Are d10s better than d6s for wargaming? 

A decent topic for this series would be "How many tokens and markers should be on the table for a game."

D10s are superior but d6s are more prevalent. However, in order for d10s to become more popular and available, games have to use them.

This discussion is actually not too dissimilar from the number base discussion. We use base 10 but couldn't we use base 12 for efficiency? Since 12 is super divisible, you can have the same probabilities of a d2, d3, d4, d6 on a d12 and the flexibility of having 12 sides to hit balances between those probabilities for hyper tuning of the game.

The first video game with "Freelook" would be "Marathon" developed by Bungie and released for Mac in 1994. Also id software had adopted the use of freelook with the Quake engine and game. Lastly, Half-life used a very modified Quake 2 engine, which was already using Freelook.

Yes, you got this exactly right. Larger die sizes give you more granularity in modifiers. There are no "Best" dice as it comes down to how you use them. Do you want the percentages easily calculated or do you want them hidden? Obviously D10s are great for easy calculations. When talking about what dice to use, you have to figure out how fast you want to solve any 1 situation. Does 1 roll = 1 shot? Does 1 roll = shot and armor pen? Does 1 roll = a whole unit shooting PLUS morale effects? That is very important to the speed of your game and its scale. The GW system is a 3x (D6) system. And I agree with you 1000%!!! The number of rolls needed to solve a single action in a GW game is, frankly, obnoxious. I have seen a single attack take 6 rolls and end with absolutely nothing happening. That is just gratuitous re-rolling of dice. Re-rolls in games, deflate the results of the dice. Rerolls should be very few and far between. My preferred resolution speed is 2 rolls to decide any effect. That can be 2 by an attacker or 1 from attacker and 1 from defender. But for 99% of the the game 2 rolls should give an outcome against any unit. I also, absolutely dislike custom dice. It makes it incredibly hard to determine the statistics especially when you have dice with multiple symbols per side. Yuck! They are very popular with certain designers because (1) you can copyright your 'custom' dice set and their mechanic. (2) you can then sell dice sets that only you can produce. I feel its scummy.

It depends on the game. 40k would massively benefit from a D10 system because of their extremely large pool of different factions with varying strengths and weaknesses. A D6 system cannot cover that. Proof ? 9th edition.

The first commercial FPS to allow players to use the mouse to freely look around a 3D environment was Marathon, released by Bungie in 1994.

I personally like the D10 system Matthew. And agree about rerolls. Maybe add a wild dice mechanic. Like for instance if you pull a boost out of the bag you can use 1 wild dice to your attacks (basically get 1 extra dice to roll with your attack dice that turn you get a boost.) instead of tons of rerolls. Also love the token turn mechanic.

I like the philosophy you touch on (but didn't outright state) around 14:40, using systems that people are already familiar with. This means it's easy to pickup, learn and teach. Which is a huge barrier to getting people into miniature games.

Thank you for recognizing star wars legions superiority concerning movement. It saves so much time and lets you actually focus on the game. Also, i like your reasoning behind using d10s. No rerolls and simplicity make gaming quicker and more enjoyable so Im all for it

I love rolling buckets of dice!!! Really like D6 but I also think D10 are great! I was planning on using D10s in my own game project. I also don't really like proprietary dice, they get weird even though they lend themselves for unique things.

It is interesting when you get into usefulness of a dice. I like to think of about how many times I can divide a dice's number of sides. The more variations, the more useful. I really like 12 sided dice, you can divide by 2, 3, 4, and 6, which means you half a coin (heads or tail), a 3sided dice, a 4 sided dice, or a 6 sided dice. I wish there were more systems that used these.

Big fan of SWL here. Just got back into 40k and what you said about rerolls resonated deeply.

Fan of d10s in general. But nothing beats the d12!

D6 (or whole load of them) are easier to read faster than a bunch of D10s. I don't really mind re-rolls as long as they don't come up too often and aren't too powerful. I used to like re-rolling 1s as a mechanic, for example. I might be more jaded with rolling a lot of dice if I gamed more often (for example-If I played games for a living on youtube). As it is I only play one or two games per month on average so to me rolling dice is part of the fun rather than being a chore. To my mind, D10s are one of those things that makes sense on paper but doesn't work as well as people think it will in practice. Like metric based time or grid layouts for cities (yes, you can't get lost but you also can't get anywhere fast-In a car or on foot as there are roads or traffic lights every few moments). I agree about special dice. I also don't like games that come with mountains of counters and what have you. One of the things that stops me from wanting to pick up Star Wars Legion is the mountain of cards and counters you need to play.

I've played around a lot with using d10s. As you point out d10 gives you some nice granularity. Some ideas to think about. 1. Try roll UNDER If you do a d10 roll under instead of a roll over then the number you need to roll is the percentage chance (divided by 10). This is highly intuitive. 2. The number you roll can have an impact on what happened. You can also use different rolls for different effects because each number has a 10% chance. So if you roll a 1 that might be an extra success, if you roll 10 that might be a bad failure, if you roll equal to the number you needed that might be a complication. If it was d6 these things would be happening a little too often but on a d10 it's infrequent enough to be interesting but frequent enough to be a real factor. You can also create a range for a GREAT attack. So one unit might need to roll a 5 or less to succeed and have a great attack on 1. Another unit might need to roll an 8 or less to succeed and have a great attack on 1-2. 3. Roll 2 dice and take the best or worst result. You can also roll an extra d10 for some attacks and take the best or worst roll depending on what the attack is. That will increase or decrease your chance by around 23%. This can be useful for things like shooting at someone with cover (worst of two), attacking from above (best of two) etc. if you're looking for a simple way to deal with those types of combat situations.

