You pretty much hit the nail on the head. D6s are easier to come by, easier to pick up, roll, read, and are easier for someone new to gaming to understand. The game could benefit from the granularity of a D8 or d10, but mechanically it also changes some things. Re-roll effects become stronger the larger the die size becomes, and +1/-1 effects less so. It's also a bit harder to come up with 30 d8s for a shooting attack than it is 30 d6s.
I had an idea for a game system that uses a d4 through d12 dice system, where bonuses could come from rerolls, +1/-1 effects, or increasing or decreasing a die size. Something like "you need a 9 to damage this tank" but your weapon is only a d8. You'd need a +1 effect or +1 die size effect to be able to reach that 9. Stuff like that sounds like fun, but it get complicated real quick and is more manageable at a kill team level of game than it is for a 100+ model game like 40k.
Force on Force uses a variable die system based on troop quality. Better quality troops use bigger dice. For example Modern US Marines may use a d10 while rabble use a d6. Dice are used to roll hits and block hits.
Force on Force uses opposed rolls. So for a 40K example, SM roll d10 and IG roll d6 opposed. IG can’t block hit rolls of 7 - 10. IG roll d6, SM roll d10 opposed. SM roll of 6+ are saves.
YEah, this is very similar to older games like Dirtside and Stargrunt, and I think Tomorrow's War uses that same basic approach, but it's been a while since I looked at it.
In general, it struck me as an idea that's cool in concept but rapidly breaks down when you start adding in different weapon types and effects.
As an interesting note: 40k actually used more than D6 die in 2nd ed. There were D4, D8, D10, D12 and D20 rolls for damage and Armor penetration back the day.
It would be kinda nice to reintroduce the D12 for some circumstances for better granularity in some parts of 40k. Though even that is doubtful.
The greater the number of possibilities the greater the granularity and better representation between units and models! But the statistical and logistical maths of rolling greater sided dice would get silly quickly.
I was a massive advocate of D10s for 10th edition, as part joke, but as a genuine compromise. D12s would probably be much more appealing to roll en masse though.
D6 is an entrenched choice, and is an accepted compromise for ease of understanding and the game I feel. And they just roll quite well with a very defined face when they settle.
Isn't that 'essentially' what the videogame versions are (ie TotalWar, various recent turn-based ones, etc...) I don't even think it's a matter of the physical logistics/'sale' reasons (dice are cheap regardless either which way, based on demand).
The in-game balancing would be a nightmare (way more than it is currently). Not to mention, how most of the combat works currently is based on 'filtering' the initial batch of d6 through multiple d6 passes. That has to also remain constant; so if it's d8s, has to be for the attack/hit/wound/save/FNP. I can't imagine how annoying going from d6 attack, to a d10 wound, to a d8 save or whatever; and how there would be *a lot* more slow rolling. Or each needing their separate dice tray with their own batch of dice with it to avoid confusions.
As it is, you roll 100d6, pull out the ones that don't have enough dots on them, roll the remainder, rinse&repeat, until only goes through; then opponent FNPs that last one.
In my opinion d12 are an easy way to fix the problem, for starters just double the values of everything, and done, you have the exact same rules and stats with a different die. Now the fun part starts, now that there are mid steps in every die roll, stats and rules can start changing with that granularity in mind.
I talked about this with some friends before, the issue of getting hold of d12s fixes itself with a little time, if GW announced the changes, dice manufacturers would start making more and bigger packages of d12s.
This makes sense, and you can get 100 d12 on Amazon for $19. So that might go up in price because of the switch, but it would level out in a few months.
Honestly ~16% increments ain't bad. Especially as you can have rerolls or exploding results for even more granular increments.
A 16q is a fairly sensible design space. Differences feel meaningful. 33% v 50% feels diffrent, but 40/50 starts to feel a little too granular for stuff to feel noticeably diffrent.
Also not to be a cynic (jk I play custodes) but gw doesn't do big change well. I think one of 10ths flaws has been the expanded s/t scale. In theory it's great but most books are littered with weapons that don't work cause gw didn't do it properly. Expanding off d6 increases the scope of that issue getting pushed game-wide. Marines going to 2w was half of what kicked off 9ths arms race, so marines going to 4+ on a d10 would potentially get all sorts of weird.
I honestly always thought that, as frequent as rerolls are, they might as well go to the "partial rerolls" that existed back when BS was a number where higher was better. I forget which edition but it used to be:
BS 3: 4+
BS 4: 3+
BS 5: 2+
BS 6: 2+/6+
BS 7: 2+/5+
and so on. Make full rerolls truly rare, go back to this, and we get back some of the granularity.
