"Dice - new thought?" Topic

A strange thought occurred to me, as I was contemplating my dice ineptitude.
I wonder how it would work if you tried this (probably work better for a boardgame then a buckets of dice type game):
1) Announce how many attacks you have that turn – where they are, who is involved, the odds, etc.
2) Roll that many dice all at once.
3) Now that you have rolled, divide up the dice rolled however you want.

Example:
I have 3 attacks: A, B & C
I roll 3 dice: 2, 4, 6,
Attacks B gets the 6, C gets the 2 And A gets the 4

You mean, applying a little oil to the Friction?
I think this would indeed work better in a Board-Game, preferably a simple one for testing.

Some people roll up their RPG characters that way.

Not too dissimilar to rolling up pips and allocating them, as in DBA/DBM/etc.

It would remove a little of the uncertainty of making an attack. Might work well for a spaceship game (Target their weapons…well, we hit their weapons and their engines caught some of our fire, too.)

Would probably only work if all dice needed to roll the same number. Or if different attacks allowed you to roll different numbers of dice.

It might result in power gamers making sacrafice attacks that they don't care about in order to get more dice to roll to generate more successful results to apply to the Important attacks.

Doesn't matter, I'd roll three 1's anyway.

Just returned to make the point which I see has already occurred to Dennis, though hadn't taken it as far; that is, rather than "sacrifice attacks", I'd thought of "feints" or "diversionary attacks".

You could also use different colors of e.g. 1d6s.E.g.

If you needed a 6 followed by a 4,5,6 … roll 2 dice.

I.e. One Red, one White.

The Red die is the "control" dice. If it does not come up 6.

It does not matter what comes up on the White die. In this case.

But … If the Red comes up 6 … and the White comes up 4-6. You got a hit !

You could even use different size d6s … just ID the "control" die …

Seems like it would slow down the game as people spend time figuring out which is the best way to allocate dice.

When I need to split up dice somehow like that my 'random' method usually to roll the dice, see where they land from left to right and start allocating them to figures from left to right. So the die that landed the farthest to the left get allocated to the left most figure, etc, and work my way on down the line.

A similar method I use to speed up the prep-bombardment for Bolt Action is to roll dice one at a time but move from left to right. So I'll roll one die, move a little to the right, roll another die, move, etc…

One of the reasons for dropping PIP allocation in DBMM was that it slowed the game*. Instead of choosing which command got which dice every turn as in DBM, DBMM simply had the general choose which command _always_ got the high dice, which one got the next highest, etc.

*Well, at least the author thought it did. And I had experience of players basically freezing with indecision.

Cheers,
JohnG

QILS (skirmish game) does this in reverse – the player taking damage decides how to apply the damage. It represents the split second decision when you know you are going to take the sword blow from your opponent and you choose to either have your shield arm knocked out of socket for the rest of the game or have the wrist of your fighting arm broken.

I think this type of allocation makes sense when all the units that share outcomes are in tight collaboration. So in a modern/scifi situation where there is good, well functioning C2 or in clusters of a Medieval mass combat where my five guys are fighting your six.

It could have some sense in other situations, I just can't think of what they are off the cuff.

Along with the tight collaboration concept, a couple things you might consider:

– It may not be a player's whole force that shares, just subsets

– Those subsets may be dynamic:
– proximity based (the Medieval example) like a command radius
– "action point based"; it costs player actions to add or restore sharing among units

– Morale or technology failure could lose this capability

$.02 USD(me)

inflation and taxes makes that $1.50 USD

I had experience of players basically freezing with indecision.

That sounds pretty authentic and realistic to me. Just add some type of negative modifier for their next action for the longer they take.

Wolfhag

Give this a try?