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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

#201

Post by stryk »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #195
stryk wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak for what I saw done first-hand. Some guys used their own shanks/shivs/whatever you want to call it, basically any old piece of metal. This was obviously done in their cells on their own. Much more frequently [and out in the open] though was guys using the plastic butter "knives" that came in the dinner trays (think KFC, individually wrapped sets of 1 plastic spork, 1 wetnap, and 1 plastic butter knif…

you had bics? like these? http://webcuriosita.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/penna-bic.... at school we used those as dices directly, notches on each of their six sides, making them roll in a bunch was random enough.

Close, but they were more the "older" style Bic pens from WAY back in the days. These:

http://www.bonvan.com/images/up_images/officepen/229.jpg

The end of the piece that sticks out from the cap worked just like a tiny plastic shovel

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

#202

Post by fenwick67 »

forapurpose wrote: post #161
jdietrich wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

I think I read that the makers of D&D removed/renamed things like demons and devils as a result.

They pulled them out of AD&D second edition for this reason [1]. In third edition they brought the words "demon" and "devil" back though, and they're still there in the latest edition.

[1] https://archive.org/stream/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonMa...

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

#203

Post by Thrwr11 »

meschi wrote: post #191
Thrwr11 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addicts are people and deserve help, sure. Most of the hate towards them comes from their bad behavior and how that affects other people. Deathwishes are just one way to cope with the inability to actually do anything about, say, noisy or violent drug addicts or criminals who don't care about other people.

I haven't seen one "noisy violent drug addict" in my life. I am not saying they don't exist, but the vast majority of drug users or even addicts are not discernible as such. Anyway, that is my European perspective.

Mine is a european perspective, too. And most of these people really have nothing left to lose apart from taxpayer paid welfare -> ordinary civility is absent, disputes are unnegotiable. (Unless you want to have your property / home / loved ones sabotaged.). Personality disorders are rampant. You not looking close enough is not a solution to the drug problem.

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

#204

Post by fenwick67 »

There is an enthralling article in The Intercept by incarcerated hacker Barrett Brown about his time playing DnD and other RPGs in prison.

He also details the spinner:

> With unlimited paper and pencils provided by the federal government, we had everything we needed except for a set of variously sided dice. It turned out that this was generally handled by making a spinner out of cardboard, a paperclip, and the empty internal plastic tube from an ink pen. This latter item is impaled loosely on the paperclip, itself positioned in the center of the cardboard, on which has been drawn a diminishing series of concentric circles divided into 20, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4 equal segments, respectively.

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/16/i-am-fully-capable-of-en...

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

#205

Post by dumbfounder »

kibwen wrote: post #110
dumbfounder wrote: post #73

Or 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...

This would be a variant of Odds and Evens ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odds_and_evens ), though Odds and Evens is kept honest by the fact that it's an adversarial game, so there's no point in players colluding to fix the outcome. To obviate any concerns of player collusion you'd need to ensure that the GM is one of the people picking the numbers, and once you've gone this far you actually only need two people to p…

I have never played any of these games, are some of them without competition? Like everyone is on the same side? It wouldn't work in that case. But all you need is one person picking numbers to be on an adversarial team in order for this to work.

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

#206

Post by fenwick67 »

paulie_a wrote: post #107
cr0sh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Locking someone up for a few years with nothing interesting to do sounds like a good way to make someone come out the other end worse than they were before. Given the (growing) number of private, for-profit prisons - that would be seen as a feature, not a bug. Because if they leave worse off, they'll likely be returning - thus generating a steady income stream courtesy of taxpayers. Cynical, yes - but likely true.

Do you have any info on the growing aspect of private prisons. The last time I looked they were statistically insignificant. Even then I don't agree with the concept but if my hazy memory is correct it was close to 5 percent

> Broken down to prison type, 19.1% of the federal prison population in the United States is housed in private prisons and 6.8% of the U.S. state prison population is housed in private prisons.

> the overall trend over the past decade has been a slow increase

> In the past two decades CCA has seen its profits increase by more than 500 percent.[22] The prison industry as a whole took in over $5 billion in revenue in 2011.[23]

> A 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Justice asserts that privately operated federal facilities are less safe, less secure and more punitive than other federal prisons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Development_2

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

#207

Post by 7Z7 »

meschi wrote: post #191
Thrwr11 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addicts are people and deserve help, sure. Most of the hate towards them comes from their bad behavior and how that affects other people. Deathwishes are just one way to cope with the inability to actually do anything about, say, noisy or violent drug addicts or criminals who don't care about other people.

I haven't seen one "noisy violent drug addict" in my life. I am not saying they don't exist, but the vast majority of drug users or even addicts are not discernible as such. Anyway, that is my European perspective.

You don't have a "European" perspective. You have a wherever-you-are-from perspective, and potentially a whatever-you-choose-to-see one too. I'm from Ireland, we have noisy violent junkies, amongst others less noisy and less violent.

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

#208

Post by specialist »

Simon_says wrote: post #177
specialist wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 irra…

There’s some weak evidence that stress is linked to cancer. It might not be true, but the idea isn’t ridiculous on its face.

True. But I needed more than positive thoughts to put my disease into remission.

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

#209

Post by deadmetheny »

edanm wrote: post #123
pmarreck wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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? Probably for the same reason most things are or aren't done - some form of status-qu…

>It's possible for eyewitness testimony to be the #1 cause of wrongful convictions, but for there to be only e.g. 3 wrong convictions a year out of 100k trials. Which would probably be pretty "acceptable".

"It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer." Three innocent people being punished is a travesty and in no way acceptable.

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

#210

Post by daveFNbuck »

dumbfounder wrote: post #73

Or 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...

I was really surprised not to see this method in the article.
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