I like the idea of D10's for the granularity as you discussed. One thing that may be slightly offsetting is most gamers have several sets of D6's around, but rarer to see D10's. I'd recommend quality D10's in the box sets vice standard quality fair. I.E. Make them seem themed to the factions included, vice a color swap. Ravaged Star already has such a cool presentation, having it match to the point of what you're rolling on the tabletop is great. Thanks for your thoughtfulness with the game's development, and wisdom to solicit input from the community on this! Can't wait to play the game!

I am a huge fan of these videos and am very excited for this game! Yes, SW Legion movenent is awesome, also enjoy drawing the cards for activations

Hey! long time viewer, best tabletop-channel. Love your camera-style, gets me a good understanding of the match and what's going on, also wholesome people. I really like your train of thought on D10s giving better granularity and being able to modify them more in a stackable way, I'm also onboard on rerolls, I like rerolls but they should be rare and mostly for things like "roll on this table to see effect", not so much anything like vehicles exploding or a good weapon hitting on a 2+. In my experience (small as it is, WHFB 7-9, AoS 1-3, 40k 5-9), in the current GW lineup the thing I really really really like about 40k and miss when I play AoS is Strength vs Toughness and also Damage not spilling over. In 40k a weapon can be a really powerful anti heavy killer but useless agains hordes. In AoS a weapon is most often either good or bad. I'm all into artillery and such where this really shows, good examples are the Bonereaper Catapult and the new Cities of Sigmar Cannon. Both have different firing modes which in 40k would be really useful but in AoS there's really not much to "trade". It's all about attacks and damage. 20 attacks with 1 damage or 1 attack with 20 damage doesn't really matter, yes there's the reliability ofc but statistically it's the same, just go with the one that has a better chance to hit. The thing you can trade is potential damage for rend/ap which never feels really interesting or useful to me. With D10s and more granularity it could be better I guess.

Game dev here. Totally agree with your opinion on wierd dices. is it good? is it bad? no idea.. D6 and D10 are easy to read and understand numbers. Instead of special dices with multiple outputs which you don't understand directy or have to go to a chart to understand what happens next.

I think it's a matter of volume. If one unit's attack action represents 20-30+ swings/shots (if they are to be resolved individually), it is much more convenient to use 6-sided dice. Not only are they more prevalent in various sizes and cheaper to buy, but their geometry facilitates rolling many at a time. If the game allows for more granularity/grit, 10-sided dice do provide many benefits such as you have discussed. Frostgrave comes to mind as a warband game with ~11 models per team, where each model moves and acts individually. Each attack or action is resolved with a D20 roll, and there are many modifiers.

I have to say I hate almost all rerolls. I get the point of them, but, as you mentioned, it takes away from the emotional attachment to the rolls and high tension moments. And it takes more time. As for the die types, I think the d6 are more ubiquitous and so better for most games to use, though the larger die does add more granularity.

A friend wrote a set of rules that had a cool, I thought anyway, mechanic. He called it a 'Risk-Die' The standard game used D6, but on things where you wanted to really push your luck, wanting that ability to not just hurt the opponent, but destroy them, you could opt in for a D10. The rewards were there, a top of the dice, 9-10 you could do way more damage(similar to Exploding 6s that other games use) but the risk was, on a 1-2 YOU could be hurt(exploding gun, malfunctions) those problems weren't available on either end using D6. Honestly, I'm just a D10 fan, but it was interesting.

It depends also you can't discount the simple fact d6s are easier and cheaper to get in bulk which is a larger factor than one would think

The to hit, to wound, and save rolls are how you introduce granularity with a D6. "There are two hundred and sixteen possible outcomes from a triple sequential D6 roll...." pg64 Tabletop Wargames Rick Priestly and John Lambshead. I have recently been enamored with Mike Hutchinson's rank-and-flank game Hobgoblin, which only uses a single die roll to factory hit/wound/armor. It takes a bit to get used to as most of us haven been raised on the GW sequential roll sequence, but I now greatly appreciate the transparency of a single roll and the time savings in doing so.

The limitations on a die come from how the game uses dice to determine outcomes, mot always because of the number of faces. One of the mechanics i like least is a static x+ for a characteristic, because that's where the limitation really comes in. But there are plenty of ways to use dice without needing a lot of sides to generate differences

For my Dev project, I chose D6s as the main for the system due to the wider availability of D6 and their general lower cost: as it's a F2P Tabletop ruleset being able to go to any dollar store or Walmart here in America and pick up a set of D6 for 1-3$, reducing cost for the end user to start playing. Love these videos so much!!! Keep up the dev work!

