How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by nybble41 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #78

ajross wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why stop there? If you switch to triples (10 flips, reroll on 1000-1023) then you can get an amortized cost of about 3.4 flips per d10. That's very close to the ideal outcome of log2(10) ~= 3.32 flips.

Above 3d10 the rate of re-rolls increases; 20 flips for 6d10 gives a worse amortized cost than two sets of three.

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

#242

Post by eximius » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 11:55 PM UTC

tachyoff wrote: post #95

eximius wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hire them?

Way easier to pay them like $0.15/hour in prison than the federally-mandated minimum wage. (That number might be hyperbole, but prison wages, if they even exist where you are, are abysmally, illegally low. I believe some of them are indeed sub-dollar.)

I meant after they served their sentence...

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

#243

Post by em3rgent0rdr » Sat, Mar 03, 2018, 1:41 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #234

dtech wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not a lot wrong with plea bargaining if an innocent suspect can except a fair trail, it trades a more lenient sentence for criminals for a more efficient, speedier and cheaper system. The problem in the US is that poor innocent suspects have heavily stacked odds in a trail: multiple biases in judges and juries and no good lawyer with enough time for their defense. So an innocent must take the plea bargain be…

So, there's a lot wrong about plea bargaining.

No...I think the parent was arguing that the problems are around plea-bargaining, not plea-bargaining itself. I personally think the biggest problem is the inbalance between prosecutor's ability to threatening absurdly large sentences. That distorts the expected value of the risk analysis in the favor of prosecution. But if the worst-case penalties were more reasonable, then plea-bargaing could be a reasonable way to reduce risk.

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

#244

Post by Fjolsvith » Sat, Mar 03, 2018, 1:49 AM UTC

Notorious_BLT wrote: post #7

I guess I can understand the dice ban (sort of?) but the fact that some prisons have apparently have banned games like D&D altogether is bizarre to me. It seems like a healthy, relatively peaceful way to pass time and do something creative. I can't see it having a negative effect that other prison activities don't already make possible.

I ran D&D games as a DM for the entire time I was in prison. Socially challenged inmates tend to gravitate towards those games, and I welcomed them into the group. D&D was a great way to help them learn to interact and work with others.

We used a cardboard spinner with a push tack for the pivot.

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

#245

Post by rb666 » Sat, Mar 03, 2018, 7:37 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #214

rb666 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really a thing in the USA and other 2nd-world countries. In most European countries this is very different.

The term "second-world" refers to former Communist states. It's not a ranking system.

Oh haha, TIL. My bad.

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

#246

Post by Fjolsvith » Sun, Mar 04, 2018, 2:09 PM UTC

We used cardboard spinners. A thumbtack was pushed through and bent over to form the pivot. We got the cardboard from the back of notepads of paper. Concentric circles had equal divisions to form the d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20 ranges.

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

#247

Post by paulddraper » Sun, Mar 04, 2018, 7:35 PM UTC

jadedhacker wrote: post #39

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.

This argument ignores the incredibly vocal anti-death penalty movement and the incredibly steep isolation of the United States in this regard compared to the rest of the world. We're having trouble implementing the death penalty in states that have it because other countries that make the drugs we use have sanctioned exports out of humanitarian concern. The United States is an international pariah. Whether it works f…

In any case, virtually every jurisdiction on earth has practiced capital punishment, now or formerly.

Characterizing rehabilitation as the overwhelming objective of human justice ignores very significant other objectives.

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

#248

Post by brokenmachine » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

kolpa wrote: post #103

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-...

Beware. "sincerely" is generally a term used to give irrational religious beliefs undeserved weight over (s-called) "mere" rational choices.

Interesting observation.

There's no functional difference between "sincerely" believing something that isn't true, and just plain old normal "insincere" believing something that isn't true.

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

#249

Post by brokenmachine » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 2:47 AM UTC

tropo wrote: post #228

Unbeliever69 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U.S. jails/prisons are designed specifically to make the inmate's life as miserable as they are allowed to by law. Trust me, if jails/prisons could ban books or commissary, they would. What you describe is what the Swedish prison system is all about. https://mic.com/articles/109138/sweden-has-done-for-its-pris... . This is a system designed to make people not only pay for their crimes but to help them rehabilitate an…

If you don't lock criminals away in miserable conditions, victims and their family members turn toward private punishment. People will get revenge. It can be official, with a proper trial and all, or it can be unofficial, with the victim's family dishing out whatever sort of justice they prefer. The whole reason for a criminal justice system is to satisfy people who would otherwise take matters into their own hands.…

Most US prisoners are there because of victimless drug crimes.

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

#250

Post by Fjolsvith » Wed, Mar 07, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

ufo wrote: post #218

dumbfounder wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The typical D&D game will have a group of players working as a team and exploring a monster-filled dungeon. A different person is the Dungeon Master and is responsible for crafting the plot of the adventure and presenting challenges to the players (monsters to battle, though choices to make, and so on). However, it isn't really an adversarial thing. A good DM doesn't "play to win" as their goal is to create the most…

Exactly. A good DM thinks up challenges that make players work together to succeed. If plot material is available, the DM doesn't necessarily have to be able to think that up, but it was by far the funnest part of being a DM for me.

I once ran a group adventure where the players' characters were hired by a noble to provide escort for his daughter to a distant kingdom. Along the way, in every town the players stayed, mysterious murders started taking place. Over the trip, authorities started to suspect the adventurers due to circumstances. This really rankled the players and when they discovered the noble daughter in their charge was an evil assassin having fun, they had a massive range of emotions to their reaction. Not only did they have to prove their innocence, they had to find evidence to do so. Some of the players were really torn - what would the noble father do to them if they turned the daughter over? What would happen to them if they didn't?

One interesting effect to running a good adventure in the prison was that a number of non-playing inmates wanted to hear about the latest gaming events, much like following a soap opera.