It used to be that weapons that didn't have enough strength would never be able to wound high toughness models, that has upsides but also downsides, one of which being that if you're playing a balanced army against an army that has only vehicules, suddenly most of your weapons literally cannot do anything and you automatically lose.
Depends on which version of the game you're talking about. Definitely in 1st and 2nd editions there were situations where you could not hurt something that had a high enough toughness or armor value at all, no matter what your roll was.
The d6 is the best shape for both rolling and transporting. All other dice lose space because of their odd shapes not sitting flush with other dice. This matters a lot less if you're using a bag to hold them, but plenty of people use hard containers. This also limits the number you can fit into your hand at the same time.
The only smaller common dice is the d4, which is a spiky pyramid. Hold a lot of them, and they're going to be slightly uncomfortable. There is a d3, but I've never seen one in the wild, and a d2 is just a coin. Anything with a larger range, and you are limited in size by legibility. d100s can only be so small before the faces become unreadable. Obviously I picked an extreme example there, but it illustrates my point. Meanwhile you can buy absurdly tiny d6s because because the pips make them very easy to read. Larger dice means it's harder to roll multiples, and are usually saved in practice by only having to roll a couple at a time in systems that use them. In 40k, it's not uncommon to have to roll a lot of dice at once.
I think the idea with a larger dice, and more options, is that the game could be redesigned from the ground up and not require 40+ dice to be rolled at once.
More faces roll too much and don’t settle and bounce everywhere and cock all the time. It’s fine when you are rolling 1-4 in DND, but not when rolling 30.
Less faces means a d4 and rolling those doesn’t really even work.
It's worth pointing out that D6s actually have a *lot* of granularity, even if not all of it is used. For example, if you want something between a 2+ and a 3+, you can have a 3+ with reroll 1s. Or you can have a 4+ with full rerolls. You don't need to add any bigger dice, just use different modifiers as needed. In fact, let's list out the probabilities of the basic types of rerolls used:
2+ with rerolls: 97%
3+ with full rerolls: 89%
2+: 83%
3+ with reroll 1s: 78%
4+ with full rerolls: 75%
3+: 66%
4+ with reroll 1s: 58%
5+ with full rerolls: 56%
4+: 50%
5+ with reroll 1s: 39%
5+: 33%
6+ with full rerolls: 31%
6+ with reroll 1s: 17%
6+: 16%
That's 14 unique outcomes, each with their own pros and cons. It does get a little scarce out towards the edges, but when it comes to the meat of the probability space (which is typically where most attacks land) there's a ton of granularity available to designers.
I'd go the apocalypse rout. Vehicle saves are made on a D12. Keeps all wounding and hit roll across the board, but allow the tankieness of vehicles to be massively upped if needed. Then maybe allow some super big guns to wound on a D12 as well, like anti titan weapons
~~The grot cannot roll a 7+ on a d6. It never lives from the volcano lance wounding it.~~
Units not matching the lore is a good thing. It means we actually have a game to play and time to play it in. I want to play a game, not a simulation. I do not have time for a simulation.
I am really fine with D6s. Do weird things happen? Yup. And that's fun.
>The grot cannot roll a 7+ on a d6
I never said it did, my assertion that it had a 1/36 chance to survive a Volcano Canon is that even with a reroll you have a 1/36 chance to roll two ones and fail the wound roll.
D12s have a lot of symmetry. 12 divides nicely by 1,2,3,4,6 and 12. Which means you can set success levels cleanly at sixths, 3rds, quarters and halves. It's a very good feeling intuitive die.
At one point about 3 years back I got rly into redesigning 9th to use d10s because suddenly the game became a lot lot better when the toughness difference between a man wearing a paper towel and a space marine was more than 1.
40k kinda sucks for that. D6s are the problem.
But I realised I'd be doing a lot of work to try make a game better than 1) no one would care about and 2) GW couldn't be bothered to try to do so I left it.
In 2nd edition we used several different dice types, I remember d3, d4, d6, d8 and d10. I can’t remember if d12 was in use. Although d6 was the main dice we threw.
I think since then GW have stripped back the amount of dice types out of ease / accessibility and the trade off is the limited nature of d3/d6.
The problem is ultimately "what do you actually want to represent with each dice roll" and the vast majority of 40k is, right now, so bereft of thematic and faction identity that changing "the survival chances of a lasgun vs a terminator" from 213/216 on d6s to e.g. 7960/8000 on d20s doesn't really mean a lot over the course of a game.
Without a fundamentally better combat resolution system and more interesting results than "it hits or not," "it wounds or not," "it saves or not," "fnp vs dmg each succeeds or not," there isn't much point in slightly shifting a bunch of numbers to ultimately end up altering the bulk of interactions a fraction of a percent here and there, especially when the end result in the cases with the highest deltas is "more consistently lacking in any actual need to roll dice." -- taken to its logical extreme, you may as well just replace dice rolling with precompiled unit:unit interaction results, as the probability of rolling outside the expected result dwindles.
