Custom dice are cool if, and only if, you have a freely available online roller/do the legwork to make it work on VTT's as a company.
If it's at the point where the conversion chart between your magic symbols and a d6 is needed for anything than not paying ten bucks for more sets in person I'm out.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I'm extremely jazzed for the MCDM game. It sounds like exactly what I want out of a tactical RPG. Yes please give me a reason to care about which weapon I pick.
I believe they do plan to have a dice roller phone ap or online thingy, yes. Last I heard their dice system also overlapped with a regular polyhedral dice set, with simple conversion taking only a few minutes to memorize.
I'm extremely jazzed for the MCDM game. It sounds like exactly what I want out of a tactical RPG. Yes please give me a reason to care about which weapon I pick.
Play my new custom RPG where players announce their actions, and then wait for next week's lottery numbers to see if they succeed.
My RPG uses a custom Tarot deck and a 10-page table to interpret the result. You use custom dice to determine which spread to use and you toss these small animal bones into the air to determine which card to draw for no wait, come back, I'm not even to the good part yet!
I like custom dice when they make figuring results out a simpler process, like how Betrayal at House on the Hill has multiple blank sides on the dice. It's effectively checking for a five or a six, but, you know, you're looking for "did I get any sides with a value"
I don't love dice with a bunch of custom symbols that you have to interpret
I like custom dice when they make figuring results out a simpler process, like how Betrayal at House on the Hill has multiple blank sides on the dice. It's effectively checking for a five or a six, but, you know, you're looking for "did I get any sides with a value"
I don't love dice with a bunch of custom symbols that you have to interpret
Yeah, don't give me a word problem.
Susie rolled 3 watermelons, a kitty cat, and 7 fire engines, did she roll high enough crush the skeleton into powder?
PSN staticvalor_1
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Part of me unreasonably holds onto the fantasy of a system that can be run if you only have a single d6. Even if something asks you to roll like 5d6 you can roll the die, record the result, and keep rolling until you have your rolls.
Part of me unreasonably holds onto the fantasy of a system that can be run if you only have a single d6. Even if something asks you to roll like 5d6 you can roll the die, record the result, and keep rolling until you have your rolls.
You can! With lots of games! I mean the ones I’m thinking of use 2d6, but it’s not a big stretch.
I don’t think it’d be tough to drop Apocalypse World down to 1d6. Instead of 10+/7-9/6- you could narrow it to 6/3-5/2-1 or something for dice results, then ditch any stat increases after +1.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I am eternally torn between the two poles, part of me wants to be able to use nothing more than two six sided dice and the other part wants each character to have a custom deck of cards that they ritually destroy or a dozen different polyhedrals that represent distinct parts of the self or whatever else
Yeah, that's the flipside. Having a buncha custom d10's with like, 4-5 resources they could roll with different color die having different distributions of them seems really cool. The perfectionist brain demanding unreasonable standards.
In Defense of really big tables of resolution: DnD would scale with its levels much better if it was based on one of those strategic scale wargame’s combat resolution by odds tables.
I am eternally torn between the two poles, part of me wants to be able to use nothing more than two six sided dice and the other part wants each character to have a custom deck of cards that they ritually destroy or a dozen different polyhedrals that represent distinct parts of the self or whatever else
Not gonna lie, the one session of Exalted that I played I was delighted when I rolled what seemed like a bucket of dice.
In Defense of really big tables of resolution: DnD would scale with its levels much better if it was based on one of those strategic scale wargame’s combat resolution by odds tables.
In Defense of really big tables of resolution: DnD would scale with its levels much better if it was based on one of those strategic scale wargame’s combat resolution by odds tables.
In Defense of really big tables of resolution: DnD would scale with its levels much better if it was based on one of those strategic scale wargame’s combat resolution by odds tables.
I see you too are making a language.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I am eternally torn between the two poles, part of me wants to be able to use nothing more than two six sided dice and the other part wants each character to have a custom deck of cards that they ritually destroy or a dozen different polyhedrals that represent distinct parts of the self or whatever else
Not gonna lie, the one session of Exalted that I played I was delighted when I rolled what seemed like a bucket of dice.
