Drawing lots to select players

Hey y’all! I did a quick writeup about drawing lots to select players for something to happen to. It’s straight out of an elementary school classroom, but I was thinking about how many times I wanted to pick individual players for something but didn’t want to be somehow biased in my selection. I was thinking about assigning each player a number and rolling a die, but that gets unwieldy quickly and especially with weird numbers of players (5 players? 7 players? 9 players?). This kind of mechanic might also be useful for determining player initiative on the spot :slight_smile:

Does this situation ever come up for you in your games, and how do you handle it?

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I’ve always gone with a die roll, but it’s difficult with odd numbers.

The idea of drawing lots never occurred to me…

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I feel like you could incorporate this into your game in different ways depending on the type of game. Playing a game of Kids on Bikes? Draw popsicle sticks. Playing a cyberpunk game? Use a cool digital dice roller. Playing in a European fantasy setting? Use strands of string. Something to keep it fresh when you change settings.

Personally, I don’t individualize initiative. One dice roll determines if PCs or Monsters go first every turn, this can get tricky with large groups however. If I want to call out one person at random I’ll typically just ask one of the players to pick someone random without knowing why. It works pretty well actually haha. But obviously that’s not the cleanest solution.

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I love the idea of making it specific to the setting!! I’m also totally the same way about initiative, I much prefer team turns instead of everyone taking their own turns saying “I hit them with my sword” and so on.

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If you have a Luck mechanic of some sort, go with the player with highest or lowest current Luck, depending on whether the outcome is beneficial or not.

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That sounds pretty intuitive, especially if players have to reroll Luck every day or something like that! Though, I like the idea of drawing lots if only to always be up in the air.

Not an OSR game, but Ryuutama has a daily stat called “Condition” that the player can spend for bonuses to rolls. I can imagine that would combine really well with referring to such a stat for selecting the most/least lucky player. Should the player spend their Luck for immediate bonuses, or should they keep it in case something happens to them? I think Troika has something along those lines.

I just roll the dice as it only gets unwieldy at 13+ potential candidates (otherwise 7 is just d8 with 8s re-rolled, for example), but having a token for each player (and hireling) and drawing one from the bag is pretty nice.

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