Different Dice

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I enjoy dice pools. Lots of dice. Not just quantity but kind. I really like rolling XdY and taking highest. It has a great feel and lets you simulate alot. I am brainstorming a new game where creatures have stats (Might, Mobility, Magic) represented by d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12.

Is that a chore for you? Would you rather just have 1d6+X? How much dice does it take to become cumbersome?

 

[Lagi]

if you are talking about RPGs. There is a big, big abyss between what player wants (consumers that gather once in a while to enjoy some adventure) and what nerd that post wall of texts on the forum's thinks a good mechanic is.

so the normies want "I want to do jump over the pit !" GM after 1 second of sorting the procedure :"ok you do it" / "oh you fall down, but you find a gold coin at the bottom" / "You are too scared to try"

what normies dont want: "What is your charisma? Multiply that by your reputation with swamp goblins, and make square root. Then roll 2d20+3d8+1d10 and toss 3 coins... You got it? Good, that's your initiative now [ after 1 hour] ... ok you deal 4 corporal damage, 2 bruises, but you lose 3 sanity points. Where is Anon? It's his turn now. What you mean he went to grocery store for beer?"

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i just roll a bunch of d6 now. I put the limit on 7 dice. 8 dice is too much.

i really like FreeLigue mechanic when you roll a bunch of dice, but you only care if you have any "6".

 

[ind33d]

every game should be like traveller where you only use d6 but consult tables for everything. it feels less like the GM is just making shit up

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I suspected as much. I have an alternate design of only using d6 for the dice pool. I'm not sure if I'll have any modifiers. It will either be Xd6 take highest, or Xd6+Y (taking highest).

I'm experimenting with making a game similar to Magic: The Gathering but without the gathering. The game would be comprehensive and complete out of the box. Two common/shared decks to draw from. One with spells and another with creatures. I'm reworking costs to have a push-your-luck mechanic rather than mana, and experimenting with the battlefield being a 6x6 grid instead of JRPG lineup. If you've ever played the original Chaos or Chaos: Reborn, it has many similarities. Functionally a table top version of it.

 

[ind33d]

I suspected as much. I have an alternate design of only using d6 for the dice pool. I'm not sure if I'll have any modifiers. It will either be Xd6 take highest, or Xd6+Y (taking highest).

I'm experimenting with making a game similar to Magic: The Gathering but without the gathering. The game would be comprehensive and complete out of the box. Two common/shared decks to draw from. One with spells and another with creatures. I'm reworking costs to have a push-your-luck mechanic rather than mana, and experimenting with the battlefield being a 6x6 grid instead of JRPG lineup. If you've ever played the original Chaos or Chaos: Reborn, it has many similarities. Functionally a table top version of it.

I thought Magic would be much better with a scoring system and doubling cube instead of best 2/3. Good luck with that

 

[Hell Swarm]

It looks like you're trying to reinvent the wheel here. What purpose do all these dices have or changing how magic's mana costs work? Are you coming at systems that already exist and looking for ways to change them? Where is the player base and why would they have fun playing magic but the costs are random or why would a player enjoy all these different dice instead of rolling just a D6 or 8?

 

[deuxhero]

Savage Worlds uses dice scaling to rate attributes and skills. It works, but only because it's a system that freely embraces diminishing returns for improving skills (you can get a d12 in Fighting at character creation, but the advantages over a d8 aren't worth it for most character types), the PCs/bosses being special ("Wild Cards" always get an additional d6 that can replace their roll), and power getting wider instead of taller.

Edit: Also had "normal" difficulty for non-combat tasks be DC4 and had infinitely exploding die. This means for a DC4 a Wild Card has odds of d4=63%, d6=75%, d8=81%, d10=85%, d12=88% and extra has odds of 25%, 50%, 63%, 70%, 75% and DC5 it's 50%, 56%, 67%, 73%, 78% vs 25%, 33%, 50%, 60%, 67%.

 

[Optimist]

I've ran a homebrew system where attributes were dice sizes, but skills dictated how many of those were you able to throw. This represented how training made you consistently better, but still limited you by your physique. Wouldn't be surprised if someone else thought about this as well.

This used to run on addition, but if you wanted to do pick-highest this'd work too, and allow to do some funky things.

 

[Lagi]

I've ran a homebrew system where attributes were dice sizes, but skills dictated how many of those were you able to throw. This represented how training made you consistently better, but still limited you by your physique. Wouldn't be surprised if someone else thought about this as well.