I don't actually like rolling a lot of dice, that feels tedious to me
TBH I was mostly joking but a game that just used an odds table with Eliminated, Flee, Reduced as the consequences could probably be mapped onto a dungeon delve kinda thing.
Or at least something which is explicitly wargamey but mapped to fantasy stuff where 'artillery' is just your mage. Maybe sommething to run a second Command Confusion where every player's POV is their Heroic fantasy hero's current location and they try to coordinate a defense and solution to the big undead invasion of a town or something with the local forces.
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gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Last night the DM in my Icewind Dale campaign asked me to make a performance check to pretend to be a dog...as a druid in wild shape. I rolled a 2. What even is that? Do I start walking on my back legs and asking about the weather?
Later, we got into a very overtuned fight. Five v five, we're level 6, enemies all had AC 21 and 85 HP and two attacks a round. Very close to a TPK. Close enough that I would bet dinner that the DM started fudging the numbers. The hit rate of the enemies towards the end suddenly dropped to 1 out of 4 when our average party AC is 14 and they're rocking somewhere around a +6.
When only one enemy was left, I told the dwarf, "Open the passage so we can chase your boss and we'll let you live." DM asked for a persuasion check => 2.
Slight pause.
"...with advantage."
16.
He agreed. How nice. Just...just still trying to gently coach the DM don't ask for a roll if it should logically succeed.
I am feeling frustrated in this game. I'll give an example. We ended with this combat. The enemy opened a secret corridor for us to chase down the boss. The boss is a dwarf (speed 25), and it had been 7 rounds total since combat started. He ran away on round 3.
So, logically, he's no more than 200 feet away down a secret tunnel, and we have been stated to be quite far from the normal dwarven settlement. Oh, and he also doffed his plate mail which had been Heat Metal'd somewhere in that 6 rounds, without damaging it.
We have a monk that can zoom, a ranger under Zephyr that can zoom. By all rights, we should shoot down that corridor and beat the the boss to death. But I am gonna bet that he "gets away". That he's just gone. The corridor ends, the secret tunnel forks, there's no way to track him, he ducked into a sudden group of innocent bystanders, whatever.
It just keeps happening. The bad guys planned ahead of us; they always had a back-up; they had a wagon waiting; they went invisible. Basically as soon as the bad guy drops from our immediate line of sight they enter Quantum DM land where they can negate anything and vanish.
I try to tell myself "New GM, help them learn" and all that, but i have this sinking feeling that we're gonna end up at the resolution that the DM planned and not the one that makes sense in the world.
I think the dice systems I've liked the most are Legends of the Wulin and Shadowrun 5e for all the wrong reasons.
Legends of the Wulin made dice a very fun part of the game because there was like a game within the game there.
And Shadowrun 5e, like, yes, I want to throw giant handfuls of dice and announce to the GM how large the pool is so that I can see his jaw drop when he realizes he has entered thine wheelhouse.
The goal with designing any sort of random system to determine outcomes in a game should be to hide as much of the math and work as you can in order to get to the good part, which is the outcome. There's a lot of complicated stuff in D&D, but most rolls come down to "roll one die and add a modifier, then report that number to the DM." Big piles of dice are a reward for hitting someone, etc.
When I was playing around with developing a tactical game, I'd half settled on using different varieties of D6 that would be different colors based on how easy it'd be to succeed on a roll with them, and then I sat down and did a bunch of math to figure out what would make for interesting progression for an ability check, and found that adding a second red die (the worst die) is probably going to result in more successful outcomes than just upgrading from a singular red die to a singular yellow die, unless you need all die to succeed, etc. Like, there was a lot of complicated math going on, but the goal in the end would be that you'd get a weapon card or something that said like, ROLL TWO GREEN DICE AND SEE IF ONE HITS and each green dice would have "success" or "failure" sides, and you could tell at a glance if it'd worked, and the game would move on. The math was built into the design, but players wouldn't have to interact with it unless they wanted to.
It didn't go any further than that, because I got bored trying to do the action/movement economy, but
TBH as far as resolution systems go I either want it to be a single die cast I have no influence over or something where the choices are obvious without a calculator.
