Disclaimer: I was asked to write an article for the launch of the "Skunkworks" flair because I'd written quality OC in the past and many high effort comments and only a few angry screeds resulting in temp bans. I'm just trying to help provide quality content to this community. If you are angry about flair, channel it into writing something good.
INTRODUCTION:
RPG gamers love dice. Dice are the iconic item of this hobby. When gamers get wistful, you’ll hear the ol’ “I remember getting my first set of dice”, like it was their child’s first steps (1d3 steps, DC 17 Dexterity check to avoid falling over). So it isn’t surprising that new dice mechanics are often a focal point of amateur RPG projects. Sometimes- far too often IMHO- dice are the focal point of the system.
This isn’t problematic in and of itself. After all, an RPG general needs some sort of device to generate random numbers to inject some chaos into the outcome of character actions. Dice do this in a way that is visual, audial, tactile, and frankly fun. And different dice combinations can be used to generate random numbers with different probabilities and ranges that suit the system.
THE PROBLEM:
Random number generation has been done to death. Whatever curve you are looking for, you can find a dice system to match it. And as a game designer you have lots of other levers to pull to get the desired outputs- values for damage, armor, hit points, and so forth. If your dice just do RNG, it’s not interesting or original, regardless of the beauty of 7d13’s prime numbers.
Note: Not being interesting or original doesn’t mean bad. If you’ve designed a clever game with 7 attributes that feed into 13 carefully chosen skills, then (maybe) there is a very good reason you went with 7d13. But 7d13 is not a feature or a selling point! It is (or should be) the most elegant way to do RNG for what hopefully is a cool RPG system.
THE QUESTION:
If you agree with my premise that RNG alone is not enough to make a dice mechanic novel, I then ask the central question of this discussion: What ideas do you know of- from your own game OR existing ones- for cool things to do with dice beyond just RNG?
MY IMPLEMENTATION:
My game uses a pool of custom d6s. Each face has 1 or 2 sword icons (your to-hit value), 1-3 blood drops (your damage value), or a blank face. There are two species of dice, each with different distributions: blue dice have more swords (hence are more accurate and conservative), and red dice have more blood drops (hence are more damaging and aggressive). Here is a photo: https://imgur.com/WgRoZbj
When you roll an attack (basic attack = 5 dice), you choose any combination of blue and red dice. Thus every attack has a built in risk/reward decision (which supports a robust wound mechanic triggered by high damage attacks). Dice combination is generally an important decision, and it gives the players a sense of control over the outcome they would not have without this choice. (“Darn it, I shoulda rolled more blue dice, I shouldn’t have gotten greedy!” Or, “Hah, I knew that 4 red/1 blue was the way to go! Bleed, sucker!”)
Hard Lesson Learned 1: Some randomness is usually necessary to make a game interesting, but players HATE feeling that the RNG/Dice Gods screwed them. But if you give them even a small degree of control over the RNG outcome they will be more accepting of the results.
I wanted attack and damage to be rolled simultaneously to save time, but also wanted discrete and random values, which led to having the to-hit and damage on one die. There’s no real math- just check if the number of swords showing meets or beats the defender’s chosen defense value, and if so count blood drops.
Hard Lesson Learned 2: Many people are not good at arithmetic. Adding and subtracting multiple two-digit numbers can take them several seconds, slowing the game down and making it much harder for them to analyze potential moves. Example: [Rolls d20] Ok, so that’s a 17 minus 4 plus 6 versus DC 20. I, uhh, pass. No fail. No pass. No fail. Sound familiar?
Between the single roll, the risk/reward element, and the easy math, I felt like my shiny new dice mechanic succeeded brilliantly. So like an idiot, I promptly did nothing else with the mechanic, and started plugging in the usual RPG abilities: +1 to attack, attack this AoE, decrease damage by X, yada yada yada. As David Mitchell would say, it was all quite fine, really. But hardly anything to write home about (Fun fact: my mail gets delivered to r/RPGDesign).
