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One thing I am finding Age of Sigmar has a lot of is dice rolling. An extraordinary amount of time is spent counting out dice, picking out ones, rerolling the ones and so on. Have you tried any ways of speeding up this process? I was thinking maybe a phone app would be good for it, but the ones I looked at didn't seem fit for purpose for a variety of reasons.

Have you found any apps that work well for you? Do you use some other method entirely? Do you just love rolling 50 dice at a time?

I personally love rolling a billion dice at once. I've actually had to purchase smaller dice be ause of AoS. No big deal, and I find it doesn't take too long.

In my opinion, usinga phone app brings about its own issues, like showing the roll to the other player.

How can you roll too many dice? For me that's impossible. Also on the issue of using a dice rolling app, I would rather lend my opponent one of my dice cubes than have them use an app. You never know how an apps algorithms work or what not. And it could also be tailored for rolls. I'm not saying you would do that, but other people might.

I always found rolling tons of dice part of the fun.

Well, maybe it's just me but I find the novelty of rolling ten billion dice is limited. It's fun at first for the spectacle, but hunting through the dice for the successes/failures quickly becomes a chore, especially with units that have a very high volume of low-quality attacks like Blood Reavers. What I am imagining is not that one player uses dice while the other uses an app, but that both players use the app and are able to play at a much better pace without getting bogged down sorting through dice rolls.

It seems to me that this is a perfect situation for automation, and for what it's worth an app will almost certainly be more random than even very precisely made dice.

 Mindstrike1 wrote:
How can you roll too many dice? For me that's impossible. Also on the issue of using a dice rolling app, I would rather lend my opponent one of my dice cubes than have them use an app. You never know how an apps algorithms work or what not. And it could also be tailored for rolls. I'm not saying you would do that, but other people might.

Dice can be biased too, but I know what you mean.

However it isn't difficult to have a unit that needs to roll 120 dice for an attack, before you worry about re-rolling ones, adding possible bonus rolls for sixes, and picking the successful rolls to go on the the To Wound stage, where there are more modifiers and qualifiers to think about. And so on. That's a lot of dice rolling.

Part of a player's view of the game is decided by whether they consider this process the most fun game mechanism or a tedious bore.

Personally I think the mechanism works fine for small scale skirmish games but it can get excessive for large units.

An alternative to an app would be to calculate the average number of successes and ones per chance to succeed, and lay out the results in a spreadsheet, perhaps starting at 10 dice and going up to 60 in steps of 10 and 12. (I.e. columns for 10, 12, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 48, 50, 60, with rows for 2+, 3+ and so on. The chance of a one is the same as a six, of course.)

Instead of rolling 120 dice you would reference the 60 @ 4+ To Hit column which will give you 30 hits and 6 ones which become rerolls. You double that to 60 hits and 12 ones, then roll 12 dice to find the number of To Wounds that you will need to roll. If wanted you can take your 60 automatic hits to the 60 @ 5+ To Wound cell to find the number of wounds scored.

Alternatively if you need to roll 38 dice, look up the 36 column and roll two dice by hand.

One of the points of rolling buckets of dice is that the results tend to average out quicker.

Of course if you simply like to roll buckets and the more the merrier, I would advise using large containers to throw the dice out of and in to.

Or you could get a dice rolling app that does all the rolling for you as well as the counting, some even have a history of rolls so you can keep track.

 Mindstrike1 wrote:
How can you roll too many dice? For me that's impossible. Also on the issue of using a dice rolling app, I would rather lend my opponent one of my dice cubes than have them use an app. You never know how an apps algorithms work or what not. And it could also be tailored for rolls. I'm not saying you would do that, but other people might.

Agreed - I have a deep distrust about these "random" dice rolling programs after conversations with maths savy friends. I like rolling lots of dice

If I was concerned that my opponent was the sort to deliberately create an app with a biased RNG, then the game wouldn't be going ahead. If it's inadvertent, then no harm, no foul, and deal with it after the game. Mind you, I'm not sure if any non-randomness introduced by a poorly-implemented RNG is worse than the non-randomness introduced by imperfect dice (which most gaming dice usually are).

Roll in batches and keep the successes to one side.

I never really minded rolling buckets of dice, always found it fun to do, especially in 40k with shootiest armies, but if you dislike it, a die rolling app like war dice or whatever it was called is nice as you can automatically set modifiers (+1 to roll for example) and/or results you need (only 4+) for it's rolls.

And if your opponent may feel concerned over it, you can decide that you both use the same app on the same phone/tablet resting on the table for both of you to see, so that's no problem. :-)

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Mindstrike1 wrote:
How can you roll too many dice? For me that's impossible. Also on the issue of using a dice rolling app, I would rather lend my opponent one of my dice cubes than have them use an app. You never know how an apps algorithms work or what not. And it could also be tailored for rolls. I'm not saying you would do that, but other people might.

Agreed - I have a deep distrust about these "random" dice rolling programs after conversations with maths savy friends. I like rolling lots of dice

If you don't like dice rolling programs, you'll really not like it when you find out that most any dice manufacturer doesn't really care about properly balanced dice. if you're using GW's dice, they're actually especially bad.

If you want dice that provide a real balanced result, you'll need to invest in some good vegas style dice with sharp corners. If you're using the typical dice I see in wargaming though, then you're probably less random than that dice program you distrust.

For myself I dislike rolling buckets of dice from an annoyance perspective, but it does to some extent mitigate the swings in luck from the results so I find that part of it a bonus.