2D20 is pretty perfect in that regard: You roll 2d20 and check for success, but you can spend meta currency to roll up to 5d20 to get more successes. It makes sense both as a boost to do hard rolls and as a way to get flashy on easy rolls. The dice are minimally complex (Because you can do a 1-20 roll under as a 1-100% chance easy) but reflect complexity and depth back where you want it: On the player making choices using tools they understand.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I like Genesys a lot, but not really in love with custom dice otherwise (looking at you L5R 5th) or weird sizes (looking at you DCC).
Dice rolls need to be fast and intuitive. Even Genesys is pushing it.
Yea genesys works because there are blank faces, like only 3 symbols, one of which is a crit symbol on the big die. the dice themselves are color coded positive or negative, which changes their symbol counts.
In the end you are just adding up one of two symbols, and if you crit or not.
I just realized that once our group's campaign takes off and my tiefling wizard eventually hits level 2 and takes a level of arcana domain cleric, she'll have 9 cantrips (3 from wizard, 3 from cleric, 1 from tiefling variant, 2 wizard cantrips from the arcana cleric feature). Gonna be pretty versatile!
Also, since we'll be running Dragon Heist and some of the stuff from the new heist book as well (something about golden keys), I should think about spells and stuff that would come in handy in situations like that.
Part of me unreasonably holds onto the fantasy of a system that can be run if you only have a single d6. Even if something asks you to roll like 5d6 you can roll the die, record the result, and keep rolling until you have your rolls.
TBH I was mostly joking but a game that just used an odds table with Eliminated, Flee, Reduced as the consequences could probably be mapped onto a dungeon delve kinda thing.
Or at least something which is explicitly wargamey but mapped to fantasy stuff where 'artillery' is just your mage. Maybe sommething to run a second Command Confusion where every player's POV is their Heroic fantasy hero's current location and they try to coordinate a defense and solution to the big undead invasion of a town or something with the local forces.
Okay so old school combat results table (The CRT racist dads can get behind ba dum tsh) stuff but for a game featuring heroes:
E=Eliminated, R=Retreat B=Bloody counter equal to number shown on theoretically CRT
Are the results we're working off. Bloodied counters get flipped to an alternative side. Typically with reduced stats though honour guards may get braver when on the edge and berserker heroes actually get harder to put down when you bloody them. If a bloodied counter doesn't get reinforced or healed before being bloodied again it's eliminated.
Counters are either Heroes/Villains (same thing, different sides) or Forces representing squads and small armies rallying around their respective Cool Hero Dudes.
Every counter has Might and Bravery. Heroes also have Wits and Leadership.
Might: What generates the odds for the Combat Results Table. This is the raw martial force, toughness and violence doingness of a counter.
Bravery: Your cohesion, charisma and sheer will. This is what counters use to rally after retreats, resist grand spells and so on. It's also what heroes can use to resist being reduced/bloodied.
Wits: Roll to scout, understand or interact with weird objects on the battlefield. This is the catch all nerd stat. Villains also have this to help resist some spells but y'know, they're big undead dudes or whatever so not too interested in most uses of it.
Leadership: A flat boost to the stats of Forces in the same zone as the hero. This is usually zero but grand strategists might have a +2 that fully makes up for their might issues if they're in a big stack. Lone ranger types and incompetent goblin warbosses might have a -1.
Counters can also have special abilities. Especially heroes. Some examples could be:
Champion (C): For elite units and also every fighter style hero/villain. This represents giga chads who swing fights by themselves. If they're present on one side but not the other swing the odds column one to your favour.
Artillery (A): Big mages, actual artillery and so on. Can fling attacks into the next zone. While they'll probably have low odds of making an impact (Their force vs whatever army is there) the advantage is that you just ignore anything that would adversely hurt the attacker.
Healer (H): Obvious, can heal bloodied Hero/Villain counters.
Rogue (R): Counteracts champions on the otherside but doesn't count as a champion themselves. Also if a force with a Rogue hero/villain retreats it doesn't become in disarray/need rallying.
