Alternate dice rules

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May 9 2006, 3:03 pm
In response to PirateHead
PirateHead wrote:
I still think you're banging your head on the cement by sticking to dice rolls and psychology and stuff.

Well yes, because coming up with good dice mechanics is hard. Game design isn't easy but it's a worthwhile challenge because you can make something even better the next time around.

Let me try to put myself into your mind set: I want to be able to finely manipulate the odds and perhaps even adjudicate the odds depending on situational conditions, but I want the players to feel the psychological effects associated with rolling dice in order to determine their success or failure and the excitement of high rolls versus the horror of low rolls, and the adrenaline rush when a mediocre roll is met by an even lower roll, etc.

Right, but those aren't conflicting goals.

Call me a cheating bastard, but here's where my thinking goes from there: instead of actually coming up with a dice system that compensates all the intricacies of what I want to do, I come up with a pure-probability engine that can handle all the different situations and odds that I want to use, then I come up with a system that fakes dice rolls based on the already-determined results. That way, I get the best of both worlds: I can pull the finest strings and make adjudication where needed, yet give the players the feeling that their dice-rolling matters.

That'd be even harder. Not to mention, it defeats the purpose of presenting randomness with dice. If the dice aren't balanced, it's gonna just annoy players.

Lummox JR
May 10 2006, 7:43 pm
In response to Lummox JR
Upon further experimentation, I've found that two forms of this don't work:

1) Using 7 as a draw roll so odds are 6:5 in attacker's favor, defender rolls 1 extra die and drops the lowest if they outnumber the skirmish and if the skirmish is less than 6 units. Result: The attacker is usually slaughtered and can't sustain an offensive against multiple territories.

2) Still using the draw, the defender only rolls an additional die if the attacker is not using the biggest skirmish possible. The attacker still tends to lose too many units, mostly in situations where they outnumber the defender.

So I'm considering modifying #2 by removing the draw roll, making 7 an attacker win and changing the odds to 7:5 instead of 6:5. This should reduce the effect of overkill at the expense of making defenders fall slightly faster in large-scale battles.

Lummox JR
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