A topic which is completely outside the scope of this discussion, but I want to send it your way regardless: Vehicles and tanks. Would you want them to work like they do in modern 40k? Basicly just a large healthbar to wittle down? Or armorvalues where outflanking the tank actually is rewarding? What about damage? Personally I would prefer the realistic variant of components being destroyed (tracks damaged, crewmen killed, turret traverse stuck). I’d love to hear a discussion about this!

I really agree on the rerolling thing. 1st of all. It really slows down the game when both players can reroll anything. 2nd, it takes away the cool situations where "sometimes you just gotta roll a hard six" to win the game, make the save, destroy the Cylon Centurion. It takes away the awesome sense of desperate victory through sheer chance. Also It truly feels like 40K and GW wants to add more and more rules to mitigate chance. Which is very strange for a game that revolves around throwing dice. If you want to mitigate chance, you should ditch out dice completely and use something like a deck of cards with a set amount of specific results. Then both players know exactly at any point of the game that there are for example only 6 cards with a 5+ left in the current deck cycle. But that would in general take the game completely to a new direction.

The point about granularity is exactly right and what I dislike about d6. I read one of the original Warhammer designers (maybe Rick Priestly) write that d6s were selected because of their accessibility, which was a big selling feature when games didn't come with dice, there were fewer game stores globally, and no internet.

The benefit of a d10 system is newer wargamers can recognize the impacts of modifiers quicker. Not that other dice are not inviting, but it just helps get newer games over the initial hurdle of investing in a game.

I think that another thing to consider here is how much the modifiers are felt in-game. For example a +1 modifier on a single d20 roll is basically non-noticeable (because with 95% probability the roll fails/succeeds regardless of the modifier). Imo this is also a really important thing to consider when it comes to what type of dice you use, how many of them you roll at a time, and what kind of modifiers your system uses on those rolls. I think all these things should come together s.t. the effect of the modifiers are really felt while playing. Perhaps something to consider.

Hey Matt! Very excited about Ravaged Star. Congratulations! I would love to hear more about the setting and conflict.When it comes to dice and game mechanics, I recently played and read a dice-less miniatures game: One-Hour Skirmish Wargames. If you get the chance, take a look at it. The book explains some of the math behind the game mechanics and it's very interesting. Also, the turn/phase system is quite different from what I've seen and very engaging. Looking forward to watching the next video in the series!

12:28 A Champion player named Tresh won with WASD+Mouse in Quake. Everyone I know switched to WASD after that. Half-Life was just the first main-stream game that had it as default.

On Dice: My personal feeling is that nothing larger than a D12 should be used for miniature wargames. Frostgrave is one of those games that exemplifies this. The game has low modifiers, but the D20 has so much swing, that you are basically cleaving through people, or doing no damage. I also feel this is a reflection of not having the defender's die roll matter unless it is above the attacker's. Instead of providing some mitigation, as long as you roll high enough, and beat your opponent by 1, you are seriously wounding or removing them. Infinity is a similar vein, except they do use the opponent's roll to mean something for dodging multiple shots. FMA Skirmish (FMASk,) developed by Ground Zero Games for their 25mm Star Grunt game has a good mechanic which based the die type used by a unit or model to their quality. Something like an untrained civilian would use a D4, while a battle hardened veteran would use a D12. This meant that some things could just not be accomplished by those who did not have a high enough quality to them. However, it was amazingly fun, and a friend of mine skinned it to some home brew skirmish games. On Re-Rolls: I also despise how prevalent re-rolling dice has become. I feel it is unnecessary in extremely large salvos, and grinds away time. Games like 40K were much simpler before the aura abilities and en masse re-rolls. It makes rolling mean less. Of course there were certain rules that allowed for it before 8th edition popped up, but they were very few. Keep it simple.

Nothing wrong with the KISS method, 'Keep It Stupid Simple'/ 'Simple'Stupid'. Not saying the basic roll to hit, and defense is stupid or simple, but it is refreshing not having to roll and reroll and reroll and potentially reroll again for a single activation of a unit.

I agree with using D10s. My biggest complaint about Bolt Action is how just a few modifiers are enough to push you to needing 7s on a D6. I remember hearing that the designers wanted to use something besides d6s but the higher ups thought D6s were just more familiar to beginners. So that is why you roll the dice so many times. Rerolls in GW games are a pet peeve of mine. Sometimes you have to do a lot of dice just to pull a few gretchen off the board. At least the got rid of the whole "Might as well overcharge these plasma rifles since I'm rerolling 1s." That really made me mad.

I do appreciate the d10 system from things like This is not a Test and Reality's Edge (yes I'm aware they are the same game system as the author is the same) as it does definitely allow for more flexibility to utilise and stack modifiers and to the extent allow a bit more variety in the rolling calculations (d6 rolls are 16.6667% between values as d10 is 10% between values)

I personally love the feeling of rolling an actual handful of dice, to the point that I don't mind D6s being the increasing standard. However, rerolling and losing out on granularity is something I find bothersome as well. I do like the idea of using D10s to add that granularity, and potentially it would speed up the rolling process because that granularity would reduce the need to count up and roll another set of "successful" dice. Having the "toughness" be a modifier to the actual hit roll would be much simpler and faster for me. For what it's worth, though, I feel a D12 would be more comfortable to roll in handfuls rather than D10s. They're less spikey.

