SG2/DS2 dice with more than six sides.

Just a momentary <harmless good natured> personal rant
<tune out if you are smart!> (BTW, not a personal attack on anyone - to
each his own!)

What's the problem with dice with many sides? I've heard several folks mention
a strange peccadillo against polyhydral dice in a game. A game system using
only 6 sided dice has to work MUCH harder to generate a variety of game
mechanics and to produce certain kinds of probabalistic curves. The advantage
of using polyhydra dice (something extremely familiar to the RPGing players
who also wargame) is, among other things, the ability to generate additional
types of results without having to perform wierd acrobatics while trying to
fit them to six sided dice.

Does it make the game harder? Well, I suppose if you'd never played an RPG
that ingrained them into your head, yes. It is a tad more complex. But that
complexity is more than counterbalanced (IMO admittedly) by the much broader
range of results curves you get from using the extra die types. And most of
the FMA family have some pretty keen ways to help you
along - for example, they've colour coded. One of the easy things to do
(I found) when playing SG2 was to break down and go to our local dice source
(Fandom II) and pickup all the dice I needed (two to six of each
kind) in the appropriate colours - yellow d4s, green d6s, blue d8s,
orange d10s, red d12s. Once you've done this, your quality chits match up (in
SG2) nicely with your die types. It makes administration fairly
straightforward. I can't recall if DS2 is this clean and straightforward or
not.

Anyway, I'll keep my rant brief. I've just seen too many games do one of
two things, neither of which is pretty, to stay with a six-sided dice
scheme:
1) Use an ungodly NUMBER of dice - more of a pox than using different
die types if I had to guess (IMO). Charlie Company seems to do this (from my
limited experience). 2) Have some pretty outrageous results as they try to fit
certain probability results to dice not ever meant to generate that kind of
result set - which leaves one with a vaguely sour taste.... I hate to
see game mechanics and probabilities distorted just to fit a die type when
their are other die types easily available. (of course, I own d2, d3, d4, d5,
d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, d30, d100, etc plus lots of more specialized dice).

You shouldn't have to distort your game probabilities (allowing freaky results
to occur 1 time in 6 for example) nor should you have to resort to coming up
with insane ways of rolling 6 siders to get a particular result distribution.
(Roll d6. If you roll a 6, roll another D6, if you roll 5 or 6 on the second
dice, roll an additional D6, and if it is a one... *you get the idea!*)

Rant mode deactivated.

Anyway, The GZGverse has a wide enough dimension to allow almost any personal
deviance from a standard ruleset, so everyone can (and will!) just do what
suits them, and we're all happy with that. I just (personally) don't get the
big problem with polyhydral dice. They're ubiquitious (not quite as much as
d6, but still not hard to find), give a wide variety of results to correspond
to a variety of types of action or event, and save you hurting your head
trying to make d6s do all your work.

Of course, to quote loosely Dennis Miller, that's just my opinion. I could be
wrong.

Tom

In a message dated 11/21/99 9:23:31 PM Central Standard Time,
> kaladorn@home.com writes:

<< What's the problem with dice with many sides? >>

polyhedrous dice are associated with D&D, many war-gamers scorn D&D:
therefore they scorn the dice. I would point out that the 2rd edition of

Mechwarrior RPG the designers went to D10's instead of D 6's for just the
reason you mentioned - a wider range of possible outcomes.

> Thomas Barclay of the Clan Barclay wrote:

> Just a momentary <harmless good natured> personal rant

First, let me state that I agree with you overall reagarding polyhedral dice.
However, you have thrown down the gauntlet

Charlie Company does use a large number of dice, but it hardly qualifies as
"ungodly." First, in all but a few extreme cases, the combat and cover
modifiers usually cut down even the large gunship fires to one or two dice.
However, I have seen as many as 16 dice thrown on more than one occasion. The
most dice I've ever seen thrown at one time, though, is 28: a combat ordered
squad against a charge ordered squad in the open. Most of the time, you're
rolling a 1 to 4 dice. Rolling more dice just keep the curve intact. The way I
look at it, any squad that charges on open ground against entrenched infantry
deserves to have 28 dice rolled against them.

-Mike