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If it's at the point where the conversion chart between your magic symbols and a d6 is needed for anything than not paying ten bucks for more sets in person I'm out.
Custom dice and lots of them.
He did a video a while back where he was raving about them.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Nothing is set in stone for them yet, though.
Huh. This dampens my enthusiasm a bit cause I already have way too many normal dice.
You heard me.
Now is the time to unleash the untapped potential of card spinning tops.
Custom dice? Yawn
Play my new custom RPG where players announce their actions, and then wait for next week's lottery numbers to see if they succeed.
Hitting the Power Ball is a crit.
My RPG uses a custom Tarot deck and a 10-page table to interpret the result. You use custom dice to determine which spread to use and you toss these small animal bones into the air to determine which card to draw for no wait, come back, I'm not even to the good part yet!
You place a Domino's order, and the quicker the delivery driver arrives the higher your score. You get a bonus for sharing your pizza.
That's what you meant right?
I don't love dice with a bunch of custom symbols that you have to interpret
Dice rolls need to be fast and intuitive. Even Genesys is pushing it.
Yeah, don't give me a word problem.
Susie rolled 3 watermelons, a kitty cat, and 7 fire engines, did she roll high enough crush the skeleton into powder?
I was just looking at the game If I Were A Lich, Man on Kickstarter which uses dreidels as a randomization mechanic, so we're definitely close
You can! With lots of games! I mean the ones I’m thinking of use 2d6, but it’s not a big stretch.
I don’t think it’d be tough to drop Apocalypse World down to 1d6. Instead of 10+/7-9/6- you could narrow it to 6/3-5/2-1 or something for dice results, then ditch any stat increases after +1.
hey grandpa have you seen the slide rule anywhere
jk i don't know what a slide rule is
It's what I use to beat whippersnappers.
It's next to my counter clipper in my ASL box.
I'm joking, I only own one of those things.
I see you too are making a language.
I don't actually like rolling a lot of dice, that feels tedious to me
But a variety of them, ooh yes
Or at least something which is explicitly wargamey but mapped to fantasy stuff where 'artillery' is just your mage. Maybe sommething to run a second Command Confusion where every player's POV is their Heroic fantasy hero's current location and they try to coordinate a defense and solution to the big undead invasion of a town or something with the local forces.
Later, we got into a very overtuned fight. Five v five, we're level 6, enemies all had AC 21 and 85 HP and two attacks a round. Very close to a TPK. Close enough that I would bet dinner that the DM started fudging the numbers. The hit rate of the enemies towards the end suddenly dropped to 1 out of 4 when our average party AC is 14 and they're rocking somewhere around a +6.
When only one enemy was left, I told the dwarf, "Open the passage so we can chase your boss and we'll let you live." DM asked for a persuasion check => 2.
Slight pause.
"...with advantage."
16.
He agreed. How nice. Just...just still trying to gently coach the DM don't ask for a roll if it should logically succeed.
I am feeling frustrated in this game. I'll give an example. We ended with this combat. The enemy opened a secret corridor for us to chase down the boss. The boss is a dwarf (speed 25), and it had been 7 rounds total since combat started. He ran away on round 3.
So, logically, he's no more than 200 feet away down a secret tunnel, and we have been stated to be quite far from the normal dwarven settlement. Oh, and he also doffed his plate mail which had been Heat Metal'd somewhere in that 6 rounds, without damaging it.
We have a monk that can zoom, a ranger under Zephyr that can zoom. By all rights, we should shoot down that corridor and beat the the boss to death. But I am gonna bet that he "gets away". That he's just gone. The corridor ends, the secret tunnel forks, there's no way to track him, he ducked into a sudden group of innocent bystanders, whatever.
It just keeps happening. The bad guys planned ahead of us; they always had a back-up; they had a wagon waiting; they went invisible. Basically as soon as the bad guy drops from our immediate line of sight they enter Quantum DM land where they can negate anything and vanish.
I try to tell myself "New GM, help them learn" and all that, but i have this sinking feeling that we're gonna end up at the resolution that the DM planned and not the one that makes sense in the world.
Legends of the Wulin made dice a very fun part of the game because there was like a game within the game there.