My biggest point against special dice is availability and customization. Like in TTRPGs dice can be part of the story. So you have your special army that you painted in a special way and then you go online and you find just the perfect dice that acompany them. With special game dice that option is off the table because you can pretty much only play the game with those dice. It alos beggs the question of what happens when the game maybe goes out of print somewhen and you might still be able to buy some miniatures but you just cannot get the dice anymore. In terms of mechanics special dice have a lot to offer though imo. Looking at Genesys RPG, the way the dice are able to tell a story. I like that a lot better than a simple d20. And in wargames like Dystopian Wars the multiuse of the critical "wound"/ damage dice is pretty neat.

Great work so far! D10 are a good solution. Got my hands on the whole bundle of the Veil Touched. They are awesome models! I'm so excited to get the Gorkogs and Immari and !RULES!. In my opinion, you are on the right way. Keep it simple! Watched the testgames, it was so much fun. I'm tired of 40k. Ravaged Star is like fresh air. Best wishes and greetings from Germany!

I personally like games with multiple dice like mantic uses so it's way easier to show scope of power with ad6 versus like a giant robot using d10

The "Bespoke" dice that many games are using now make sense for board games (Heroquest for example) but I'm not a fan of them in more complete miniatures games. D6s were fine in earlier editions of Warhammer/40k, but that was before we were rolling buckets of dice and had all of the rerolls and "feel no pain" sort of rules. Anything more that 3 rounds of rolling more than 20 dice is just a pain. I think the folks at Warlord got it right. the d6 still works well with Bolt Action and other historical games because the troops are very similar and there are fewer special rules. But with Beyond the Gate of Antares they used d10s to get more granular, allow for the differences in different species, and avoided the need for an armor save roll.

The trade-off is in readability which drops as the number of dice you need to roll increases. D6s are language agnostic and very easy to pattern match in a large group. Higher sided dice trade readability for granularity and work better with smaller sets of rolls.

Yes. The answer is yes. Most games should have been d10, or as others suggest, even a D12. The old reason was that "D6 is more available, thus accessible". This is no longer a problem. D10's are accessible. Its easier to balance a system on a larger number (especially if it has more diversity of models).

Man, D10’s, no re-rolls and one single round to hit and one to save? I AM ALL IN!

so i have been watching this is not a test, and i really like damage being applied at the end of the round. that way you can us all your stuff.

stick with the d10 systems and the alternative activations. love the way the tokens are being pulled from the bag as well.

As an aspiring game developer - I like games that combine various types of dice - particularly for different actions or even weapons (one great example is Space Weirdos)

As a player of Mantic's Armada. D10's work very well.

D10 was the first thing that really surprised me on yout test playes. And to be honest i REALLY like that! I think that it is much much much better system than d3, d6, 2d6 etc.

Thanks for those Developper's diary. Very Interesting. I think I like D10 more now, with less throws. I would really like 40k to have alternate units system and 1 Attack throw then 1 Defense Throw with less reroll (just the Stratagem maybe) With time and version, there is too many rolls : To Hit, Reroll, To Wound, Reroll, Damage, sometimes reroll, Saves, sometimes Reroll, Feel No Pain, sometime Rerolls... That's way too much and a bit annoying. I don't mind having big number of dices but those slow downs too much the game. I'm thinking about merging Hit and Wound as Houses rules but that's hard (and need agreement from my opponent) Good Work and Good Luck for your campaign !

I've said this on another video, but I wanna double down on how much I love the single attack and single defense rolls. It's quick and way easier to grok how good/bad an interaction will be. I also totally understand (and largely agree with) the no-reroll policy. Let stats be good, but let the rolls stand. The only thing I'd say is missing is a way to strategically modify the dice in some way. I'd like to have some sort of Strategem style system so that I can choose when or how to augment something. And maybe boosts are currently filling that niche, but I think they are too random to feel right for me. I also like how army-wide narratives/mechanics can be showcased by the strategems, whereas boosts are entirely dependent on the unit.

There's another reason to wish that GW would consider other dice for their games, and that's that in any system that runs off of dice rolls determined by opposed stats (most commonly Strength vs Toughness in GW's case) and not using a large enough dice to account for the range of variance within those stats will inevitably lead to situations in which the differences in those stats effectively don't matter, which is a feel bad moment. For example: assuming for a moment that the average Strength of an attack in a GW game is 4, then due to the nature of how they do wound rolls there is effectively no mechanical difference between having 5 Toughness or 7, at least to the average attack. Same with S3 VS T4-5, or S5 VS T6-9! Basically, the dice you use may limit the numerical scale of stat ranges you can/should use for your game while still keeping the variations between those stats meaningful. Depending of course on how you use those stats. Nobody likes dead or meaningless numbers in their numbers game.

