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An idea that probably exists, and therefore thread can be closed if someone can link me. Are there tabletop games that use this function? (i'm a 40k player only, and therefore not knowledgeable on this subject)

So i'll use 40k (apologises*) as my example as that's all i know in depth.

You have X amount of tokens in your collection/bag. All labeled 1 to 6 to represent the dice. When you need to roll a dice you choose to play a token instead, token is then removed from your collection/ bag of tokens. But you only have X amount of tokens so you can't keep using the 6 token to make your saves/to wound rolls etc.

This forces players to sacrifice bad tokens (eg, token saying 1) as you want to save your good tokens (eg token saying 6) for killing and making saving throws. But the bad tokens (eg token saying 1) are good for moral checks and toughness checks.

Obviously as a direct change it wouldn't work, and the player turns are an issue etc etc. But it removes the randomness.
However i don't doubt this is use somewhere already!
Also dice rolling is fun, after all i'm a non compy player, but am curious.

Thanks

This sounds like a nice variation. Are the tokens blindly drawn or can you pick and choose?

I like the idea of this, as it adds another element of strategy, but the only drawback I see is deciding how many tokens you get and when you get them.

A horde army will need more tokens than an elite army presumably if you consider volume of attacks and armour saves, and then how would you expand this to ensure you have enough tokens to shoot/attack, wound and save across your army for the length of the game?

Do you get all of your tokens at once or are they rationed per turn? i.e. could you save them up or go all in early and try to destroy your opponent through sheer volume?

Too many ways of playing this but I love the idea and possibilities.

I'll stop now as I could go on and on and on

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread

This is a really old idea, actually. It's also really easy to cheat at. And hard to keep track of, and different armies would need hugely different volumes of tokens as well. How does one play orks?

For a little history
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Chits

Games with premeasuring can already take a while with certain opponents who will measure every little detail. I can't imagine how long those certain individuals would take if they got to choose every individual chit result.

"Hmmm do I take 4 hits or 5 hit?" *scratches chin for 10 minutes*

It doesn't have to e that difficult. There is a board game called Kamet. It's sort of like ancient Egypt risk.

There are no dice to determine battles, each side has 6 card with various results. Blood drops for slain enemies, shields to cancel out blood drops, swords to boost the overall power of your unit in combat to determine the winner (winning the fight and loosing "models" is separate. You could suffer the most losses but force the other guy to retreat from the space).

So the idea is you have 6 cards with various mixes of the various effects with some cards clearly better then others in certain situations but all usable.

When you get into a fight you choose one card to discard and one card to play face down. Both sides reveal their chosen cards and tally the effects. Who suffers how many losses? Who won the battle etc etc...

The played cards are added to the discard and you don't get them back until all cards have been used.



Point being, you don't need a lot of anything or an overly complicated system to replace dice. We could create a series of "battle cards" with wounds/saves per model in the unit or some such. I could see something like that playing out interestingly.

Regarding some of the questions.

The idea was to have a set amount of tokens laid out pregame so both players knew what each person had. When you use one it's discarded, and you never redraw. You never draw blind or randomly either.
-Which was the point of the tokens, eliminating all randomness and allowing you to bait the opponent. There are of course other ways to do this i know.


I only used 40k as an example as that's all i know. If you wanted to use it in 40k i'm sure it could work if you started from the ground up. But obviously 40k has the issue of balance with it points system as is. No that's no use there to use as a basis for token numbers.

You could start with each player has 10 tac marines, dreadnought, predator, 10 assault marines, 5 devastators. All with equal loadouts.
Then work on giving each unit X amount of tokens and tweak from there.
Blobs versus Elite armies gets mega confusing, but i never intended to try implement it into such a game, seems like a lot of hassle for a game that is incredibly unbalanced as is.


But if a skirmish game that was being designed from the ground up, implemented this system i think it could be really competitive which would be cool.

Ever play Battle Rider by GDW? similar idea, to take a game that used 2d6 a lot and speed it up the game came with cards, the cards had a score on them, a 1d6 as well for other functions, modifiers for a green or crack crew basically reduced to a collection of cards with success/fail on them for various difficulties.

you needed 10 results? deal 10 cards.

When you get through the deck flip and shuffle it then keep going. You get away from 'lucky dice' syndrome to a level as over the course of a game you will get a perfect distribution of results, its also faster than using pairs of dice.

For a system that uses 1d6 results though not sure it adds anything, does become a lot easier to break the 1d6 cage though, and provide different factions different decks that can have different weightings perhaps.

You could go the route of a deck thats all you have, and for opposed rolls picking cards in secret and comparing, who wants that success the most to burn a good card on it.

Not sure 40k is that sort of game though, the randomness is a large part of it

Closest thing to Kamet I can find is Kemet (well, and a mountain.)

Kemet has indeed a nice combat system along these parameters, in general the strength of such system idea is to make the combat resolution predictable for both players either by choosing from a limited pool of resolutions, or by drawing from a bag with known content it can create an interesting metagame were high and low resolutions are important and players may waste actions in order to influence their results.

There are two challenges with this, first of all to make the low results interesting to have and second how to implement the reset mechanic without making it a trivial choice.

The boardgame Raptor implements such a mechanic really well, unfortunately its not for combat resolution, but for activation.