And Shadowrun 5e, like, yes, I want to throw giant handfuls of dice and announce to the GM how large the pool is so that I can see his jaw drop when he realizes he has entered thine wheelhouse.
I think that game is on my TTRPG bucket list but I don't know any GM's (including myself) who are down for it.
When I was playing around with developing a tactical game, I'd half settled on using different varieties of D6 that would be different colors based on how easy it'd be to succeed on a roll with them, and then I sat down and did a bunch of math to figure out what would make for interesting progression for an ability check, and found that adding a second red die (the worst die) is probably going to result in more successful outcomes than just upgrading from a singular red die to a singular yellow die, unless you need all die to succeed, etc. Like, there was a lot of complicated math going on, but the goal in the end would be that you'd get a weapon card or something that said like, ROLL TWO GREEN DICE AND SEE IF ONE HITS and each green dice would have "success" or "failure" sides, and you could tell at a glance if it'd worked, and the game would move on. The math was built into the design, but players wouldn't have to interact with it unless they wanted to.
It didn't go any further than that, because I got bored trying to do the action/movement economy, but
2D20 is pretty perfect in that regard: You roll 2d20 and check for success, but you can spend meta currency to roll up to 5d20 to get more successes. It makes sense both as a boost to do hard rolls and as a way to get flashy on easy rolls. The dice are minimally complex (Because you can do a 1-20 roll under as a 1-100% chance easy) but reflect complexity and depth back where you want it: On the player making choices using tools they understand.
Yea genesys works because there are blank faces, like only 3 symbols, one of which is a crit symbol on the big die. the dice themselves are color coded positive or negative, which changes their symbol counts.
In the end you are just adding up one of two symbols, and if you crit or not.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Also, since we'll be running Dragon Heist and some of the stuff from the new heist book as well (something about golden keys), I should think about spells and stuff that would come in handy in situations like that.
This made me laugh for like a solid minute
Actually, that's this system here. Also this system here (an OGL version of the venerable Star Wars d6 system)
This works on a lot of levels.
Okay so old school combat results table (The CRT racist dads can get behind ba dum tsh) stuff but for a game featuring heroes:
E=Eliminated, R=Retreat B=Bloody counter equal to number shown on theoretically CRT
Are the results we're working off. Bloodied counters get flipped to an alternative side. Typically with reduced stats though honour guards may get braver when on the edge and berserker heroes actually get harder to put down when you bloody them. If a bloodied counter doesn't get reinforced or healed before being bloodied again it's eliminated.
Counters are either Heroes/Villains (same thing, different sides) or Forces representing squads and small armies rallying around their respective Cool Hero Dudes.
Every counter has Might and Bravery. Heroes also have Wits and Leadership.
Might: What generates the odds for the Combat Results Table. This is the raw martial force, toughness and violence doingness of a counter.
Bravery: Your cohesion, charisma and sheer will. This is what counters use to rally after retreats, resist grand spells and so on. It's also what heroes can use to resist being reduced/bloodied.
Wits: Roll to scout, understand or interact with weird objects on the battlefield. This is the catch all nerd stat. Villains also have this to help resist some spells but y'know, they're big undead dudes or whatever so not too interested in most uses of it.
Leadership: A flat boost to the stats of Forces in the same zone as the hero. This is usually zero but grand strategists might have a +2 that fully makes up for their might issues if they're in a big stack. Lone ranger types and incompetent goblin warbosses might have a -1.
Counters can also have special abilities. Especially heroes. Some examples could be:
Champion (C): For elite units and also every fighter style hero/villain. This represents giga chads who swing fights by themselves. If they're present on one side but not the other swing the odds column one to your favour.
Artillery (A): Big mages, actual artillery and so on. Can fling attacks into the next zone. While they'll probably have low odds of making an impact (Their force vs whatever army is there) the advantage is that you just ignore anything that would adversely hurt the attacker.
Healer (H): Obvious, can heal bloodied Hero/Villain counters.
Rogue (R): Counteracts champions on the otherside but doesn't count as a champion themselves. Also if a force with a Rogue hero/villain retreats it doesn't become in disarray/need rallying.