Here is an argument for D6. For larger conflicts, the range of probable outcomes is lowered. A duel between 2 figures, there is a huge variety of outcomes. 100 men vs 100 men, some will die, some will run away, but overall the range of outcomes is lower than in single combat. Again, I favor D10, which can be combined to create a 'percentage dice' easily.

I just bought a bunch of D10s, just so I could play Verrotwood. It's a solid choice for game design. My gripe with D6s is that they can be frustrating in 40k because of the silly mechanics around rolling way too many, multiple times, only to have no damage dealt in the end.Foe example, Imperial Guard vs Demons in 9th edition 40k.

I think a big thing to consider about D6s is their physical real world properties and tactile properties that makes them ideal for a game that rolls a lot of dice. Here's the problem with with higher sided dice: they are inherently unstable. The more sides there are, the more unstable the shape is. D10s and D12s are kinda easy to knock over. D8s are relatively tolerable in terms of stability but still has that lever point that makes them easy knock over. D20s, oh man.... Okay, less sides means more stable. That leaves 2 shapes: pyramids and cubes. That is, D4s and D6s. They are extremely stable. But D4s have two huge physical problems: they're hard to pick up and they're basically little caltrops. If you're rolling 20 of these, D4s are kinda frustrating. They feel bad in the hand and they don't feel satisfying to roll. Pyramids are too stable, hard to pick up, feels uncomfortable in the hand. I once made a game using D4s (the math worked perfectly with D4s) but I had a huge concern over how uncomfortable it is to handle mass D4s. I think higher sided dice have limitations as to how many is practical to roll at once. Having played World of Darkness that function primarily on D10s, I think around 7-10 dice is the limit. It gets too cumbersome after that. D20s I think 2-4 dice is about how much is tolerable. They're just easy to knock over and it makes extraction start to get tedious when there's too many. That leaves the D6 as the perfect shape for purposes of comfort, stability, rollability and readability. Rounded D6s feel great to roll up until they have a hard time fitting in the hand, which is around 20-24 16mm dice. That's great for wargames. Rolling 20-24 D10s is probably tolerable but I can't say it's enjoyable when trying to separate success and fails. Of course, I can also understand the argument that the shot count bloat is the result of using D6s. If we moved on to higher sided dice, we can start reducing the number of shots in the game. All things are in balance. I am typing this "in defense" of D6s but I am definitely not typing this saying "D6s are superior". As many (and you) have pointed out, having more sides provide significant mathematical advantages. However, I just don't want the D6 to be discounted simply because we are used to it and are too fixated on its mathematical disadvantages and forgetting about its physical advantages.

Bravo, these have been great. Many discussions of different systems over the years and I'm afraid none will ever be perfect. I agree about special dice never liked any of them. I liked what I've seen of Ravaged Star. I would really like the the token initiative if it didn't give me the double turn vibes. I really like the idea just not the possibilities. Keep up the great work.

2dn are usually superior to 1d(n*2). If you roll 1d12, you have an equal chance of getting any result - it's chaos, 2d6 gives you a nice curve biased toward the expected values. Much more civilized. Specialist dice I see in two camps. The first allows for probabilities not easily represented through normal dice (looking at you Saga). The second gives another product to be sold to the gaming public (Also looking at you Saga) I noticed that for time you glossed over a number of dice mechanics like "exploding sixes". There is one interesting mechanic found in StarGrunt II - and that is dice shifts. Rather than a +1 modifier adding to a roll, it instead shifts the dice up so a d6 becomes a d8, a d8 becomes a d10 and so on. The success number doesn't need to change at all, but your probabilities of achieving that success increase or decrease accordingly.

Having larger dice allow for greater variation between units without having to lean on special rules like armor of contempt. In the case of war gaming, I would argue that d8s or d12s are the best. They roll the best and are easy to read. Personally I like d12s the most, but I understand the percentage argument.

One advantage of d6 is that you can roll 2d6 add have a gaussian like distribution of results. Obviously it doesn't really work if you are making multiple rolls at once though. Also: I've got a 12 sided die, I've got the Dungeon Masters Guide, I've got Kitty Pryde And: keep rollin' rollin' rollin'

d6 is more accessible but d10s provide better balance/nuance to different armies a slight pet peeve of mine is that the Tau in 40k with a lifetime of shooting experience hit just as well as someone who is considered veteran after spending 2 days fighting. granted 4+ is considered average, 3+ for enhanced and 2+ for snipers, but it feels like there should be a 3.5+ and a 4.5+ to help even out the averages between different species and experience levels

I feel like anything that allows sufficient design variation is important, the exact number of sides does not matter, but I do think d6 is not enough room for interesting variation in the scale of tabletop games. The right number definitely depends on the minutia and detail of the game system and what you are trying to achieve I think. Warhammer definitely seems to be leaning into d6 just being the most common type of dice people already have and not really that it is the ideal for the design of the game

I really enjoyed this, please do more of these! There's a wargame I designed (Illeria). For most of its playtesting existence, it used d10s, though near the end I switched to d6s. I actually did it for the reasons that drove you to pick d10s. Basically, characters rarely rolled more than a couple of dice, so I wanted every modifier to feel impactful. I also wasn't worried about having too many stacked modifiers. I can see how if I had stacked modifiers, and if I was rolling handfuls of dice, I probably would have made the same decision you did. I wonder too, why not use d20s? It seems like you'd have twice the fidelity, wouldn't that be better? Or does a 5% change in probability feel like too little to matter?

