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Made in us
Krazed Killa Kan





SoCal

For a long time I've been very interested in using a set of specialty dice for wargaming to make the numbers not so fixated on the traditional D6, while also allowing more interesting results to come up that mix up the gameplay. The concept being to use ideas from boardgames to address certain areas where things have gotten stale in traditional miniature games.

You see this in some current games like Malifaux and some Western games that use cards also count.. Other games like Saga have specialty dice, but make the mistake of specialty dice for every faction instead of one set. Bolt Action/Gates has order dice, which are just tokens disguised as dice, but people liked those enough to buy them.

An example to look at is FFG doing this good acclaim with their Star Wars RPG, although before that it was the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, which got a mixed reception. Now they're releasing a generic version of their "narrative dice" rules that I'm excited to use.

Some not quite released games are experimenting with this as well.

This pertains to wargaming in that, people generally shy away from specialty dice because they don't want to have to buy new dice just for one game. However, the gameplay possibilities opened up by specialty dice are too big to ignore. Imagine making a roll that starts as a simple attack, but in that roll you get both chance to hit, damage, and interesting extra effects based on which icons come up and how many of them? That would speed up gameplay and reduce bookkeeping at the same time, all without charts or multiple step math.

So, what if the community came up with a generic set of dice with associated icons, usable by anyone, and any rules set. People could make generic rules with these dice, or make specific rules.

The dice face counts, colors, and names might need to be standardized to help with establishment, but the usage of them open. So any die manufacturer can use them. This helps solve the problem of people not wanting a set of dice usable only in one game.

   
Made in gr
Thermo-Optical Spekter





Greece

While I am for such design, I am not sure a generic dice for Various systems will work, each system needs their own custom dice to fine tune their design.
   
Made in us
Incorporating Wet-Blending





Houston, TX

Yeah, dice are directly tied to the design of the game, so outside of numeric/pipped d6, I don't know how you could do generic.

There is also the problem that I have- at the end of the day, they are just recolored d6. Look at the HeroQuest style dice. 3 swords, 2 shields, 1 skull. Same grouping as saying 4+, 2-3, 1. The key is thinking about the results and probability groupings. The symbols are just polish and could just as easily be cats, rayguns, or whatever. FFG in particular has gotten quite a bit of criticism from its constant use of custom dice which makes the games less accessible.

Cards are completely different and operate on a whole different set of conditional probabilities.

-James
 
   
Made in gr
Thermo-Optical Spekter





Greece

From a design/ business perspective I prefer FFG approach of custom dice over using custom cards, costs less to change the dice than change a card based system.
   
Made in gb
Longtime Dakkanaut






Cheltenham, UK

I've been thinking carefully about this idea since you posted it.

I don't actually like the SW narrative dice, which I find difficult and unintuitive to read. That said, I have fellow players who love it and seem to have grokked the concept much more quickly than I have.

Overall, I like the idea of a generic dice set with an open licence, along the lines of OGL, that would allow designers to build games on the basis of the use of a common dice set. But it does throw up some challenges for designers not dissimilar to OGL.

The OGL d20 system was (I know there's a new one, but I don't know enough about it to be confident in my assertions, so I'm referring to the old, 3.5 one) based upon certain assumptions about the probabilities of certain events taking place. If you wanted to substantially alter the probabilities, you had to modify the system. Now, this was actually easy enough, thanks to the fact that the OGL was based on numbers - so you could shift probabilities with the application of a few strategically-placed modifiers.

But with symbol-based dice like the FFG narrative dice system, you run foul of the fact that you've got an abstract set of symbols that dictate outcomes and you can't therefore substantially alter the probabilistic picture.

However, there would still be a substantial range of possible game designs that could be built upon a generic dice system by enterprising designers, regardless of the probabilistic distribution. It's a really interesting idea and I'd love to see it fleshed out with more detail on how it might work.

R.

   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






SoCal, USA!

 Vertrucio wrote:
So, what if the community came up with a generic set of dice with associated icons, usable by anyone, and any rules set. People could make generic rules with these dice, or make specific rules.


While the intent is good, in practice, it's kind of wonky. If you look at various games with custom dice, a lot of them collapse results to change probabilities. For example, if we just look at 6-siders, you have the ancient HeroQuest and BattleMasters dice. Then there are the newer Super Dungeon Explore dice, which were re-implemented in Conan. Also the BattleLore dice. And then there's GW's reuse of the Epic order dice in Battlefleet Gothic. All of them are unique, for their own reasons. The designers use their custom dice to produce a particular result, precisely to create custom dice that don't follow generic rules. After all, if they wanted to be generic and standard, they'd have used ordinary d6s in the first place!


   
Made in au
Homicidal Veteran Blood Angel Assault Marine




Oz

Not sure how useful this is. I was designing a game at one point, and considered custom d6s with the following pips:
green - 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4
yellow - 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6
orange - 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8
red - 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10

There was a company that would make custom dice that i looked into, chessix? Not sure, it's been a while. But i liked the idea of a d3-type dice that had a greater spread but more reliable outcomes (the average roll would be 0-1 variation (4/6)).

But if you're looking for icons/faces (that would presumably be put on a dice) for use with a wargaming system. I found this: lorc rpg icons. Would give a link, but can't for the life of me remember specifically where i got it from. But very useful stuff, and from memory it's freeware too, just need to credit him.

 
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






SoCal, USA!

Those dice are more akin to d10s, possibly d20s if you roll multiples?

Chessex, and every other dice manufacturer, will produce custom dice for a fee, based on the number of dice to be made.

As a general rule, the point of custom dice is to get away from math, and to something mathless or at least low count (maximum 7 or less).

Dice should be 0-based, so if you wanted something, consider something like this:
A = 0-0-0-0-1-1
B = 0-0-0-1-1-2
C = 0-0-1-1-2-3
3 flavors, counting up to 3, so that the math is easy to work with. Blanks, that the player can simply ignore to process quickly.

   
Made in au
Homicidal Veteran Blood Angel Assault Marine




Oz

Depends what you use them for. At the time i was looking for movement. So green was slow, yellow was average, orange was fast and red was really fast. Also, damage. Green was light damage, yellow was average, etc etc. They weren't intended to roll in multiples though, short of following through on damage from hits.

I disagree that the point of custom dice is to get away from math, but rather to represent it in a way that makes sense to your system.

 
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






SoCal, USA!

Still overcomplicated, IMO

   
 
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