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Here's the basic concept. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time re-rolling hits, misses, wounds, leadership, whatever else.
And I will even say, armor saves, invulnerable saves, cover saves, etc.

I would propose that a handful of d12 dice would be easier/faster than rerolling.
For example, a unit of 10 is shooting a weapon, needs 4+ to hit. So lets say 5 hit, 5 miss, the unit gets a reroll, so ends up with 7.5 hits.
Statistically you get 75% hits when you get re-rolls on a 4+ to hit.
If you roll 1d12 instead of 1d6, and keep the target roll the same, 4+, you also have a statistically 75% chance to hit.
So by rolling 10d12 you'd see right away your 7.5 hits on average instead of needing to re-roll 5 dice. I feel like this ends up being faster over-all.

I also feel like leadership checks could be mapped on 1d12 instead of 2d6, but switch to the "roll-higher" instead of "roll under", so leadership 10 would become leadership 2+, leadership 9 becomes 3+, leadership 8 becomes 4+, etc.

Well it is simple enough to check

2+ reroll - 35/36 chance of success
2+ on D12 - 33/36 chance of success

6+ reroll - 11/36 chance of success
6+ on D12 - 21/36 chance of success

It does seem to change things somewhat.

It does skew differently for some rolls, not a perfect mapping of the current statistics. But I feel like... are the current statistics worth sticking to? Couldn't points adjustments be made to reflect the new statistics for rerolls switching to d12 instead?
I feel like the utility of rolling once with 1d12 is a very fine time saver compared to d6 with reroll.

I assume you mean we should use d12s in place of d6s at all times and not that we should carry around a separate bricks of d12s that we'd have to fish out, count out, and calculate the target number we need based on the non-reroll target number.

The speed factor is pretty negligible to be honest. Rerolling a pile of misses probably takes me about 1 second per dice pool. Every 60 sets of rerolls adds like a minute to the game time. So the amount of effort

Using a larger die size is a common suggestion with the benefit basically boiling down to modifiers being able to stack eothout the math getting crazy as fast. But it sounds like that's not a benefit you're going for here.

BanjoJohn wrote:
It does skew differently for some rolls, not a perfect mapping of the current statistics. But I feel like... are the current statistics worth sticking to? Couldn't points adjustments be made to reflect the new statistics for rerolls switching to d12 instead?
I feel like the utility of rolling once with 1d12 is a very fine time saver compared to d6 with reroll.

Sure-but then you're rebalancing every single unit that gets rerolls.
Also, what about rules where you reroll 1s?

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I assume you mean we should use d12s in place of d6s at all times and not that we should carry around a separate bricks of d12s that we'd have to fish out, count out, and calculate the target number we need based on the non-reroll target number.

The speed factor is pretty negligible to be honest. Rerolling a pile of misses probably takes me about 1 second per dice pool. Every 60 sets of rerolls adds like a minute to the game time. So the amount of effort

Using a larger die size is a common suggestion with the benefit basically boiling down to modifiers being able to stack eothout the math getting crazy as fast. But it sounds like that's not a benefit you're going for here.

My main proposal is that you'd have your pile of d6's for most rolls, and a pile of d12's for special rolls in place of things like d6 with a reroll.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JNAProductions wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
It does skew differently for some rolls, not a perfect mapping of the current statistics. But I feel like... are the current statistics worth sticking to? Couldn't points adjustments be made to reflect the new statistics for rerolls switching to d12 instead?
I feel like the utility of rolling once with 1d12 is a very fine time saver compared to d6 with reroll.

Sure-but then you're rebalancing every single unit that gets rerolls.
Also, what about rules where you reroll 1s?

That's a good question. I'm not familiar with every rule in the game as it stands now, when do you re-roll 1's?

My main issue is that you want time to be saved. I've found that swapping to different dice in games always slows things down, just look at the gamut of multi dice rolls in RPGs.

If you truly want to speed up your game, there are dice rolling Apps that exist. (Just check with your opponent before breaking out this little piece tech heresy).

Why does it need to be sped up?

Well ideally you should try and speed up all games to the point below where it effects gameplay. I would have loved stuff like 'first rank fire, second rank fire' to have just said each weapon hits once rather than two shots at BS4+ each etc. (yes modifiers, but they are only lasgun shots and were an example of excessive dice rolling for little effect). But in general special systems don't really speed things up that much.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
My main issue is that you want time to be saved. I've found that swapping to different dice in games always slows things down, just look at the gamut of multi dice rolls in RPGs.

If you truly want to speed up your game, there are dice rolling Apps that exist. (Just check with your opponent before breaking out this little piece tech heresy).

