I have a combination dice tower, dice try and dice storage system that I would fight tooth and nail to keep.

Why is it so hard for people to read the blurb on the right?:

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(Emphasis entirely mine.)

In short - the d20 mechanic enables you to resolve everything. If everything you encounter becomes something you can interact with mechanically and assign a DC to, a widget, then you are no longer actually roleplaying in a fictious world. You are just interacting with the mechanics of a game with a thin veneer of fiction layered on top.

This is true iff you think that having the ability to interact with mechanically means you must interact with it mechanically.

I've played coherent games with flexible, (almost) universally-applicable core mechanisms since the 1980s. This is not a thing that is new to D20. D&D3 didn't invent having coherent, flexible, universally-applicable core mechanisms. Weirdly enough we didn't at any point devolve into just interacting with the mechanics of a game because, well, we understood what the point of the game was and just appreciated having a way to adjudicate things neutrally when we needed it.

So first error: assuming that because you can adjudicate almost everything with dice you must.

Old School: "I flash the barkeep my best smile, order a cup of ale and pay with a handsome tip and try to get him talking about the local rumours in a chatty friendly manner."

DM considers the scene and factors in the fighter's 14 charisma and decides that a good impression is made.

Now let me strip the rose glasses from this and give other alternative outcomes that I have actually seen in those sainted "Aulde Skhoole" days:

• DM considers the scene and factors in that the player took the last slice of pizza and gets churlish. Bad impression is made on NPC.
• New DM freezes as something he didn't prepare for happens and spends a half-hour flipping desperately back and forth between the PH and the DMG to find out what to do next.
• DM makes up a reaction mechanism on the spot without thinking it through, throws 2d6, has them come up snake-eyes and decides the barkeep goes berserk and tries to murder the PC.

And so on. Because, get this, DMs are human too and sometimes have brain farts where ideas belong and stupid things happen. Having rules that offer guidelines, even if you don't actually roll for a situation (more on this later), can lessen those brain farts and increase reasonable outcomes.

D20: "I flash the barkeep my best smile, order a cup of ale and pay with a handsome tip and try to get him talking about the local rumours in a chatty friendly manner. Actually a Persuasion roll. I roll 12, +2 from Charisma and +2 from Proficiency, so 16."

The DM gives another +2 for the handsome tip and decides 18 is good enough to make a good impression.

I have, as I've said, been playing with (non-D&D) systems that have consistent, universal game mechanisms since the 1980s. I have never, not even once had any but the newest, greenest, most inexperienced players of any game do what he says is normal here. (And new, green, inexperienced players do stupid things in any system, OSR or modern!)

Here's a more common outcome in my experience. (YMMV naturally, and if it does, I'm so sorry you have terrible fellow players surrounding you!)

Player: "I flash the barkeep my best smile, order a cup of ale and pay with a handsome tip and try to get him talking about the local rumours in a chatty friendly manner."

GM: ...

OK, let's break down the GM actions by things I have seen once again.

• GM checks the player's stats and skills, realizes that on a Persuasion roll he'll succeed about 80% of the time anyway on a stressful task and, since this isn't a stressful task, and since the barkeep earns money by literally being friends with as many people as possible, decides the barkeep reacts well and is open to talk.
• GM insists on some actual in-character interaction and notes that the PC says something that is taboo in town. Asks for a skill role on local lore and, with its failure, decides that the gaffe happens and the barkeep clams up.
• GM insists on some actual in-character interaction and notes that the PC says something that is taboo in town. Asks for a skill role on local lore and, with its success, sidebars the player and lets him know and gives him a chance to undo the action. As a result the barkeep is friendly and aids.

And, naturally, if it turns out that this situation is critical for some reason, I've also seen:

• GM asks for a Persuasion roll against a target number.

See how in the first case that's almost identical to the so-called "Old School" case, and how in that first case having all the tools to do the roll helped make the decision without, you know, the actual roll? See how in the second and third the ability to do task rolls on anything gets some nuance in the RP, even though the actual persuasion attempt wasn't rolled out?

See how, in a case where it might be needed, the persuasion attempt could actually be rolled out in a way that is understood by everybody around the table instead of some poorly-thought-out ad-hoc thing?

So just to repeat this theme here: the fact that you can roll for almost any situation doesn't mean you should or will.

And I think any sane person who has read to the end would now agree that the d20 mechanic should die in a fire. It was an interesting experiment. Maybe we are all better off for having tried it. But we are not better off for persisting with it.

I guess I'm insane, because having read to the end the only thing that I think needs to die in a fire is OSR grognards who denigrate other styles of play. Who preach BadWrongFun™ because people are having fun with something other than the games they wear such deeply rose-tinted glasses for.

They're called Arch'd4¹ and can be found in various online venues if your local purveyor won't stock them.

¹Link is representative. I'm not recommending this particular site because I can't buy from any western source.

I always liked Kahuna. Quick to set up. Easy to explain even to casual gamers. Has a lot more depth than it appears at first glance.