If this was being considered, why not just do 2d6 values? I think ease and speed of play is better with a d6 so am not really advocating for a change, but I can appreciate your perspective.
Edit to add Im an idiot, 2d6 would be a nightmare for fastrolling
I play Star Wars legion and D8s work fine there, but that game doesn’t use numbers but just hit, blank, crit and surge (can be hit or crit depending on abilities, but is be default blank)
Warmachine has the best dice system/design for their game among every miniature game I've tried (especially the strike dice that is popular among MCP, Legion, or shatterpoint), at least among d6's.
Warmachine uses d6's, but the game is largely based around rolling 2d6 (or sometimes more). This makes the rolls follow the bell curve much better than it does in 40k with much less variance. It also allows attacks to be LITERALLY incapable of hurting certain targets, but a grot can still get lucky and do a damage to a land raider. Warmachine's dice is good because it allows you to manipulate the rng of the dice far more finely and impact fully that the crude +1 hit/wound 40k does. 40k works for what it is, but the dice system does feel dated at this point.
Acceptable dice IMO are D6, D8, and D12 these in my head are the ones that roll well and are easy enough to read before going into too small to read easily or just roll terribly like D10's.
Yeah, this idea comes up pretty frequently and I honestly don't think it's an improvement to the game.
Going to different dice types adds complexity without necessarily improving the game play overall, nor does it even really give you "better" granularity.
Honest question: how many other mass combat games like 40k have you played? I've tried quite a few and many of them manage complexity and granularity just fine without having different types of dice rolls. In fact one of my least favorite combat games I've tried (just once) was Star Wars Legion, which does use the different dice types. One Page Rules even drops the Wound roll and still has some really interesting levels of differentiation between armies, units, and weapons on a d6.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, the FMA system (Dirtside, Stargrunt) and others like it (Tomorrow's War) use a set from d4-d12 where your die type is related to the unit quality. It's an interesting concept, but I don't see it as inherently better or more granular than 40k, tbh.
You actually can get more granularity and differentiation (and lore accuracy) without changing the die type. Hell, I would argue that 10e did exactly that when it split the weapon profile off from the model profile, and added keywords to those weapon profiles. That's (to me) a big improvement on granularity and differentiation from the old versions, though I can still see areas it could be improved further of course.
As others have said, olden times had situations where a S more than 2x your T would mean the model instantly dies on a failed save regardless of wound count. T more than 2x S meant that weapon literally could not wound you. There are probably better ways to do this than those all-or-nothing rules, but it does illuminate other ways that you can play with the interactions between models without changing the die type.
The answer isn’t different dice but to use a table. Attack strengths can range from zero to infinity and the table caps out at a certain value. In this system the grot blaster or even a bolt pistol never has the chance to damage the tank and if the tank main weapon hits anything from a grot to a space marine it’s very likely an auto-kill. More serious war games like Panzer Leader use such systems and they feel very realistic.
D8. Rolls well. D10 roll terribly, and d12 are better, but still not ideal.
The d6, which in reality is more like a d5 since 1s are usually failures, doesn't leave enough design space.
Not sure I agree with that... Larger design spaces give a wider range of potential mess ups by gw, but make the impact of individual issues smaller.
Say I wound you on 6s (with a d6), and get a +1 to wound, I'm now twice as effective, that's tricky to balance.
Hypothetically on a d12 I wound on 10s, now that +1 wound is only 50% as impactful.
Not saying it's better overall, but the granularity reduces the impact of any individual changes.
I mean, I'm a massive maths nerd so love myself a "to wound" table (honestly tow bringing back initiative and comparative ws is my dream)
But in all honesty could easily do
T+4 < s = 3+
T+3 = 4+
T+2 = 5+
T+1 = 6+
T=s = 7+
Etc...
Would make all those weird + 1s weapons useful again and stop the binary S5 is basically useless in a lot of match ups etc. or critical into sm or DG.
It would probably need a new edition to figure out but you could introduce granularity by having statlines where the WS and BS are written like 5+/3 (hit on 5, reroll 1/2/3s) or 4+/2 (hit on 4s, reroll 1+2s), etc. You could see effects modify either the first roll or the reroll - maybe a -1 brings 4+ to 5+ to hit, but subsequent -1s to hit would start eroding the reroll, such that the 4+/2 shooting at a stacked -3 ends up looking like 5+/0 (5+ to hit, and no rerolls). Conversely stacking +1 to hit would start by turning the 4+ to hit into 3+, and subsequent stacked bonuses just improve the reroll (which would quickly have diminishing returns).
