"How many dice = 'Bucket of dice'?" Topic

Hi

I have seen games that use anything from NO dice to several dozen for a given mechanic (firing/melee), I am curious as to people's perception/preference on this point.

1) What amount of dice usage for a given mechanic do you consider to be encapsulated by the term: 'Bucket of dice'?

2) What do you consider the maximum amount of dice desirable for a given mechanic – at what point do you say this is too much, I cannot do this?!

So, what do you think the term means specific to the number of dice being used, and secondly what is the maximum amount of dice you would be prepared to use for determining fire/melee or whatever.

more than can be easily held in one hand

6

more than 10 a one time

I think of "bucket of dice' being a game mechanic that increases the number of dice being used as the number of models increases.

Like TNE2300 and Saber6 said. The number varies with the size of the hand. Starting at around 6 or so and ever increasing. Punkrabbit also has a point. It often starts with the amount of models in the unit.

What if you have a really large hand and/or use very small dice?

Yes, once it is more than five or so.

It is when you start to get all that cumbersome counting out, then finding somewhere to throw them so they don't go all over the table but you can still read them.

Two dice is definitely not bucket O dice.
Forty like I had to roll the other day definitely is ;)

More dice more averages, which IMHO rather defeats the object of dice as tools to achieve something random.

Personally I like one modified dice vs one opposing dice. I'm a big fan of Piquet for that reason. Both players are involved in each die roll.

1) Anything more than 10 dice at a time is a bucket.

2) I don't have any problems with tons of dice. What I find more annoying is mechanics where it's more difficult to figure how many dice you should be rolling and when there are dice that are figured differently. I'm annoyed by Warhammer type games where you've got to count the figures, then consider special weapons abilities etc. So you not only are rolling lots of dice, the number may change from turn to turn, and some dice are figured differently (usually a different color). Compare that to KoW which also has lots of dice, but the number is mostly constant throughout the game (sometimes doubled or trippled), and there's rarely more than one "special" dice that is figured differently than the rest.

I hate buckets o dice. If I like a game that uses them – say Flames of War – I will rework those charts to some other system. For FoW I use a base 6 – one red one white. So you read them like percentiles (red=10s). MUCH faster than sorting dice, counting hits, sorting dice, counting saves. And no dice all over the damn table.

Too many dice?

If we consider just 6 sided for convenience.

If the rarest result is 0ne in a million then 8D6 are more than enough 1/1,679,616 from [1/(6^8)] to represent that small chance. (say all sixes)

If rarest result is 1/1000 then 4D6, 1/1,296 ie [1/(6^4)].

I have seen games with 32 dice rolled for one result.
And one would have to ask, "Are there really that many possible outcomes?" ie 6^32 or about 8.0*10^24 Does that reflect the rarest meaningful outcome?

Perhaps to the point, 8.0*10^24 of 28mm figures would weigh more then the Earth. (Not to mention that this number of figures is not just way more then all the humans who have ever lived in all of the history of human-kind. It is probably more then all the mammals that have ever lived in the history of mammal-kind.

So, do we really need that many dice to parse out all the possible results from one action? In one exchange? In one battle?

Or let us imagine, every second the possible outcomes in a combat are doubled. Sec 1 two outcomes, Sec 2 four outcomes, Sec 3 eight outcomes…
It would take almost 90,000 years before each of these different outcomes could not be assigned to a result of rolling 32D6.

I suspect we are not using our dice as well as we might be.

Oh! the answer is Three!

QILS
is a dice focused games (the dice themselves take the place of tables and charts).

In QILS, the dice don't necessarily average out (or top out)with large numbers. So, while you certainly could design figures with buckets of dice (I would say more than five or six), the "typical" roll is 1, 2, or 3 in an opposed roll against your opponent's 1, 2, or 3 dice.

The big exception to this is the Phenomenally Cosmic Power set of scenarios which are explicitly intended to pit large numbers of lower-level guys against heavy-hitters. I think (well, for the sake of those scenarios, I hope) it is reasonable to have one unit on the board chucking an überhandful of bones around, especially if the point is that figure is an anomaly. And even there, I think it maxes out at ten dice.

In general, the number of dice doesn't bother me. TSATF is my bucket of dice game, and it's fine, mostly because I am not doing two dozen different things with each die … and the guy who runs the TSATF games I like does a lot of rules handholding, making it easier.

I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it.

1 more than any rule set that I use.

I don't care about the number of dice required if I enjoy the game.

"So, do we really need that many dice to parse out all the possible results from one action? In one exchange? In one battle?"

Thats IMO not the point.

I think, that you can better remember and sort different modifiers if they are for different things. One die with 12 modifiers is more complicated than changing the number of dice AND the result AND the save. Especially if it has a different meaning: number of dice = strength of a unit, modifier = quality of a unit, save = morale of the enemy.

2

I suspect we are not using our dice as well as we might be.

It is worth keeping in mind that with usual "bucket of dice" mechanisms, dice rolls are of a binary nature, resulting either in failure or success. However, there are not usually different levels of success or failure factored in (though in some cases rolling the lowest or highest score can result in some sort of critical success or failure).

So for example if a platoon of 32 riflemen opens fire on the enemy, and a die is thrown for each to determine if he hits or misses, then there are a total of 33 possible outcomes for the combined platoon action, ranging from 0 hits to 32 hits. Of course different possible outcomes can have different probabilities.