I often want to roll a number of dice equal to the number of players at the table, and even include it as an instruction in published modules. The problem is there’s no standard dice notation for this, so I’d like to propose one:
Precede the identified die with ‘P’ to indicate that it should be rolled once for each player at the table.
So, “Pd6” in a session with 3 players would be the equivalent of rolling 3d6.
It could be a lowercase ‘p’, but I feel it looks more balanced in uppercase:
Pd20
pd20
I posted this on Mastodon, and someone suggested to make it d20xP, so it looks less like a page number reference, but I honestly quite like simplicity of “Pd8” - it also sounds cool to say.
Some practical use cases for this notation:
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There’s a market filled with people, and you want the size of the crowd to be related to the number of players. Roll Pd20.
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Players encounter a set of creatures, and the combat needs to be reasonably scaled, regardless of the size of the party. Roll Pd4.
-
Loot is found, but you want the players to find a reasonable amount of gold - not too much or too little. Roll Pd20 (maybe multiplied by 10 in this instance).
You could even get each player to roll a die to create more engagement at the table.
What do you think? Does this sound like it would make sense and be useful? Or am I just stating a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist?