Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey guys

As I'm working on an alternative rule set for 40k using 10-sided dice, I hear that one of the complaints about 10-sided dice is that they can be annoyingly slow to use, as you have to look closer to determine if a 9 really is a 9 or if it is a 6. I have some ideas for solving this issue, which I would like to share and hear your opinions about. If you have ideas of your own and/or you even want to see such dice produced, then please speak up, because I've contacted a company which produce customized dice and the price per die only gets lower, the bigger the order.

These two ideas can be mixed or used independently.

1. If the die ranges from 1 to 10, then give the number 1 side the colour white, the number 10 side the colour black and the numbers between shades of grey, going darker if the number is higher. By increasing the luminance equally for each step, it can be made in Paint. I've attached files to show how much the shades of grey differ. The actual numbers could be black for the numbers 1-5 and white for the numbers 6-10.

2. Use dots for the number 6. This is fairly easy but not very pretty, I guess - though I can imagine that many of you don't care about the aesthetics but more about practicality.

Looking forward to hear from you.

6.

9.

Just put a full stop next to the bottom of the number.

6

9

Also works - it's how I do it when I'm labelling eppendorfs.

 Griddlelol wrote:
6.

9.

Just put a full stop next to the bottom of the number.

6

9

Also works - it's how I do it when I'm labelling eppendorfs.

The complaints are that these solutions aren't enough if you've thrown 15+ dice and quickly want to determine which dice are 8 or more. Obviously the under score, which is most often used, should be used no matter what. (Maybe no under score is needed for the number 6, when using dots )

I don't like the grey scale idea at all.

The type that have an underscore to show the 6 and the 9 are visually quicker to read than the type with a dot, I reckon.

Maybe someone makes 10 sided dice with a dot pattern instead of numerals.

What about if you make the rules so that a low roll is what you need? A lot of the time, the difference between 6 and 9 will be irrelevant if people will need to roll 3 or less, rather than 8 or more.

Have you really had a lot of complaints? It seems to me that people are making a small mountain out of a molehill.

Mark 6 or 9 with Roman numerals?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't like the grey scale idea at all.

The type that have an underscore to show the 6 and the 9 are visually quicker to read than the type with a dot, I reckon.

Maybe someone makes 10 sided dice with a dot pattern instead of numerals.

What about if you make the rules so that a low roll is what you need? A lot of the time, the difference between 6 and 9 will be irrelevant if people will need to roll 3 or less, rather than 8 or more.

Have you really had a lot of complaints? It seems to me that people are making a small mountain out of a molehill.

Well not actual complaints - it's just an argument against using D10 instead of D6, but people who use this argument feel very strong about it, it seems.

You don't like the grey scale? - think about 20 dice which have been thrown and you've locked onto the grey level, which you need - then it's just to gather the dice with that grey level or darker... I sure would like to try it out.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Mark 6 or 9 with Roman numerals?

Yes... Either that or using dots instead of the number 6 or 9 like I proposed.

What about using D8's? You're still getting 33% more possible values compared to D6's.

 Haravikk wrote:
What about using D8's? You're still getting 33% more possible values compared to D6's.

Agreed, that's a naughty indirect approach but sure would have solved it. It was a combination of reducing movement to 5" and that I wanted more granularity. Going from D6 to D8 seemed like too small a step, which it actually ain't but it just doesn't work well with a 5" movement, when figuring out rules.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Mark 6 or 9 with Roman numerals?

Best solution yet.

I don't really have a huge issue with 6 vs 9 on D10's, my main issue is I find numerals slower to process than dots. Dots have this weird pattern recognition thing where if I know I need a 4+, I can just without thinking or counting sweep my hand over 10, 20, 30, 40 dice and almost instantly sort the successes from failures. It's just so visual, it even makes it hard to cheat because a cheater needs to be superman level fast to pick up the dice before I can see they picked up the wrong ones.

Even a D6 which is printed with numerals rather than dots I find it more tedious to sort successes from failures. Maybe it's just me.

Also D6's being perfect cubes are quick to count out, you don't count out 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9....18,19,20 dice, you just arrange them in to your hands to form a cube 4x5 and you know that's 20 dice without actually counting them out.

But that's just me, if you think you can come up with an awesome D10 system, just go for it. Personally I don't think the lack of granularity in the D6 is a huge hurdle in 40k compared to all the other hurdles.

I don't believe I've ever heard anyone genuinely complain about 6 vs 9 on a D10 dice. Ever.

I really don't think this would "slow" a game down unless the players are blind.

I think part of the problem lies with 40k design of requiring you to repeatedly throw absurd amounts of dice, eg Scat Bike packs, Orky/Wulfen CC, Guard blob squads, even with d6's mistakes will happen, if you are going for a rewrite I'd look for ways to lower the number of dice chucked

As for the D10 issue, underlining is most likely the most obvious way

Some people like throwing large amounts of dice. This doesn't mean every new rulebook should adopt it as a basic principle.

What about my idea of rearranging the rules so that usually you won't need to worry about a 6 or 9 because you are trying to roll low?

An advantage of doing this using D10 is that it becomes very easy to calculate the odds of hitting with multiple shots. If you need a roll of 1-4 to hit, and you have 24 shots, your chance to hit = 0.4*24 = 9.6; this is 9 hits and a single roll of 6- for a 10th hit. Thus the 24 dice are very quickly reduce to only 1.

Obviously this has the disadvantage of asking people to do a bit of mental arithmetic and roll small numbers of dice.

Just change the font on the dice. 9 does not need to curve around like it does in whatever font this is. It can be as straight as an inverted b. That is how I physically write it and how nearly every other handwritten nine I've seen has been, including the OP's. If dots or underscores are not enough, there's a solution.

Elbows wrote:
I don't believe I've ever heard anyone genuinely complain about 6 vs 9 on a D10 dice. Ever.

I really don't think this would "slow" a game down unless the players are blind.

I've played RPGs since 2000, and I've never heard of that complaint, either.

If you're tossing 50 of them for a "warhammer" style game, it's still not that big of a deal.

And underline or "." following the number works fine.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I don't really have a huge issue with 6 vs 9 on D10's, my main issue is I find numerals slower to process than dots. Dots have this weird pattern recognition thing where if I know I need a 4+, I can just without thinking or counting sweep my hand over 10, 20, 30, 40 dice and almost instantly sort the successes from failures. It's just so visual, it even makes it hard to cheat because a cheater needs to be superman level fast to pick up the dice before I can see they picked up the wrong ones.

Even a D6 which is printed with numerals rather than dots I find it more tedious to sort successes from failures. Maybe it's just me.

Also D6's being perfect cubes are quick to count out, you don't count out 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9....18,19,20 dice, you just arrange them in to your hands to form a cube 4x5 and you know that's 20 dice without actually counting them out.

But that's just me, if you think you can come up with an awesome D10 system, just go for it. Personally I don't think the lack of granularity in the D6 is a huge hurdle in 40k compared to all the other hurdles.

Numbers are patterns, just like the pips on dice. You just have more experience with the pips than you do with the numbers. If you were to switch over to numerical dice and use them exclusively your speed to process the results on the dice would most likely increase over time.

 SharkoutofWata wrote:
Just change the font on the dice. 9 does not need to curve around like it does in whatever font this is. It can be as straight as an inverted b. That is how I physically write it and how nearly every other handwritten nine I've seen has been, including the OP's. If dots or underscores are not enough, there's a solution.

I think this is the winner, along with the 'use low numbers' argument.. The grayscale likely won't work as depending on light you'll still have issues with what's dark and what's not. I also have no idea where you'd get the grayscale dice in the first place.

The other option I see, if you have a place to get dice with different colors on them, is to paint either the number or the facing different colors, probably blue for one and red for the other.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
What about my idea of rearranging the rules so that usually you won't need to worry about a 6 or 9 because you are trying to roll low?

