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BGonline.org Forums
About Time...and rolling
Posted By: phil simborg In Response To: About Time... (Chuck Bower)
Date: Sunday, 2 August 2015, at 5:03 a.m.
Chuck, you have hit on one of the major reasons I, and many others prefer baffle boxes. It's NOT about stopping people from cheating...it's about not having to worry about all the technical issues related to proper rolling of the dice.
When you and Jeb and I sat down to improve the rules and make them less ambiguous, as you recall we wrote a very detailed list of thinks that defines what a "legal" roll is. There were just too many gray areas about what is the proper way to roll. How many times should a person shake? How vigorous is vigorous? How high above the board should the dice be dropped? Where should a player's fingers be as the dice leaves the cup? Can the player's cup touch the table when he's rolling?
It's just too damn much to have to try to "police" your opponent during a match. Nobody wants to be that technical or have to worry about these details when you are playing, and nobody wants to be a jerk and call the director because you have an opponent who simply doesn't follow all these guidelines.
At the same time, it's not fun to play against someone who doesn't shake the dice or lays them on the table. It's also not fun to keep stopping the clock and look all over the floor for dice; or watch the guy roll the dice on top of checkers roll after roll.
A baffle box eliminates these problems and allows you to relax and concentrate on the game, not on all these technical issues, and now the issues of the clock relative to rolling the dice are greatly reduced as cocked dice are reduced and none of us have to be so uptight about how much we, or our opponents, shake the dice or how they roll them.
Oh yes, and of course to some extent it does make it harder for someone to cheat, but again, I don't think that is the important reason for the box. Cheaters will always find a way to cheat...we need rules so that honest people can enjoy the game without being nasty to each other to do it and without requiring the TD to have to police us to make it happen.
As for the opponents of baffle boxes, they are certainly entitled to their opinion, but the main objection is they just like rolling the dice the old way. That explanation pales in comparison to all of the benefits listed above. When we have a tool or idea that greatly improves the game in terms of ensuring a level playing field, speed, fairness, honesty, and elimination of conflicts, it should be accepted and not rejected just because people aren't used to it or don't like change.
Yes, I make and sell baffle boxes, and I don't have much competition simply because I make good ones and price them fairly. If more people use them others will make other models (they already have) and their will be improvements and the price will come down. I didn't go into the baffle box business to make money, in fact I barely cover my costs and probably lose money when you consider the time and trouble it takes to ship etc. I do it because it greatly improves the game.
Now, as for the exact setting on the clock for total time and time delay, after having played Mochy with a clock that starts out with shorter time per game but adds 3 seconds to your bank for the game for each move of the game, I am convinced that is the best settings I have seen yet. The idea is to give each player a "reasonable" amount of time to think about his moves, but not so much that a match drags on forever. How much is reasonable, and how long a match should take are highly arbitrary because of all the differences of opinion and variable involved....we want tournament to run smoothly, but we also don't want any match to be so slow as to make it boring and uninteresting for spectators...that's not good for the game...we need to keep it entertaining and exciting if we want more spectators and want to see the game grow.
But getting a little more time when you have a much more complex game, like a super back game, seems to me to be an excellent compromise so that these games can be played with the kind of additional thought and time needed for any of us to play reasonably well. So I recommend that this be put into the equation, and of course, we need to have clocks that allow for these controls and even XG may have to change it's built-in clock as well, which I am sure is possible (but probably not a very high priority for Xavier at this time with everything else he's working on right now).
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