Monday, March 20, 2023

One die to rule them all

For Hack'D & Slash'D, I've gotten all of the mechanics down to two dice: The humble D6, and the possible even more humble D12. I was using the D12 for checks, and the D6 for results... but, in the last few days, I've streamlined even further so that a lot of the things I used the D6 for have been locked in as fixed values; hit points and damage were once the responsibility of the D6, but now they're hard wired in.

The D6 is still there for a handful of things - likelihoods, a few tables... but a D12 is basically just a D6 with twice as many sides, so it's a straight up conversion to move to D12 as the only die you need.

Well that's nifty.

I like it that you never wonder which die to roll this time - if you're rolling, it's a D12. I also like the change for likelihoods, because then I can stagger them a bit and put them on a bit of a bell curve:

  • Very unlikely 1 only
  • Unlikely 1-3
  • Possible 1-6
  • Likely 1-9
  • Very likely 1-11

I think it's easy enough to remember - the front and back end end in 1, and the middle three are all divisibly by 3. So it's 1/3/6/9/11. Not hard to remember, and better represents the descriptors. Something that is very unlikely should occur less than 10% of the time, so that's solid.

3 comments:

  1. The d12 club. I can only think of one or two games that rely on d12s.

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    Replies
    1. How to stand out in a crowd, then :)

      I can see the marketing right now - one of the five best RPGs that uses only the D12.

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