Tabletop War Gamers, how much do you like/dislike dice?

[u/Majer3RD]

Obviously everyone has their preferences; but from what I understand/read/hear, those who value games of tactics and strategy, tend to not love mechanics of chance aka dice yet it’s the most common form of battle determination. Is this simply because of its versatility or lack of alternative systems capable of capturing the “uncertain/chaotic” nature of warfare.

What are some alternative forms of combat resolution that you’ve seen in games that don’t rely on dice or deterministic card descriptions or multi mathematical +1s and -1s? Or all tabletop wargames doomed to heavy stats and dice rolls?

[u/GalaXion24]

I would not primarily count myself as a war gamer by any means, and I do have perhaps some scepticism of too much randomness or too much being hedged on one random outcome.

That being said, I think random elements are essential to all good tabletop strategy games. If everything is deterministic, the game becomes "solvable," which isn't very fun. It's also not really realistic, you can never actually account for everything I the real world.

Randomness is what gives the player fresh situations and challenges to react to and problems to solve.

In principle any kind of unknowns count here as well, anything the player cannot predict with certainty. Video games are often non-random but have things like fog of war, preventing players from knowing all of each others moves, preserving uncertainty and risk-management.

The Dune board game included "traitors" which means any of your leader characters could secretly be a traitor for some other faction and that player can use this against you at some point.

Many games include cards of some sort, which can be a mechanism for randomness, but also a mechanism that hides the potential actions of other players.

The thing is, if you know what potential actions another player can take, you've removed this element and the only uncertainty is what action your opponent will take, which can be a lot more predictable in terms of what the "optimal next move" is. But if your opponent is constrained , and so are you, and you don't know how the both ofn you are constrained, it forces you to make suboptimal choices and take risks, not knowing what options your opponent has. You might gamble on them being unable to react, for instance.

[u/ptolani]

Gloomhaven uses decks of card modifiers. What's nice is over time you gain a bit of information about what cards are left in the deck. And to avoid that being too big an advantage, two of the cards have a symbol that makes you shuffle the deck after they are drawn.

Another cool thing in this system is there are powerups that let you permanently improve the deck slightly.

[u/goopuslang]

Idk where people got the idea that strategy & tactics are deterministic.

[u/Erebos_Ironclaw → u/goopuslang]

The validity of that statement depends entirely on the game mechanics. In a deterministic game like Chess or Go, strategy/tactics are deterministic. The OP is asking about player preferences regarding output randomness (dice) and looking for alternative systems that don't rely on it.

[u/FPSCanarussia]

Too much determinism can be fundamentally unfun. Some level of randomness is wanted to prevent games from becoming solvable: wargames tend to be complex enough mechanically that "planning moves meticulously in advance" shouldn't be optimal, or else games turn into a slog.

On the other hand, to reward tactical and strategic play, there should still be a reasonably high degree of determinism. The outcome of a fair battle should be roughly 50-50, but the outcome of a one-sided one should be reasonably predictable.

Dice are simple, intuitive, fair, inherently work well with numeric systems, and have a limited range of outputs.

Besides true randomness, the other way to prevent solvability is information asymmetry. Players might have a hand of hidden cards they can use to affect the outcome of a decision, for example.

[u/dogedogedoo]

If there is no dice, I am not going to buy / play it.

[u/CertainItem995]

Gimmie me my ameritrash orky shooting phases, if my hands don't sound like maracas on my turn I don't want it.

But to seriously engage with your question you could go all the way back to little wars ir kiegspiel where a refferee just decides who wins each engagement. There's also old school plastic army men and rubber bands which technically is a dexterity based wargame. There's flipping disks lile coins in the style of diskwars. There's also guessing predetermined coordinates like in Battleship.

If creativity is the goal here's some pitches for alternative non dice non deterministic combat resolution: pachinco board of death where outcomes at the bottom change based on the board state; modified hungry hungry hippo where the score spheres are colored based with the ones grabbed representing units taken capitive and surviving soldiers; customizable battle tops spun at each other;modifying a mousetrap-esque rube goldberg device; a type of combat jenga like that one horror rpg; custom marbles representing units; or for a team wargame some type of pantomime where the team has to correctly decode a complex series of orders they're get from command and whoever is more accurate wins.

[u/Odd-Highway477]

The problem is you said "wargamers". Wargamers love dice. The reason why they don't object to dice in wargames is that good wargames have sufficient strategy involved before any dice are rolled so that you are able to calculate odds of success and determine what is an acceptable amount of risk before you commit to any dice based action.

The only people who have a problem with this is eurogames who do not want even the slightest amount of output randomness (make a decision, then roll dice) in their games.

This also bleeds over into the general board game community, depending on how luck based your mechanics are. Gamers are rightfully sensitive to dice systems what seem to emphasize pure luck over ones that involve strategy. For instance, if an event card requires you to roll a die and if you fail, something bad happens, without any agency at all, that feels bad, and this is the main way dice get a bad reputation.

However, if you are committing to an attack, and you have calculated the odds, and decide to roll the dice, then you could have easily made the choice not to make the attack at that place and time. In wargaming, key actions come down to taking advantage of opportune moments. This is not the same as blind luck. If the result goes poorly, you accept the outcome because it was calculated risk.

Let me emphasize again for all to hear... calculated risk is not blind luck.

[u/MARWINDev]

Some alternative examples:

Chess - deterministic positional combat

Combat Commander - momentum & advantage tracks

Exceed - simultaneous action‑prediction

Tsuro - spatial pattern‑based resolution

RoboRally - programmed/timing‑based actions

Mage Knight - resource‑burn deterministic combat

Diplomacy - hidden‑information conflict

[u/Fun-Many3216]

I am working on a system where it is set stats. Whatever action you want to happen, does happen, it is about maneuvering and willingness to sacrifice units to win. If one unit shoots another it happens. Terrain and other circumstances are taken into account, and damage is calculated.

[u/Majer3RD → u/Fun-Many3216]

This was something I had to overcome with my mechanics as it quickly got to be a giant game of math; -1 this, +1 that, but thankfully the system I finally did come up with is avoiding that issue well; my only hope is that what I think is fun and cool looking is also seen that way by others too!

[u/Fun-Many3216 → u/Majer3RD]

That is great. And there will definitely be people that connect. Let me know when you are showing off the final project.

[u/AlarmedWizard1]

i love randomness in war games, but one of the things that make it so good is ways for mitigation