I certainly like rolling D10 or D12 more, and the rest of the points make sense.

I definitely prefer a D10/D12 it allows a huge level of skill expression compared to D6. I personally love the whole system for Star Wars Legion - alternative activations, and a simple tiered dice system, along with easy movement means the game doesnt get bogged down in detail - i do agree custom dice arent amazing though - i think having a 4th set of dice netween medium and good would help a lot, its still a simple thing to learn. Thanks for the video.

I think the key downside to non-d6 based games was traditionally the lack of availability. Even in wargames like 40k and Fantasy where players require a 3x3 cube of d6 dice minimum the implication was 'you'll probably lose them from time to time but your parents will have some or you can grab some spares from another boardgame'. Compare that to a d12 where you could walk into a toy store and they'd have no idea what that even was. However with the surge in popularity of tabletop, specifically D&D, and the decrease in popularity of stock Mattel style game design that sort of attitude isn't really a factor anymore. I'd have an easier time finding a sack of d12s than I would a dedicated toy store and I live in a major city. You don't have to mail away to some random basement in the UK to get replacement dice even when they're custom printed. I find the comment about white/black/red Legion dice a bit funny because I have so many more of those wargaming moments you love when I'm playing Legion. It really emphasises how close I came to success and failure. Rolling a 3 on a 3+ or a 4+ sort of feels the same. The simple less than greater than math tells me that I either beat it or I didn't. Meanwhile when I roll the three blocks I needed on white dice I feel like I survived by the skin of my teeth. The emphasis on the outcome of a multi-axis pool of dice obscures the literal odds while pushing us towards the intuitive odds. I don't just want to beat a number I want to counter your specific result. There aren't actually more miracle shots in Legion, the odds smooth out nicely, but instead of being limited to spiking saves and surviving on 6s or wiffing on 2+ with 1s a miracle shot can happen on the Legion equivalent of a 4+.

D6s are the most accessible for players who are unfamiliar with tabletop war gaming. D10s or D12s are the better option because they allow for more granularity in unit statistics. Take 40k as an example, Power Armour vs Carapace Armour (3+ vs 4+). One of those saves represents armour that far outclasses the other, but GW are limited by the D6 system so there is no way to separate them further. In a D10 system however you could have a 4+ vs a 6+ to give the same rough odds of success, but allow for units that fit between the gap to be able to have a save that differentiates them more. Would also allow you to have lots of abilities and rules to modify dice more without completely breaking the balance.

I think D10 is easy to use not so bad for faster pace games and probabilty. I agree with D10 to do easy math and having a mini war game that is fast to pick up for anyone is going to be huge for the community. I'm so excited cause 40k is so hard to even me to learn by myself and then teach a friend or family to play. This is looking to be as easy as learning a new board game and practice practice practice. I might even get my GF to play a little and if I'm luck help paint some minis. I think designing around pick up and play is going to be so huge. I have a couple mom and pop gaming stores where if they had this and I saw people playing and I could buy a box and join them for an hour to learn and have fun I would do so. I'm excited for how well thought out the whole project is. From rules, gameplay, minis that don't need glue, a box that acts as the carrying case for them and just the nice video info dumps to explain everything. Simple stuff like what if a model has a bent piece, stick it in hot water and cool it down after bending it back. That choice in material and design is nice. I already get frustrated when glueing a 40k model with tiny thin peices and I break one off cause I dropped it or held it wrong while glueing. I legit bought minis years ago to build and paint and then I got so frustrated I toss everything in the trash back then. I wish this was a thing I'd have been more inclined to stick with the hobby back then.

I've been working on a table top wargame for a really long time, iterating over and over, but i also use D10s, my sysems is rolling under a target number. I think D10s give a lot more crunch and detail, and i dig it.

My comment was going to be that a d10 is an easier dice to work with fraction wise. I think this is a good presedence to set and likely more approachable for beginner gamers. The granularity bit is great too!

My friends and I have found that D10s give enough variance and bonus have a decent impact.

The upside of D10's is that we use base 10 math for most common things. Money, mathematics, the metric system for all modern science. So, understanding of how that dice system and calculating odds is far easier for the average person who will most likely have a small distain for doing math/doing math in their head to do. Also, the larger the dice is, as to the number of sides/faces, the easier it is to make subtle changes to other aspects of a gane without creating major balance issues in that game. That is simply because changing values of something has a lesser percentage chance it will greatly impact that element of the gane. Personally, it is the reason why I prefer to play skill based RPG systems that are D100 based and are roll skill number or lower. Example if my character has a skill of 48 for lock picking that means if I roll 1 to 48 I've successfully picked that lock but if I roll 49 to 100 I have failed to pick that lock. But the upside of D6 systems is that D6 dice are easier to fit into cubes for transport?

I think there is a game out there that uses cards instead of dice. Since you don't reshuffle for every "roll" that makes for a bit less randomness, i.e. you can't get a 1 two attacks in a row.

