make me think of the passage about someone telling Jesus "Someday, people will do things in your name" and he replies "And I will say I never knew them."

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#74

Post by pmarreck »

EggsOnToast wrote: post #70
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #53

For a semester, I taught in a state prison for a prisoner educational program. Every time I went in, I was struck by how punitively petty so many of the rules and corrections officers were. The environment is carefully crafted to suck out all joy and hope from the inmates. Azkaban with its dementor guards is a pretty good illustration of an American prison. Guards are as likely to confiscate gaming materials (and pun…

I'm just giving anecdata here so I'm curious to see if you agree with me. Having known two people that went to prison, my opinion on the system is that I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason. That being said, a lot of people I meet seem to associate going to prison with deserving to live in a hellhole. No one considers the social exclusion itself a hellhole as evidenced by the ubiquitousne…

> I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason

Or not, if most of the incriminating information was eyewitness testimony, the #1 cause of wrongful convictions:

https://www.innocenceproject.org/

MY opinion of the US criminal justice system is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation is almost definitely not being followed, with the bias far into the false-positive conviction camp.

Come to think of it, why is the criminal justice system not "tested"? In other words, set up a mock situation where you know in advance who is innocent and who is not (because it's a setup), and run a mock trial by all the rules using actual jurors, and compare the outcome of the trial to the actual innocence or guilt of the actor?

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#75

Post by Parcissons »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #59
scarmig wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether prisons are effective for deterrence is an empirical question. As it turns out, they're not particularly effective. The people who go and hold up a convenience store aren't doing it because of a reasoned cost-benefit analysis based on risk of capture, differential value of prison vs freedom, and future discount rates. They're doing it because they don't do those things. That leaves three real reasons: 1) Refo…

Capitol punishment is however a complete solution to recidivism for violent crime, undeniably.

Well, i guess what im about to say is not in particular popular- but prisons in the US might be necessary for a reason. The people of the US and Australia, have been carefully selected in the past centurys among the most insane or hardened criminals

There are several records in archives in germany of thieves, con-artists and muderers - for whom the ground got to hot- escaping to the US or Australia.

I can understand a capital punshment system for a society thats longs for a constant state of violence and instantly decays into anarchy, the moment the stick is dropped.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#76

Post by EggsOnToast »

pmarreck wrote: post #74
EggsOnToast wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just giving anecdata here so I'm curious to see if you agree with me. Having known two people that went to prison, my opinion on the system is that I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason. That being said, a lot of people I meet seem to associate going to prison with deserving to live in a hellhole. No one considers the social exclusion itself a hellhole as evidenced by the ubiquitousne…

> I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason Or not, if most of the incriminating information was eyewitness testimony, the #1 cause of wrongful convictions: https://www.innocenceproject.org/ MY opinion of the US criminal justice system is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation is almost definitely not being followed, with the bias far into the false-positive conviction…

I agree. That being said, the reason I tried to choose my words carefully is that, in this instance, I think your point mainly functions as a distraction. I agree that things like witness testimony are sub-par as numerous studies have shown, but that's also an issue wholly separate from the point I was trying to make and I felt like mentioning it would be more of a distraction than a boon with regard to highlighting that there is a difference between being guilty and deserving to be imprisoned and purposely making life needlessly hellish for the inmates.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#77

Post by jdietrich »

dfee wrote: post #62
DoreenMichele wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

D&D and similar have a really negative reputation in some circles, including religious groups. I was a gamer in my teens. One younger member of the group was probably being given a hard time by his religious family for being a gamer. He was often absent from gaming sessions. The weekends he was absent consistently included stories like a drunken car wreck, and now he has a broken leg, or a wild party where some gal s…

Do you think this is a representative sample or a bizarre situational experience?

There was a widespread moral panic over D&D back in the 1980s. A lot of Christians sincerely believed that D&D was a recruitment tool for satanism. Well into the 1990s, many evangelical groups were producing materials warning that D&D inevitably leads to witchcraft, murder and suicide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATUpSPj0x-c

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#78

Post by ajross »

ajross wrote: post #27
setr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you converted the rules to be powers of 2, each coin representing a binary digit, it shouldn't be too bad 24d10 becomes 0-240, so change it to 0-256 and you've got 8 flips (8d2?) Distribution won't be correct but hey, 8 flips

Four flips can get you 16 outcomes of course, rerolling values out of bounds means you need 4*16/10 = 6.4 amortized flips to generate a d10, or ~154 total to get 24d10. For large dice counts like that, it's probably better to just use a manual table for a bell curve based on ~8-10 flips. No human player is going to care about result fidelity beyond a thousand possible results anyway.

Actually I'm realizing a much more efficient (but still simple enough to be practical) way to generate d10 results is to do them in pairs. Do seven flips to generate a binary number to be interpreted as a "percentile" result in the range 00-99, rerolling on 100-127, then treat the two digits independently.

That gets you to 4.48 amortized flips per d10.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#79

Post by DoreenMichele »

jdietrich wrote: post #77
dfee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think this is a representative sample or a bizarre situational experience?

There was a widespread moral panic over D&D back in the 1980s. A lot of Christians sincerely believed that D&D was a recruitment tool for satanism. Well into the 1990s, many evangelical groups were producing materials warning that D&D inevitably leads to witchcraft, murder and suicide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATUpSPj0x-c https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...

Yes, this was in the 80s. I'm old.

Thank you.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#80

Post by cableshaft »

Thrwr11 wrote: post #65
cableshaft wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slips of paper, write 1-20 (or whatever the die faces are) on them, shuffle them up, have people pick one. There's your randomness. You could even insure an even distribution and have like 1-6 in there 4 or 5 times (if it's a d6), and don't return the slips back to the pile until the pile is depleted. Or you can do what I've done for testing pen and paper game designs where a die wasn't handy, and do the above and wr…

You have to put the slips of paper back if you want to simulate dice.

Yes, I didn't mention it but that's what you'd do in the first one. There are people that prefer dice get rolled more predictably (an even amount of 1s, 2s, 3s, etc), so you can just have a few sets of repeats and don't have them return the slips if you wanted that.

Some people get really mad with true randomness and think the system is rigged. Something I've learned when designing video games. Settlers of Catan have Dice Cards they sell for people who hate that "the 4 alwaaaaays gets rolled and my 8 didn't get rolled once, that's bullshit!"

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