This used to run on addition, but if you wanted to do pick-highest this'd work too, and allow to do some funky things.

what was the values for skills? 1 to 4?

im veteran pilot (3x) but im blind (d4) = 3d4 => avg 7
i never seen electronic device (1x), but i have eagle eye (d12) = 1d12 => avg 6

and you try to beat threshold?

d4 handicapped
d6 average (random picked dude should have d6, the majority of population)
d8 good
d10 exceptional
d12 inhuman

what if there are bigger monsters? is this high fantasy, or a troll just dismembering a puny human without rolling for damage.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Is that a chore for you?

No. Not at all.

Would you rather just have 1d6+X?

Absolutely not

How much dice does it take to become cumbersome?

I am good even with the occasional gimmick dice, so I don't have a limit.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

It looks like you're trying to reinvent the wheel here. What purpose do all these dices have or changing how magic's mana costs work? Are you coming at systems that already exist and looking for ways to change them? Where is the player base and why would they have fun playing magic but the costs are random or why would a player enjoy all these different dice instead of rolling just a D6 or 8?

I am trying to reinvent the wheel, or at least trim it down to its fundamentals. I want to eliminate the bloat aspects of MTG by eliminating the gathering, principally. This eliminates deck-building as a consequence, but I'm OK with that. In doing so, there are a few elements that need changed. Mana being chief among them. In a shared pool of cards, deck sort could really fuck up the game. Players need to have some kind of agency every turn. My idea is that they have a base pool of dice to roll with to achieve a card's target number in order to play. So summoning a Unicorn my require the player to roll a 4, or casting a Fireball spell roll a 2. In the case of spells, I want to use the outcome of that challenge roll to keep resolution quick. For example, let's say the player wants to cast Hold Creature. They must roll 3. They roll 3d6, and take the highest. I can have this work in different ways that I'm still contemplating. Maybe they get to hold a creature for each success, for example. Now I have a reason to introduce mechanics that can empower spells and give the player a strategic reason to think long term.

This dice mechanic for casting, spell resolution, and monster interaction introduces a gambling and push-your-luck mechanic that I think makes the game more exciting. To balance it out, I've been thinking that failed spells are retained by the player. Creature actions would also be less certain and give weaker creatures greater relevance and staying power. This is important, since deck building is eliminated. All cards need to be generally useful at all stages of the game. Increasing the variability in creatures simultaneously allows me to give them powerful and interesting abilities while keeping them in-check.

When I have looked over my concept sketches and scribbles, I think I will probably go dice pools, taking highest, but stick with purely d6. There will still be room for special conditions that modify the roll in simple ways that won't overwhelm a new or casual player or bog the game down. This is just an idle diversion, so we'll see if anything comes of it.

 

[spectre]

Personally, I dislike D6. Only thing they've got going for them is that they're common and familiar to non-rpgists. Sure, they're fine when rolling for damage, but not exactly for success/failure.
I'd much rather use D10 and D20s, though I can see the less popular dice being useful if the point is to obfuscate the chances (though it will always boil down to just that for savvy players).

IMO, the D6 is very lopsided and operates in increments of 16,6%, which is quite a bit. If critical mechanics hinge on it, at some point it will boil down to one player rolling two sixes in a row and another rolling a one at
a bad moment ultimately deciding who got the upper hand. Working with large pools of dice can help with it, but I believe two things are essential to account for:
1) Each result needs to be "desirable" at some point in the game. Some effects will want ones, others will want sixes, others will want threes.
2) Streaks - a guy who manages to pull three sixes in a row shouldn't get that much of a headstart. You can say that this is part and parcel of playing dice games,
but imo there needs to be a way to bank on a streak of bad rolls. If anything, the player shouldn't be prevented from playing.

If you want a working example of a working system built on D6 mechanics, there's the boardgame Sagrada by fox games.
It's a drafting game using d6 of different colors where players try to collect different patterns of results and die colors.
You essentially grab a fistful of dice from the bag and roll them, and players try to pick the results which they need to complete their objectives.
It also has a bunch of mechanical tools to manipulate these results. Standard fare - like changing the color of the die, flipping the die upside down,
or fudging the result +1 or -1. Might be useful to look it up for reference.

Another way of spicing up vanilla D6 mechanics I've seen is to use the poker system.
You roll a pool of dice then assign them to cards results following the logic of poker hands to produce different results - one six is a high roll, so it should give you a decent result and you get
to keep the other dice for other things this turn. Two threes is a pair and should yield an even better result. And dropping a streak of 1-2-3-4 means you go all in and conjure a big ass fireball.