Cleromancy: Divination by the casting of lots.
(Middle French cleromancie, from Medieval Latin cleromantia)
Prologue
These past years, I've implemented or tested a number of systems with various decision randomizers in order to prevent indecision. I am not a decisive person by nature. If you tell me I have to choose between two books this evening, I will paralytically rotate irresolutely between the two books every 5 minute for an hour and not get done any quality reading. It all stems from a deep instinct of mine to always be doing the "correct" thing (even if it's an arbitrary or erroneous assessment), and I've struggled with this instinct my entire life. When there is one correct thing to do, this makes it easy. When there are multiple options or choices of seemingly-equal rational merit, I feel paralyzed. Does the Universe (or God) will for me to read one book over the other? What if I'm accidentally doing the incorrect thing but I have no way of knowing it? What if I somehow derail my entire life and future by choosing the wrong book this evening? All these questions. No answers.
So yes, I suppose I practice a little good old Christian cleromancy. With a d20 in hand, I'll "pray" aloud a phrase such as "under 11 is cheerios, over 10 is mini wheats". Roll the dice. The decision is made. If the Universe (or the God, however you want to perceive It, since any omniscient entity is inherently the same) somehow was against the choice that I make, the fault is not in my hands; it is the entropy of the universe that influenced that roll of the dice. I can make the decisions easily this way. I do not feel indecisive. I do not feel paralyzed. The dice decide, and I simply let the entropy of the universe make my decisions.
But enough about me. Let's get into the logic and systems involved.
Emergent Behavior and Entropy
I'm a firm believer in emergent behavior. It sounds silly but it needs to be asserted because I was bred in an extensively deterministic household, and I never believed in the "old world theory" or in "evolution" until adulthood. I was raised to believe that science at large was fundamentally a conspiracy organized by Satan to remove God from the picture, and that the creation mythology was of greater rational merit. But that's not the point of this writeup, so I'll move on.
The point is emergent behavior and the philosophy of emergence. It's the idea (or attribute) that highly complex and ultimately entropic systems can exhibit behaviors unintended and unforeseen by the creators or operators of that system. These unforeseen behaviors are called "emergent" of the system that they inhabit. The pretty obvious example being evolution and ultimately consciousness. Emergence is my religion. That is to say, I believe that the omnipresence of a God is emergent of the Universe or vice/versa, and that Consciousness is deterministic even though it is the product of an entropic system (the laws of physics) because it is observed by that omnipresence. If every quark is observed at once and always, it is equivalent to unobservance, but that doesn't make them unobserved.
I use both the words "entropic" and "deterministic" here. To be clear, I do not believe that the Universe is inherently a deterministic system; I am simply saying that if the universe were to observe Itself (that is, a conscious omnipresence), from the perspective of the Universe itself the system is ultimately deterministic, regardless of how much "entropy" you throw into the mix. This is a conditional statement.
I say that this is my religion, because I believe that the entropy of any closed system (in this case the 'system' is everything that exists under the institiution of the correct laws of physics) is what gives rise to any emergent property. Therefore, if God were to communicate to a mortal, it would be through the entropy within this system (or, within Itself).
Pseudorandom and random
"Random" functions in programming languages are nearly always considered to be "pseudo-random" (seemingly random). Computers are (almost but not quite ultimately) deterministic systems; true random only exists in the presence of true entropy. There may be "ghosts in the machine", that one AI at Google might be "sentient", all that shit if you believe in it. So yes, emergence. But this is the entropy of the (computer) system in this instance, and not the entropy of the larger physical system. A programming language's "math" or "rand" library is only ever going to get you pseudo-random unless you do a bunch of shenanigans and provide a source of external entropy to the system. Which can be done.
I don't know if I'm fully qualified to talk on pseudorandom on a higher level beyond this, despite the fact that it does fall under my academic concentration. I know that convention is with me on this one, but if you want to learn more on this interesting topic, I would encourage you to please look into it. It's worth the time.
System one: asking someone else for a number
This one is by far the most simple of the systems I have used, but my least favorite. This is because it relies on the "entropy" in the system of another person's consciousness, which really is probably filtered through so much background instinctual and conditional bias that it's less likely to be strictly a product of the laws of physics, though I'm confident that physics could explain anything if you gave it enough time.
It's simple. I say to myself, "20 is my range. if they pick a number below 11, I do one thing. If they pick a number over 10, I do the other thing." I then prompt someone as opaquely as possible, "Give me a number between 1 and 20." They give me a number. I make the decision. Simple.
System two: rolling the dice
This is my favorite and preferred system. I will mutter aloud the conditions of my dice roll, and then let the d20 decide. Sometimes I use a d12, sometimes I use a coin, but very rarely do I use a d6. I don't really know why, but having a higher number allows for greater precision with more than three or four choices, and a base-10 number makes it easy to modulate to any particular set of criteria. I have had and lost three d20s over the past few years, and recently ordered 10 new ones. I am hoping that I never run out again, I'll just have to be super vigilant on not losing them.
System three: the 20 domains of Aleks Samoylov
This is certainly the most esoteric of the systems, and therefore I always feel a little twinge of Christian guilt when I use it, so I have not used this one in a while. This was my decision maker for a solid year though, so I will share it.
Aleks Samoylov is an artist and game developer that I've been following for quite some time now. I subscribed to his Patreon because I really liked How to die Like a Graceful Beast, which I may very well node one of these coming days. He made a sequel to it which he entitled Pleroma, but I just haven't been in the headspace to dedicate myself that extensively to a puzzle game.
Anyway, in one of the tabletop games Aleks designed, one of the game's mechanic involved rolling a d20 and getting a "domain" out of it. Each face of the d20 corresponded to a "domain", and each domain basically has its own "vibe". So I would be rolling to detect if the action I am about to take has a "vibe", and the vibe consulted would inform me if I wanted to do the thing or not.
I won't say how the domains worked in the original tabletop game that Aleks Samoylov made, because that would be spoiling the game. Go buy his shit! He's super cool and the game this is in is entitled "passage".
The twenty domains that I consulted are as follows:
01 - Earth
02 - Fire
03 - Water
04 - Air
05 - Shadow
06 - Light
07 - Shelter
08 - Violence
09 - Walls
10 - Portals
11 - Loss
12 - Discovery
13 - Motion
14 - Stillness
15 - Growth
16 - Decay
17 - Poverty
18 - Wealth
19 - Weakness
20 - Power
This was more than a little interpretive and, as aforementioned, esoteric, which is why I don't use this system anymore.
Miscellany
I found that the d12 works best with three choices. The d6 (standard dice) would also work, because 3 evenly divides into it. With the d20, I would reroll if I got above 18, which is a bit gimmicky but it works. The d12 allows for greater precision than the d20. When I played Overwatch, I would assign 1-4 to the "tank" role, 5-8 to the "dps" or "damage" role, and 9-12 to the "healer" role. It was an impossible decision for me to make on my own. I fucking loathed it. The dice freed me, released me from the burden of making such a trivial decision. (This was before I became a Mercy main. I would cycle between the roles.)
I think the d20 looks way cooler than the d6, I fucking love icosahedrons. The coolest dice of all is one that I don't personally own, which is the d1