Yeah sorry I didn't respond to that. It's an interesting idea, as it will get rid of the problem most of the time, it's just that I've written most of the rules already (you guys are in for a treat!), it's more in the spirit of 40k and it will demand more from the player, as you pointed out yourself, which maybe will take as much time as were saved.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
It's just funny, that none of you have heard about this problem before as it's an argument which comes up every time someone suggests to use D10. But with your replies amongst others, I think that people who have a problem with the 6s and 9s are in the minority.

 Ghaz wrote:
Numbers are patterns, just like the pips on dice. You just have more experience with the pips than you do with the numbers. If you were to switch over to numerical dice and use them exclusively your speed to process the results on the dice would most likely increase over time.

I don't really think that's the case. The patterns of pips on a dice are laid out in a way that makes them quicker to identify. Numerals are mostly arbitrary squiggles. If you had to identify "1"s it wouldn't make much difference between pips and numerals, but for anything else I reckon most people if tested could identify pips faster.

I'm sure some of it's learned, but I work with numbers all day for my job and if you gave me a string of 30 numbers between 1 and 6 it'd take me longer to sort them in order than if you gave me this...

https://www.random.org/dice/?num=30

I tell pretty much instantly what the distribution is, quicker than I can actually mentally count them.

That's why when I get bunches of numerals I plot them on graphs to see trends or lack of trends

Or maybe I just have a mild case of savant syndrome

The pips on dice are just arbitrary patterns of dots instead of an arbitrary squiggle. Its still just a pattern.

I think the problems with 6 and 9 are not as bad as some people think. The type of die with a clear line under the foot of the numbers 6 and 9 is pretty distinctive.

Any custom made variant using colours, different fonts or other changes, realistically is going to be rather expensive to produce.

In the worst case you might consider modifying the rules to Roll Under instead of Roll Over.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I think the problems with 6 and 9 are not as bad as some people think. The type of die with a clear line under the foot of the numbers 6 and 9 is pretty distinctive.
.

This is the best option. When it comes to picking out the difference between 6s and 9s, the underlined method is going to be the fastest and most visually distinctive, unless you want to make one of them a particular different color to distinguish as well, like bright red.

I suggest using dots for 1-6, and numbers for 7-10.

That way higher rolls are more easily distinguishable and would actually compliment large amounts of dice being thrown.

 SharkoutofWata wrote:
Just change the font on the dice. 9 does not need to curve around like it does in whatever font this is. It can be as straight as an inverted b. That is how I physically write it and how nearly every other handwritten nine I've seen has been, including the OP's. If dots or underscores are not enough, there's a solution.

Pretty much this. Just a backwards p. Never understood why this is not standard on dice.

Perhaps because most people don't have a problem distinguishing the 6 and the 9 by the dot or underline marking?

I've got to be honest and say I've never heard anyone complain about it, though perhaps that is because I haven't played a game in which you roll huge handfuls of them.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Perhaps because most people don't have a problem distinguishing the 6 and the 9 by the dot or underline marking?

I've got to be honest and say I've never heard anyone complain about it, though perhaps that is because I haven't played a game in which you roll huge handfuls of them.

I have. With the simple matter of the underlined number, distuinguishing the two is not an issue.

Having looked at a lot of the D10s that come up on a Google image search, they all have the base of the number on the die's 'equator' and the top of the number at the die's 'pole'.



That means if the number next to the six or nine is upside down, you're looking at a six instead of a nine or a nine instead of a six.

Precisely (hence the confusion some of us are having with this being difficult to figure out...)

Vertical slash through 6, horizontal slash through 9.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Vertical slash through 6, horizontal slash through 9.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Vertical slash through 6, horizontal slash through 9.

If you are at the point where you can get a company to customize the color of every face of the die, why not just design a custom font?

Use a font that 'weights' the bottom of each number visually by making the lines broader there (this also has the advantage of broadening the lines of the numbers away from the smaller apex of the die). The six will have a fuller loop on the bottom, and the nine will have a smaller loop and a wide, full line on the bottom.

You can use the same custom font on all the dice, even though most won't need the '9', to keep the dice set looking visually consistent.