Dice appreciation day

[kumakami]

Ok ok as silly as it may sound I have a reason for this...I was staring at my projects and thought about it. Do other gamers have preferences? what dice so you love or think need more love?

for me there are 2..

D10, so many games I love (legends of the fire rings, WoD, call of cthullu...) need and use them.

D4, I often look at these mostly passed over dice and wonder if they have a bigger place in RPG's.

[Rob Lang]

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

There are d24s and d30s - but many people have enough difficulty acquiring the usual set of non-standard polyhedrons - so most games don't use these.

Which brings us to the fact most of us probably have a special place in our hearts for the lowly d6. Easy to acquire and read - small enough to make checking and math simple. My first intro to RPGs came via a car-wars gamebook that used d6s to resolve vehicle combat.

[Wolfboy]

[kumakami]

[Rob Lang]

wolfboy, why not the lovely D8? Is it too angular?

[bal3000]

[malladin_ben]

The last two games I made both used d8s.

The first, Gateway, was a universal game system. We wanted to use a "pick a single dice from a pool" mechanic, as this creates a nice curved progression as you add more dice to the pool. We toyed with d6s and d10s, but found neither entirely satisfactory. With D6s the outcomes were too guaranteed, with d10s, you could pull of somethings that just seemed bizarre (a complete amateur could perform brain surgery with a decent roll as well if not better than an expert neurosurgeon on a bad day). D8s was the middle medium that was conveniently random enough yet not too extreme.

The second game was Midgard, a Vikings game. I created a dice rolling mechanic based on rune divination. The runic alphabet has 24 runes, which are divided up into three different Aetts (sets of eight runes). If I'd known about d24s may be I might have considered using those, but as it happens I didn't, so I went with d8s to represent the Aett.

So a lot of d8 love from me at the moment. Other than that I really don't mind. That said, I tend to find most d100-based games split things up into 5% brackets anyway, so if you're doing that why not just use a d20? I have a preference for things not to be too random, but i also like the chance for a roll to come up with an amazing result every now and again that really gives you something great to play with in the story.

As far as designing games goes, I'd say pick your dice for flavour first - why do they fit your game? then I'd think about the probability relationships. If you're capable enough to put some figures into a spreadsheet I find it really helps you work things out and makes the game smoother as a result.

Cheerio,

Ben

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Ben has the right idea. The choice of dice should be based on the dramatic needs of the story your rules support. A good bell curve means a predictable outcome for the heroes, while a single die means greater chance for a maximum result.

This probably should be a new thread, but I'll ask anyway - has anyone ever included multiple different resolution systems in a game? I've done so several times.

The second or third game I designed was called "Neg0Eight" (negate) and the idea was 2d8-9 (+/- a characters skill). Any positive result was a success, negative a failure, and the role of 0 depended on the setting added to the rules. (ie heroes still pass, if barely, mooks fail) Attributes were on a 2-8 roll under test.

[Wolfboy]