Not everyone can be ambidextrous, its not something you can easily do; I BELIEVE overtime you can train yourself to use your other hand, but its not a very easy journey to take. Thus in roleplaying games I like to ask players to determine what is their dominate hand, mostly because I am tired of not knowing and when it comes to a character losing a hand, or arm.. the player always saying, "well good thing that I was a LEFTY instead of a RIGHTY!" When their right hand gets injured.
Yeah yeah, bullshit.
Unless the game has a mechanic for it, I use this method for determining it.
I roll percentile dice, get a number as a base range. I add 10 to it and then subtract 10 from it. The player now rolls and must roll with in that range of numbers. IF they get in that range, they can say their character is ambidextrous, if they fail to hit the mark, I ask them to determine, "right or left".
Example: I would roll 22%. The player would have to roll in the range of 12 to 32 to match it and they would be ambidextrous.
Essentially you have a 20% chance, which in my eyes is a hell of a good chance. I like to make it random the percentage of 20 random and not just 1% to 20%. Makes it more interesting as the scale slides up and down.
I think this is fair, otherwise everyone would be ambidextrous and frankly I find that to be powergaming, which I absolutely hate.
There is a reason why certain games employ mechanics for it and require certain things to be in place before you can get it.
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At my table the rule is "unless stated otherwise on your character sheet, your PC is considered right handed."
ReplyDeleteYes, we used to do something similar, but then I came up with this rule, because I was getting annoyed at everyone saying as soon we start a new game, "I am Ambidextrous." -- it got on my nerves, if there was a mechanic for it, no one picked it in the game we played, but if it was a free choice, it was always picked. so I came up with this to stop that bullcrap.
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