stupid d6 tricks

 Some OD&D house rules make use of "roll 2d6, take the lower result" and "roll 2d6, take the higher result." Obviously that would skew the chances of each possible result away from the flat 16.66% chance of each number coming up with a typical roll. But I wanted to see how much that skew would be, so I did the math real quickfast.

Here's the same idea, but using 3d6 and only keeping the result of one die.

But the real interest possibility with throwing three dice is the possibility of keeping the middle result. If you define the middle result to include any roll of doubles (e.g. 3,5,5, is a 5 result) then that spread looks like this:

There's probably a lot of uses for a die mechanic like that. After all, it's not too different from the bell curves we get from throws where we add up multiple dice. I think I once suggested roll 3d6, keep the middle as a way of generating low-but-not-necessarily-first level PCs for a campaign that doesn't want to spend a lot of time on the rat-killing, copper-piece-grubbing world of 0xp. Of course, you could just say everyone starts at 3rd level, or everyone begins with 8,000xp or something like that. But why not roll dice if you can?