I'm on the fence with custom dice. On one hand they can work really well - Star Wars Armada has those and I think the system is pretty good. On the other hand it's as you say - often they feel different for the sake of being different. On top of that whenever I see custom dice all I can think about is that they're trying to make me buy more of them - FFG is particularly bad with not providing enough dice with their games.

I mean, mathematically, more faces just means you can distribute the probability more (i.e. going from 3+ to 4+ in a D6 is more impactful than going from +5 to +6 in a D10). Like you said, the granularity. I have been exploring also with D20. I think if you are throwing MANY dice (like in Ravaged Star), then D6 or D10 would be preferred. If you are only throwing one (or two) dice, then D20 or D100 works best IMO. EDIT: Also agree with the point about waaaay too many rerolls not being great... the maths get very tricky to do in your head! EDIT2: One of my favourite RPGs is the Vampire universe (World of Darkness) and it is all D10 based!

I like D10s. With a D6 you really only have 3+, 4+ and 5+ to work with, 2+ and 6+ are edge cases with dramatic effects. What is often lost though is how many good combinations do you get? In 40k where you have typically 3 D6 rolls: to hit, to wound, to save, you get a total of 216 combinations. If you roll a 1 to hit then no other rolls mater and 36 of your 216 combinations are of no use. If we were to take 3+, 4+ and 5+ as the most useable rolls and include half of the 6+ and 2+ rolls we get 4 good rolls per D6 so 4x4x4=64 good combinations from your 3 D6s. If you apply the same method to 2 D10 rolls then you would get 8x8=64 good combinations. I enjoy OPR's Grimdark Future, try it if you have not, with only 2 D6 rolls, one to hit and one to save, it is fun but many of the units have pretty similar stats and the difference between +1/-1 is still pretty telling. With Mantic Firefight, which I recommend trying, where it uses 2 D8 rolls, one to hit and one to damage. Even with the addition of 2 more sides the improvement over GDF is notable. Gates of Antares uses 2 D10 rolls, one to hit and one to resist. I think that is best method, where and attack makes a roll and the defender replies with a roll. While I think that D12s are ok but you can buy D10s in bulk quite easily and some like the easy percentage calcs with D10s.

A bit off topic but I would be interest to hear what you think about Warhammers success and what you intend to do to make Ravaged Start a long term success as well. The reason I ask is because the rule set and ideas you are bringing to the game seem really good but I have seen other games with good rules that I think are better than warhammer and yet warhammer remains the dominant and most popular game. I was thinking it may be that they have a critical mass and so there are lots of people to play with and see other peoples interesting hobby projects to get you inspired, or it may just be that GW are constantly pushing new minies and rules and codexes and new editions at a rate that keeps a constant feed of exciting content that keeps people engaged that way. And so I was curious as to what you think makes a game system successful?

D10 allows for more diversity in armies. A bolter can't have the same strength as a Las gun.

I'm with you on D10's for all the same reasons. Have been for years.

Matt - m the best dice for Ravaged Star are whatever you want!, it’s your baby! I guess from a business perspective the most cost effective dice to buy or produce are the best.

I'd say both AND d12 added to the mix. The trick here would be the size of the game. The more models you have the smaller the dice because on bigger scale individuals matter less but then on really small scale you could use bigger dice to make models feel unique. On average d10 would be my pick 'cos it is easier to handle multiples of 10%.

Hmm, I agree with pretty much everything you have said, and your reasoning is sound. My question is... Hows the Lore of your game and will there be an RPG?

the best wargames engine imo is FASA's Vor: The Maelstrom, core book came with rules for creating your own armies unit stats for any miniature you might have and was D10 with you rolling under the stat(edit: the beauty of rolling under is an 8 or less would be 80% etc.) for success the die roll being modified by situations, cover, range etc. Infinity has a neat D20 system that is too arcane to fit in a comment. D6 is ok, it doesnt scare anyone with an advanced platonic solid beyoned cubes. However rolling 20+ D6 and tallying results is a bore and a waste of time imo only models with LOS and front rank should shoot. Not all ten firing twice because one guy is out of cover and has LOS on a single visible enemy model. (addendum; mouse and keyboard was DOOM and before that Wolfenstien. Quake and then Quake2 (halflife one 1998 was built on the Quake2 engine omg we are too old).

What do you think about using mathematical averages when needing to roll a large amount of dice. Lets say you need to roll 40 dice. You can rule that 36 of them will be mathematically average- 6 6s, 6 5s, 6 4s, 6 3s... .etc then just roll the remaining 4 dice.

Warhammer and other d6 systems really struggle with granularity. Sometimes with a d6 system, on the extreme low end or high end of things like accuracy or toughness, the effects gets crushed together and it really makes no difference, while in the middle, there are huge differences in which weapons or armor modifiers are worth it to hit different breakpoints. (Just look at some of Auspex Tactics' analysis videos for weapon profiles!) A d8 or d10 system really starts to make a difference. I've played a fair bit of Star Wars Legion and I like their system of d8's for attacking dice, but the d6's for defense dice seem to have problems too. Like, why does a Stormtroopers have the same save (red, non-surging) as Darth Vader? Alternatively, I've also been trying the skirmish wargame Carnevale. It uses a d10 system where you just roll your number of attacks, and every dice result greater than or equal to your opponent's dexterity value causes damage. For most other rolls, the standard value you look for is a 7+ on a d10, and you can have opposed rolls where the defending player rolls to reduce the number of dice the attacking player can roll. Their system takes some getting used to, but dice modifiers don't change the face value of dice you're looking for, they change the number of dice rolled. I think it would be worth brainstorming what this might look like in a larger scale game to see if it might work.