I guess I've never had trouble with different dice in RPGs? When you play a game enough times, the procedure becomes normal and goes faster. Assuming that you have the standard rules now, where re-rolls can happen. Vs a game where the rule would be on some specific things you roll d12's instead of d6's, both systems when played enough times will train players to behave in a certain way, and its just faster to roll once instead of twice, players who get used to the rules will not become confused about when to roll which dice, at least I hope I'm not being too generous in assuming that players are smart enough to not be confused by it.

I think the thing is with RPG games you are often not rolling that many dice of each kind. So managing them is pretty easy.

With wargames, even if you are cutting down on dice, you're still rolling quite a few of each kind. The result is it becomes more work to always keep those groups of dice separate. It's also much easier for those who are less strict/formal to end up picking up the wrong dice in a group and suddenly you're having to reroll because you grabbed a few of the wrong dice and the time you were trying to save is lost.

I think there's value in having higher value dice to roll with - indeed considering GW "love random" and such its surprising that they haven't tried moving to a D10 system or similar to increase the random element and also broaden the range of results that a single dice can give.

BanjoJohn wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I assume you mean we should use d12s in place of d6s at all times and not that we should carry around a separate bricks of d12s that we'd have to fish out, count out, and calculate the target number we need based on the non-reroll target number.

The speed factor is pretty negligible to be honest. Rerolling a pile of misses probably takes me about 1 second per dice pool. Every 60 sets of rerolls adds like a minute to the game time. So the amount of effort

Using a larger die size is a common suggestion with the benefit basically boiling down to modifiers being able to stack eothout the math getting crazy as fast. But it sounds like that's not a benefit you're going for here.

My main proposal is that you'd have your pile of d6's for most rolls, and a pile of d12's for special rolls

Oh. Then no. Way too complicated for negligible benefits. You'd have to address a lot of design challenges to implement it, and the end result is to speed up a process that already only takes like, one second as-is.

If you want to speed up the game you need to look at the core reason for things being slow. The multitude of dice rolls probably contributes a lot to it, but I don't think this solution really addresses the problem. Swapping one set of dice for another doesn't seem like it would really speed things up substantially. If anything, switching between different sets of dice would slow things down.

Slipspace wrote:
If you want to speed up the game you need to look at the core reason for things being slow. The multitude of dice rolls probably contributes a lot to it, but I don't think this solution really addresses the problem. Swapping one set of dice for another doesn't seem like it would really speed things up substantially. If anything, switching between different sets of dice would slow things down.

With my experience of GW games these days the slowness comes from

1) Rule interactions where the order of influence/process and what affects what isn't clear.

2) Rules scattershot through different references; Each publication also has FAQ and Errata, which on their own are good things but when you add that to running perhaps rulebook; codex; expansion book; white dwarf rules; app - you've suddenly a LOT of spots to check

3) Rules scattershot within a single publication. Instead of all on one page with page references you get bits here and bits there. Heck even something as simple as alphabetical unit profiles in a book is a step up from the random jumble we get today.

4) Too many layers of rules. I'll throw strategems in here. Personally they are, to me, a great example of a simple idea taken too far to the point where if you try to use them effectively its very easy to eat up time thinking and double checking their rules because there's quite a few of them and that is before you add point 2 where they are, again, increased with more publications.

The lack of organisation in the rules is definitely a problem, along with the sheer amount of them. We have army rules, detachment rules, every unit has a special rule, stratagems, weird core rule interactions and multiple FAQs/erratas, many of them in a massive commentary document. Most other games have a single source for the core rules and it gets updated as new rulings are made, so you don't have to read the core rules, then go and find which document contains the Pivot rules, for example.

I think the movement and LoS rules also don't help, especially when combined with the very high lethality of the game. Units that aren't out of sight tend to just evaporate because it's too easy to kill entire units with one unit activation, so the exact position of every single model is of vital importance. Most games that operate on the scale of 40k either abstract LoS much more, or just aren't anywhere near as lethal.

Go and watch any tournament game and you'll see players obsessively measuring every single range and angle and adjusting their models over and over to get them in the perfect position. Quite often this can result in players then realising they can't hide an entire unit and cancelling the whole move to try something different. That's extra amusing because all the precision they were so concerned about in the first place has now gone out the window.

The lack of organisation is also compounded in GW's case because every 3 years they start it all over again. So you don't even get incremental consolidation besides adding models into the codex that were newly added in an expansion campaign book.

Any steady improvement that might be achieved is undone by the cycle repeating itself