If you want to go with the classics, the only form of Chess I enjoy is Xiangqi. It's a faster-moving and more dynamic game than International Chess, but if you're good at the latter the skills, after you get past a few little "gotchas", transfer well to this. Related (very distantly: it's more closely related to Stratego in that it inherits from the same parent) is Junqi, though you'll want to play the refereed version (either a human referee or the various mechanical/electronic referee systems out there) for the most enjoyment.

For card games, well in traditional cards there's (literally) hundreds of choices, perhaps thousands. For commercial card games I really liked the Star Realms series of games when I got them.

And the die uses the old form of 5: 伍

From way back in the days, Valley of the Pharaohs. While not my first game that attempted to be historically accurate (that honour falls to Chivalry & Sorcery) it was the first such game I found that not only tried to be historically accurate but also supplied loads of supporting material for it. (This was more important pre-Internet than it is now because it was both time-consuming and hard to find good, solid historical information that was usable in play.)

But I could never interest anybody in playing it.

Your relationship with your significant other. Some monsters don't look monstrous. They can use charms and wiles to steal your girl/boy/otherfriend from you if you don't pay up.

I like the system in Mythic quite a lot, but it's quite involved and can take you out of whatever game it is you're playing. Some people don't like this.

Parts Per Million publishes, seemingly, a million Solo RP supplements for a million different games. (I got their Solitude supplement for Chivalry & Sorcery because I wanted to solo that.) Their approach is to design an oracle that builds on the core mechanisms of the underlying game system, so in the case of Chivalry& Sorcery their yes/no oracle is built up on the "Skillskape" (sic) system so that your oracular questions are resolved the same way as the other mechanisms of the game. Their "complex questions" oracle is multiple-d100 generated word prompts you can use to inspire inspiration, by way of comparison. There are four columns headed "Chivalry, Piety, Sorcery, and The World" and each of those has 100 words under it. You roll d100 and read the four words attached to that number, or you roll four d100 and read each one separately.

In comparing the two, for yes/no questions they are rougly the same in terms of outcomes with Solitude just feeling more like it "fits" with the underlying game system.

Mythic's approach to complex questions is a bit "twenty questions". Instead of asking "what's in the box?" you ask "is there a weapon in the box?" (no) "are there potions in the box?" (no) "is there writing implements in the box?" (no) "are there body parts in the box?" (yes). In practice I've found that a bit tedious and tend to shy away from the Mythic oracle for those kinds of things.

The Solitude approach would be to roll d100 four times on four columns (if it's not so important maybe only once reading across the columns) to get words you try to interpret for your improv. "What's in the box?" "Chivalry: venerable (84), Piety: demons (58), Sorcery: wield (4), The World: drought (8)" From here, depending on how events have transpired, and the nature of your world setting, you might say that the ancient (venerable) box contains sorcerous materials that let you control (wield) demons (duh) that when unleashed can bring drought upon the land. Or perhaps that the box held the thing that was binding the demons and by opening it you've unleashed them. Or whatever else "venerable/demons/wield/drought" bring up to mind. The weak point of this approach is that it has the same criticism of using Mythic in yes/no questions: it draws you out of the game system you're using. That being said, an easy fix to this is to pre-roll the words each session. Roll a handful of words from each column before you start a session and cross off words as you use them. That way you're not pulled out of the moment with die rolling that doesn't match. You get the benefit of a word-based complex oracle without the fiddling around and table-flipping that you'd otherwise get using them extemporaneously.

So which would I recommend?

I love Mythic ... but not as a solo game. I use it as a cap system or (increasingly) a standalone system for GM-free RP in groups. For solo RP I've found the Parts Per Million approach to oracles more satisfying and in my journaled C&S game I follow Solitude's approach (with some added 已经 stuff for the Hell of it because I can; I chiefly use that as an oracle for NPC motivations and the like).

I really like this approach of "two dice highest" for "likely" and "two dice lowest" for "unlikely".

Only works from 1-3. 4 has 5 strokes (6 lines), for example.

I bought them off of Taobao (like … pretty much everything I've bought in the past decade or so 🙃). You can probably find them on AliExpress as well, I would guess.

Yep. And sometimes that lack of breadth was deliberate. They wouldn't look at alternatives. They just wanted to "fix" the game they played.

Buy. I wouldn't even know how to begin cutting stones.

I got it from a shop on Taobao. (Along with the dice you see there including the skull-face D6s, the ancient Chinese d18, the Chinese Chess dice, ...)

Upvote for recognizing that "different from what I want" is not the same as "bad".

I wish the blog writer had learned that.

Here's one source. I cannot vouch for or against it; I buy inside China, not outside.

You were saying?

Pick a different old school game that incorporates this stuff? Runequest is a very old school game that easily supports life paths.

Chrysoberyl is the naturally-occurring "cat's eye" gem, though scapolite, spinel, tourmaline, corundum, and even quartz can display this behaviour as well.

There are probably artificial cat's eye gems that are made that way, but natural cat's eye is a thing.