Where did you get that shirt from? I live it!

I think most dice can work with most dice systems - it's all a matter of execution. 40k is an example of bad uses of D6s where, as stated by yourself, it can sometimes require 4 successful rolls in your favour (to hit, to wound, save, FNP) before you succeed in an attack. There are other games for which this isn't the case that's D6 based. The various Rampant games use D6's and dealing damage ranges between rolling 5 to 12 dice (varying on the system) and calculating how many of those "hit" to determine the outcome of combat. However the main thing to note is that basic units tend to only score "hits" on a 6, with skill units scoring on a 5+. 4+ is considered above average and the highest I've seen in the game is 3+ on some very, very elite/specific units (and even then those units tend to have horrible drawbacks, such as being very vulnerable to damage themselves). The issue with 40k is that in a bid to make everything feel better it's very easy to get in a situation where you're hitting easily, wounding easily, and bypassing armour easily.. which means at that point the rolls are just a formality. I remember once playing 8th edition against Crimson Fist marines and by the end of the game I was telling my opponent to just jump to the "to wound" step since between all the re-rolls the number of misses in that game were in the single digits. Granted there was some absurd luck there but... re-rolling all 1's and a floating re-roll per unit AND re-rolling 1s to wound as well just made so many shots hit true, while in just the edition prior they would have so be much less lethal. D6's or D10s can work fine but it's the execution that counts. One danger of the system you seem to be proposing is that if there are too many stacking modifiers you can end up with a situation where the rolls are still slowed down.

I said the other day while watching my friends play a game of 40k that I think rerolls are fine but anything hitting or wound on a 2 should not get to reroll 1s, ever

Could not agree more regarding the d6 rabbit hole GW has fallen down. One of the main reason I don't play their games any more is I feel I spend too much time rolling and rerolling dice. It draws me OUT of the on table action.

D10's became very popular in the 1990's thanks in large part to White Wolf's excellent World of Darkness games and their dice pool/number of successes mechanics. So if you build it that way (and the game itself is good) the players will come. I've often thought of all the dice rolling time that could be saved if GW had changed to a more granular die. It seem like every single good fighting or shooting unit hits on a 2 and if they are a Primarch or something gets to re-roll. And I have never really liked the hit, wound, save base-line (never-mind all of the other rolls) method of determining who gets hit and injured in a game of 40k.

The answer is D8's, they read as quickly and easily as a D6, gut give 33% more scope for granularity. As a 30+ year D&D player, I know funny shaped dice, and everything above D8 is slower to read. D12's can't be used because they roll forever, not too bad unless it's a wargame and you're rolling 20 or more dice, D12's are a problem.

Straight off the bat again, my first though is why not D8s? In fact in the game I half designed in my head D8s became the defacto dice.

Matt you possess a very analytical mathematical mind. A lot of people don't and their experience with dice and values etc is very different. This isn't really a good or bad thing either way, it just is.

Maybe its just me, but I don't find rerolls that annoying, unless its full rerolls all the time. Like hitting on 4s rerolling 1s gives you odds that are between 4s and 3s and adds more nuance to the math of the game. The same math that can be replicated by going to 10s or 12s system, which I agree would be more interesting

Agree on number of rolls per attack is bad in 40k, etc. Attacker needs at least two rolls (three if charging!), and defender gets at least one roll (with possiblity of another) - and both can reroll...makes every action take too long and be much less impactful than feels appropriate.

I think most people who have spent decades playing d6 games have no trouble with d12s. Although the percentages are not as neat, just doubling the granularity is easy to grasp. An army-scale game needs dice rolls that are quick to interpret and apply, so I think using more granular dice is a far better way to increase detail than any sort of clever gimmick dice mechanics.

D10s i think give you more ranges in probabilities. But also they are less common then a d6 which would mean less people would have them.

I understand and like how easy d10’s are to calculate, but just get so much more satisfaction rolling d6’s.

Well, I do not think having d6,10,12 is that much of a problem really. I watched one of your battle reports and what I did not like was the activation. I am aware that there is no -one way fixes all - however, in either - I go you go or alternative activation, there is always some kind of structure to it. I didn't like that bit in the battle report, and it was making it difficult to watch. What I would recommend You to have look at in terms of activations, is either long forgotten - battlefield evolution( i believe that was the name of it) or neuroshima hex. Both are kind of I go - you go - but with a twist. First one, very similar to infinity, however, units had 12" range of reaction( you could jam a gun /run out of ammo) and then there is elegant, simple and very intuitive solution of neuroshima hex , with introduction of initiative, where all units in that segment of initiative get to fight.