The thought of connotations being had for different dice (like d20s for Frostgrave to evoke D&D) is a genius observation. God this podcast is so good

This is the second dice mechanics video I've watched today and the second to slander the d8. I love them. I find the slight overhangs cute and the way they almost tesselate interesting

Great Stuff~! I like multiple poly dice pools. Polyversal, Silent Death style. Uses d4 to d12s. Total vs DEF to see if you Hit. You get three based on skill, weapon, and morale. Damage is also found from those 3. Based on the Weapon Type. Doubles and Trips are your Crits. One set of Dice rolled outcome and damage known. A few DEF systems like Anti Missile requires a roll to intercept. Force on Force used d4-d12, with 4s being needed to Succeed. Cover and such mods by shifting die type up or down. These systems allows the rules to cover a large spread, from Primitive Weapon, Next to No Training, and about to give up, to Decent Weapon, Basic Training, and Standard Morale, to Best Tech Known, Highest Trained, and Over the top motivation. And all the combos in between. Thus most any Force can be set by a few dice of different types. In all three, 4s are rare :) How can you not have at least 15-20 D20s. Roleplay some :) I get the it has to be a d6 to get GW player to look, just do not like it. I do not like the GW system at all. Really do not like constraints of D6s. Most systems 1 Always Missed, 6 Always Hits. So Only 4 Slots matter and any modifier becomes very powerful. I would be fine with most D6s never used again. Then Layer on the GW ReRoll, 1s then Misses, then Wounds, Then Foe, Rerolls 1's to save and throw another one Reroll anyway. But if we all liked the same stuff it would be dull. Worse die roll I have seen, 30d6, no 6s.

Great discussion! When I think of dice pools I always think about d6 because it is the most standard die, and also young kids love rolling a lot od dice together. I my game which is a d6 dice pool I don’t use addition because it’s more friendly to my 4yo. It’s basically the more are you skilled in a thing the more dice you throw and if you get at least one 6 you succeed. My kids love it 🙂

Imagine rolling a D4 and a D6. For exemple, a trrpg where instead of rolling and adding bonuses, your attributes or equipment grants 1d4 extra to your rolls The maximum is a 10 Min 2 1 and 6 2 and 5 3 and 4 4 and 3 4 pairs that sums up to 7 1 and 5 2 and 4 3 and 3 4 and 2 are 4 pairs that sums up to 6 There are also 4 pairs to roll 5 To roll a 10 there is only one option To roll a 9 there are 2 (6-3, 5-4) To roll a 8 there are 3 (6-2, 5-3, 4-4) To roll a 7 there are 4 To roll a 6 there are 4 To roll a 5 there are 4 To roll a 4 there are 3 (1-3, 2-2, 3-1) To roll a 3 there are 2 To roll a 2 there is only one Total 24 possibilities of dice combinations and a flat middle with 5, 6 and 7 having a possibility of 8% each. 2 + 3 ++ 4 +++ 5 ++++ 6 ++++ 7 ++++ 8 +++ 9 ++ 10+ Sounds cool, this shows that adding a 1D4 instead of giving a fixed amount of bonus to a roll is much more interesting

A couple of interesting games: Congo (Adventures in the heart of Africa) and Pulp Alley use dice pools with a fixed success number. (4 or 5 - I forget which success for which game). Characters (Pulp Alley) or Units (Congo) roll a number of dice and count the successes. Powerful units/characters roll big dice (d10) for things they're good at (Congo's Hunters or regular soldiers shooting their rifles) and smaller dice for things they're less good at (Tribal archers in close combat). The number of dice in the pool reflects the strength of a unit (Congo) or the "level" of the Pulp Alley Character. Summary: No. of dice faces - reflects competence. No. of dice - reflects unit strength. Seeking successes against a fixed target number.

Ill try to design a dice system for combat similar to king of tokyo, where you'll always do stuff, but you may reroll once any number of dice

This was my first time viewing...I think. I've been sifting KZfaq for talks and takes on dice systems. No surprise I'm faffing about with my own game. I'm pretty secure in using d6 dice pools. Like Mike, I'm familiar with buckets-o-dice; the 'o' is for Orks. So, my question is: How many D6s are too many for a dice pool using numbers of success to scale the degree of success? We've been pretty set with 5 as an upper limit. If your 'hits' are 6s for instance.

My game has a little tray of four dice for each figure so that players can see the target numbers without having to consult a table or chart (which is boring and involves maths).

"Most people don't own enough D20s" - Hooold my Beer!!!

