Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did they carve with?
We carved our own knives out of bars of "state soap" .
Who carved the first soap knife and what tool did they use?
How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
111–120 of 250 posts
Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#112Earlier 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…
Another test which I think has been done on rare occasions is measuring the inter-rater reliability between different juries (which could be done by having several juries hear the same trial and then deliberating independently). (It's harder to do this with judges if the judges are also overseeing the trial and ruling on evidentiary and procedural matters.)
Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, power blackouts, police strikes and natural disasters usually lead to outbreaks of looting and vandalism. At least some proportion of the population are deterred by the possibility of being caught and punished.
The main question isn't "Is the prospect of jail a deterrent", but "Is the prospect of 10 yrs in jail more of a deterrent than the prospect of 1 year in jail". The USA has absurdly long sentences for crimes.
That was not the question I was responding to, which made no reference to the length of sentences. It argued that prisons were not an effective deterrent (i.e.: at all), moreover there seems to be a school of thought that we should never punish crime, at all.
I said nothing about adding ten years to sentence lengths. I don’t know, and don’t claim to know what the optimal length of sentence (or other punishment) is, except that it is not zero.
Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#114Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
#1 is not important. Everything costs money, including appeals and cleanups when long-term corruption is uncovered. Adding 1% or 0.1% for integrity testing is trivially justifiable. #2 and #3 are saying the same thing: The powers that be know the system is broken, and don't want to fix it, and therefore want to suppress evidence that shows the brokenness.
#1 is absolutely important. You can't just take valuable time and money from people to do "testing" that, in my opinion, wouldn't tell you anything anyway. It's insulting to all of the professionals involved, especially when they have a backlog of /real/ cases to get to. But let's entertain the idea and say that you get the trial to happen, and your innocent person was found guilty, or vice versa. What do you do with…
> 1. That costs time and money.
False convictions have a gargantuan cost in time, money, and human suffering.
Justice is incredibly important. We need to get it right.
Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#116Earlier 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-...
Damn I really wish I could title the book, it is on the tip of my tongue but I read the same thing.
What I found abhorrent is that the people interviewed in that book, ended up being prescribed meds by good professional Christian Doctors using all means to change their paths from evil. To avoid D&D as it was the devils work.
I would say that those parent's were mentally ill and/or uneducated and that the doctor's were mentally ill and/or uneducated.
Alas, religion.
Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#117Or they could simulate dice by each person picking a number, adding them all up, and then modding by 6 (+1). Could lead to interesting results methinks...
Someone mentioned playing cards were allowed and with a bit of math, card removal, and a lot of shuffling you can use playing cards as somewhat fair dice.
If you remove Kings and any Jokers you have 4 sets 1-12, which mod 6 gives you 8 sets of 1-6 in a single deck (an equivalent to 8d6 can go a long way). For less card math you could just use the 4 sets of face value 1-6 cards. If you replace cards every "roll" and fair shuffle, you have relatively fair dice.
Of course, trick shuffles are too easy an unfair advantage in that situation that I wouldn't suggest playing something like Craps or Yahtzee with Playing Cards, but could certainly be fair enough for a collaborative RPG environment. Similarly, card replacement and amount of shuffling could be relaxed in a RPG setting if the table agrees to allow "unfair" failure/success patterns (which can lead to interesting trade-offs to roleplay; I can succeed at this first die check, but already know I have to fail the next).
ETA: Playing cards and spinners are both mentioned in the linked article. The article describes using a deck for 1d20 as opposed to 8d6 as mentioned above, which makes sense given a D&D context.
Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#118I understand the dice ban somewhat, I mean, gambling is principally what they'd be used for, but why is chess of all things banned? Seems.. counterproductive.
Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
#1 is not important. Everything costs money, including appeals and cleanups when long-term corruption is uncovered. Adding 1% or 0.1% for integrity testing is trivially justifiable. #2 and #3 are saying the same thing: The powers that be know the system is broken, and don't want to fix it, and therefore want to suppress evidence that shows the brokenness.
#1 is absolutely important. You can't just take valuable time and money from people to do "testing" that, in my opinion, wouldn't tell you anything anyway. It's insulting to all of the professionals involved, especially when they have a backlog of /real/ cases to get to. But let's entertain the idea and say that you get the trial to happen, and your innocent person was found guilty, or vice versa. What do you do with…
You want to do double blind, randomized, strictly controlled testing?
Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband
#120Earlier 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?
People believe all sorts of things.
One devout partner implored me to stop meditating (during my Zen & Buddha kick) because she didn't want me to succumb to Satan. Another believer partner educated me about ghosts (tl;dr: they're every where). A coworker told me my cancer was caused by negative thoughts and that germ theory was a conspiracy.
Whaddya gonna do?
My fear is that I'm unknowingly harboring some wildly irrational beliefs.