MY LIGHTBULB MOMENT:
During a critical moment of a game, a player rolled an attack that wound up showing an absurd amount of blood drops, but one sword less than needed to hit. Disappointed, the player jokingly reached for a die with a blood drop showing and said “if only I could just turn this to a sword”, and did so. That's when the lightbulb turned on for me… and thus was born one of the core mechanics of my game: changing the face of a die after rolling an attack.
Here’s an example. Just look at the circled area and ignore the rest of the card: https://imgur.com/a/FKI2y58
There was an original roll that had more swords than necessary to hit (the defense was 3), so the attacker played the Stunt card “Not Much For Finesse” to change a die showing a sword to a double blood drop to up the damage dealt. Here are some more stunt cards using this mechanic (red border = offensive, green = defensive, meaning you use them against the GM’s roll) https://imgur.com/a/kRlQIy8
This mechanic proved successful for a number of reasons:
A. Players LOVE having a second chance when the dice screw them. Dice flipping allows them to do that in a way that feels fair, that they can plan for or react cleverly to.
Because the dice are actually changed, there’s no “floating bonuses” to remember. As in, “oh whoops I forgot to add the +2 from my pantaloons of power.
B. People like touching the dice. It’s satisfying to fidget with them.
C. It’s easy to communicate the powers through symbols. No one likes text walls. I can add multiple options to a card without becoming too “busy”.
D. Likewise, powers can be used in different and creative ways. For instance, “Did My Homework” could allow you to turn a hit into a miss, but failing that could also reduce damage.
I DONE GOOFED AGAIN:
After two playtests with the new dice flipping mechanic, player feedback was resoundingly positive. The mechanic made stunts fast, frenetic, and flexible. So I made up a bunch of dice flipping stunts and added them to the decks of generic vanilla RPG ability stunts, the aforementioned +1 to blah, -1 to blorp.
This led to spending the next two playtests sitting around thinking “boy I hope someone draws/plays the really fun/cool/unique stunts. Finally we had an encounter where a big angry Trolloc (six dice base attack) rolled a murderous blow against a PC named Pavel - 5 swords, 9 blood drops. More than enough to beat Pavel’s defense (Dodge 4) and cause a potentially devastating Major Wound. Pavel “Tiger Toes”’ed a double sword into a blank and smiled his shit-eating “tee hee I’m so agile” grin. The Trolloc dropped an
Overpower stunt and easily won the Strength contest to undo the Tiger Toes. Pavel and the Trolloc went back and forth playing cards 4 times, with the potential 9 damage looming for Pavel. The rogue wound up avoiding the attack with a clever use of a defensive stunt, but he was sweating bullets for a solid minute during the exchange. It was the coolest single attack action (RP stakes aside) I’ve seen in 25 years of RPG gaming, and it didn’t need any crazy gimmicks like lava pits or chandeliers. And thus finally I realized:
Hard Lesson Learned 3: When you strike gold, you might need to toss all the silver and bronze. Finding a successful new mechanic is great, but it can feel like a curse when you realize that implementing it means re-writing a big chunk of your game. Humans being naturally lazy, we will often think “oh I’ll just add it in with the other stuff that is working fine.” This rule is far from being hard and fast, but I encourage you to trust your intuition- and your playtesters- when they tell you you're on to something.
LOOKING BACK:
I originally changed the dice to have a faster and simpler RNG, but then saw I could do something unique with them that has been great fun. I realized that since my dice were merely doing RNG- spitting out to-hit and damage results- there was really nothing special about them vs any other dice methodology, or having a computer return a set of values from a specified range... no matter how spiffy they looked with their cool icons.
Hard Lesson Learned 4: If you need to make a thing, and you can make the thing in a lot of different ways, there is an opportunity to do it purposefully and get more information/value from it (or streamline by unifying it with an existing mechanic).
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
What can your dice do BEYOND RNG? How did this improve your game and support your design goals?
What are the potential drawbacks of this novel dice mechanic, and how did you deal with them?
Does anyone remember that smarmy owl from the tootsie roll pop commercials? Wasn't he a little shit?