I don't know why, but hearing people talk about their emotional reactions to dice is a fascinating discussion, and I'd like to nominate the D16 recently forced upon bloodbowl players - it is a crime against good sense and should not exist! Does the love/hate apply only to the die, or is it an instinctive reaction to something fundamental to the polyhedron? Does Mike also hate the Egyptian pyramids 🤔 (There's a game idea - Egyptian rulers racing to build the most magnificent mausoleum using a D4 pool!)

Great discussion. One thing I am not a fan of with dice pools is the time to collect and count - and then possibly count a second time to check - a big pool of 20 or 30 dice.

Today I watched a video of two guys playing an old school D&D module, and there were shouts of joy when a panther rolled a series of very low numbers, allowing the PC to survive. You just can’t get that with a d6, unless you go for the ‘exploding dice’ mechanic where a critical hit allows another roll, but even that cannot compare to the thrill of rolling a natural 20. Look at how many roleplaying-related brands incorporate the d20 into their name or logo - maybe that doesn’t mean so much to you guys thanks to those nasty knobs at GW, but rest assured, it’s a thing. I recently introduced my system to a friend who had never even heard of tabletop gaming or D&D and he was immediately hooked on the d20 - he kept just rolling it for fun (he also thought the d4 was cool, so clearly has poor taste in regards to dice, however).

I so agree about the abomination that's a D4. Doesn't roll, drops and sticks, and any that miss the table become lethal caltrops. d8, d12 and d20 could all be marked with 1-4.

Whatever method you used to record seems to only be pushing audio out of the left channel

"That's a lot of d20s for a person to own. ... That's like 15 d20s." I did a quick count of the number of d20s I have just on the bookshelves within arm's reach of the chair I sit in to GM. There are at least 135. I probalby missed a few. There are more in in a cupboard and on shelves in another room...🤣

I'm designing a TTRPG inspired by Pokerole, which uses a d6 dice pool where you must roll 4+ to achieve successes, and DC depends on number of successes. I want to modify this so that the dice increase like in DCC [D6->d8->d10->d12->?] for epic levels of play. The Difficulty Class would also slowly improve to needing 5+ or 6+ on top of needing more dice to succeed [meaning commoners could never do this, essentially] I just need some examples of how this would work in practice

One can never get an instant (and visceral) reaction with dice pools, because the result is not instantly apparent.

I dont know, but dice are random. If you dont want randomness to impact your game, prabalbly we should look for a different combst system. For exemple, could we play a ttrpg with a mechanisma like slay the spire? Where you have a small deck of cards that you are certainly going to draw what you want frequently

In the new version of the Cortex system (e.g. Firefly RPG), you roll a bunch of dice for your dice pool, but only use the top two results which are added. So getting a d12 or d10 in a dice pool made up of a bunch of d6, is a big deal. You gain a decent chance to hit a total, the other side just can't reach. Warm regards, Rick.

7:28 I rolling two n sided dice and adding their result will always have a most probable result of n+1 with 2 and 2n being the most rare. I'm not sure about rolling two dice that don't have the same number of sides though.

need an opinion somewhat related to that: Is it weird to resolve 95% with one die-type (like D10) and just for specific things ask the player to roll 2D6? Because that would solve a "problem" i have... but it feels weird somehow^^

Would love to see a game that used a D4 dice pool, just sayin...

34:40

Whilst I love infinity I hate how inscrutable the calculations are. If you have two weapons to aro with that have different damage burst and range mods, it can be impossible to know which to pick to achieve the result you want. If all I need is to win the f2f but I don't mind not wounding vs I don't care if its a long shot I need to roll a weapon that if it hits it will likely kill... Nearly all players can't work that out by themselves. To make those decisions I have to commit a bunch of examples of weapon comparisons to memory so I can guess at the option that is more likely to be the actual dice odds I want to roll... But that's not great is it

Use a pool of d12 and have it become a pool of d10 slowly and then a d8 and then a d6 and then a d4. you just build up an intuition for how the distribution works. its not that far from human performance in general.

Sorry to be a pedant, but two d4s stuck together would only have six sides, not eight. I totally agree that d8 are horrid, but I also dislike d10s … I agree that d12s are underrated and underused, but have to disagree about d20s, which is so revered that it has some taken on some kind of supernatural power. D20s are superior to d12s because they make it easy to calculate percentage probabilities. I don’t see how a d12 being divisible by three is somehow advantageous. One does one ever have to divide the result of a die role? D20s are divisible by 2, 4, 5 and 10, which is (marginally) easier than the d12’s 2, 3, 4 and 6.

LEFT EAR

Dice pools/games... CRAPS, learn the game and you hae no choice but to understand dice and probabilities.

Playing online - the math is automathic with computer dice rollers. Even phones now have dice apps