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I am working on a war game. I spoke to someone about my rules. They said that a D10 would be looked down on by most gamers and be fighting an uphill battle for acceptance. How are your feelings for games using dice other than D6's?

I don't know... a lot of the stupidity of GW games is based on their reliance on a d6 system, which is statistically very limiting.

Lots of RPG's use D10's

The usual arguments for d6 dice seem to be the below:

They are easy to read.

Gamers already have a bunch.

They roll well as a group.

All true... you have to make up for their lack of "separation" by layering the rolls... rolls to hit, wound, save, etc. & you still get lots of functional similarity between units, war gear, etc.

d10 gives you better statistical separation and reduces the number of rolls needed in most systems, however you do lose that familiarity factor that most GW gamers have with the D6. However people coming in from other gaming systems or RPG's probably wouldn't think twice about it... so it kind of depends on your target audience.

I like D10s. As an avid board gamer I've seen several in my time, and I don't RPG. Twilight Imperium is a system that uses them and is successful.

As stated above, it allows for separation, but it doesn't become too out there for people to understand.

"Gamers" are comfortable with all dice ranging from the d2 all the way up to a d10,000 (yes, I've used a table with 10,000 results before). They can do proper arithmetic, and would have no problems running a d10 game or even one with (gasp) modifiers.

GW-only "gamers"? They might have a problem counting higher than 6, and don't like a game where they have to occasionally mentally subtract 2 from anything (everything has to be in a table), so you might want to consider keeping it simple for them.



It's a joke, people.



Mostly.

Field_Mouse wrote:As stated above, it allows for separation, but it doesn't become too out there for people to understand.

I think it's a good idea, but rolling big numbers of d10s can be a problem... Int he current incarnation aren't there times in 40k when players may need to roll 40+ dice?

Still, it would allow the spread of stats to be enlarged... perhaps enough that Orks could be stronger than normal humans, Guard better shooters than untrained civilians, etc. Maybe even adjust such that SoB power armor is a slight bit less protective than Space marine armor, but still better than Carapace.

Rolling a bunch of D6s is very easy.

4+ to hit.
4+ to wound.
4+ to save.

GW seem to mistrust their core users' ability to handle simple arithmetic.

Despite that you can get a reasonable varation of results out of lots of D6 rolls, it is just more time-consuming than various other methods.

If you want to go beyond rolling lots of dice, there are many, many interesting ways to do it mechanically.

As just one example, instead of throwing 40+ dice, you can create a look-up table which give the chance of the result of throwing one die three times (to hit, to wound, to roll) and simply multiply this by the number of attacks. For example, let's say 20 Kroot attack a bunch of IG. Their To Hit is 4+, their To Wound is 3+ and the IG's To Save is 5+. This gives a 22% chance per attack to hit, wound and not save, so 60 (attacks) x 22 = 1,320 % which is 13 dead IG and a 20% chance of killing the 14th. Only two dice need be rolled.

The 40k RPGs Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch all use d10s.
White Wolf RPGs have people rolling d10s in large multiples.

Rolling d10s is not an exotic concept.

Just understand that unless you have a small-skirmish level game such as Infinity or Star Wars Minis (both use d20s), then you may be turning people off by forcing them to buy large amounts of exotic dice.

The game is intended to be in between infinity model numbers and 40K model numbers. It will be on a platoon to company scale of forces. Note not all companies are over 100 troops. I plan on having "dueling" rules for small engagements of Squad level and below, and rules for large scale engagements of over a company in strength.

No problems my end. If you are worrked about it attach a great looking D10 to the beginners rule book so they all have one when they get the base rules.

There have been minis games that used d10 before, too: Void used them, for one... Vor might have, but I don't remember offhand. Used them in my game, too.

There's nothing inherently wrong with d10's, especially since it makes figuring out percentages really easy: it's basically 10% per "tick".

Standard d10's are also quite useful in a wargame sense: they're directional! A rolled d10 has an "up" point and a "down" point. You can use either point as a random pointer for things like scattering artillery, deciding fallback directions, stuff like that. (If you're stuck in GW terminology, it's a built-in scatter die.)

So, from a designer's point of view, a d10 is awesome. I used them in AV because they're just so easy to work with statistically (and because I had a metric crapton laying around after marrying my Vampire-playing wife). They're slightly less convenient for gamers, as you can't get huge blocks of tiny d10's, but I think the advantages outweight the problems.

Anybody that won't play a game because it uses a standard gaming dice type isn't going to play your game anyways. Don't stress it.

Brushfire uses D10s, we get some strange looks at first for being different, but no other issues.