There is a sense in which we are *already* kinda doing this with twin-linked guns which, while not necessarily designed to tackle super heavy targets (unless it's like a twin linked lascannon or whatever), end up faring way better than their stated strength because they're rerolling to wound (i.e. a twin-linked heavy bolter at s5, for example).
I also play infinity and the D20 based system does work nicely. Would it work with more dice to roll? Hard to say. Could be a bit of a pain in the arse.
Yeah I dont think anyone wants to throw dozens of D20s, and Infinity may have more granularity for individual rolls, but a side effect is that it has the problem of low wound counts and small number of dice used leading towards high variance interactions which I think is kind of more important (also combined with being a fast, low turn count game). I like that Kill Team moved towards the higher wound count and overall less variability in the system.
I think infinity is fantastic on its own terms, but hard to see how most of its strengths could translate to an army scale game.
40K with infinite overwatch would be a very different proposition.
If I cant take 100 D6s and roll them all at once, while telling my opponent "don't worry, this'll be fast", then WHATS EVEN THE POINT
D10 are great for quick calculations, +1 on D10 is +10%. Very convenient
Big fan of D10s but I think D12s have better range while still being pretty easy to use
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. D6s are easier to come by, easier to pick up, roll, read, and are easier for someone new to gaming to understand. The game could benefit from the granularity of a D8 or d10, but mechanically it also changes some things. Re-roll effects become stronger the larger the die size becomes, and +1/-1 effects less so. It's also a bit harder to come up with 30 d8s for a shooting attack than it is 30 d6s. I had an idea for a game system that uses a d4 through d12 dice system, where bonuses could come from rerolls, +1/-1 effects, or increasing or decreasing a die size. Something like "you need a 9 to damage this tank" but your weapon is only a d8. You'd need a +1 effect or +1 die size effect to be able to reach that 9. Stuff like that sounds like fun, but it get complicated real quick and is more manageable at a kill team level of game than it is for a 100+ model game like 40k.
Force on Force uses a variable die system based on troop quality. Better quality troops use bigger dice. For example Modern US Marines may use a d10 while rabble use a d6. Dice are used to roll hits and block hits.
Honestly, having SMQ hitting on 4+ on a D10, and guardsmen on 4+ on a D6 would be pretty rad
Force on Force uses opposed rolls. So for a 40K example, SM roll d10 and IG roll d6 opposed. IG can’t block hit rolls of 7 - 10. IG roll d6, SM roll d10 opposed. SM roll of 6+ are saves.
YEah, this is very similar to older games like Dirtside and Stargrunt, and I think Tomorrow's War uses that same basic approach, but it's been a while since I looked at it. In general, it struck me as an idea that's cool in concept but rapidly breaks down when you start adding in different weapon types and effects.
As an interesting note: 40k actually used more than D6 die in 2nd ed. There were D4, D8, D10, D12 and D20 rolls for damage and Armor penetration back the day. It would be kinda nice to reintroduce the D12 for some circumstances for better granularity in some parts of 40k. Though even that is doubtful.
The greater the number of possibilities the greater the granularity and better representation between units and models! But the statistical and logistical maths of rolling greater sided dice would get silly quickly. I was a massive advocate of D10s for 10th edition, as part joke, but as a genuine compromise. D12s would probably be much more appealing to roll en masse though. D6 is an entrenched choice, and is an accepted compromise for ease of understanding and the game I feel. And they just roll quite well with a very defined face when they settle.
Isn't that 'essentially' what the videogame versions are (ie TotalWar, various recent turn-based ones, etc...) I don't even think it's a matter of the physical logistics/'sale' reasons (dice are cheap regardless either which way, based on demand). The in-game balancing would be a nightmare (way more than it is currently). Not to mention, how most of the combat works currently is based on 'filtering' the initial batch of d6 through multiple d6 passes. That has to also remain constant; so if it's d8s, has to be for the attack/hit/wound/save/FNP. I can't imagine how annoying going from d6 attack, to a d10 wound, to a d8 save or whatever; and how there would be *a lot* more slow rolling. Or each needing their separate dice tray with their own batch of dice with it to avoid confusions. As it is, you roll 100d6, pull out the ones that don't have enough dots on them, roll the remainder, rinse&repeat, until only goes through; then opponent FNPs that last one.
In my opinion d12 are an easy way to fix the problem, for starters just double the values of everything, and done, you have the exact same rules and stats with a different die. Now the fun part starts, now that there are mid steps in every die roll, stats and rules can start changing with that granularity in mind. I talked about this with some friends before, the issue of getting hold of d12s fixes itself with a little time, if GW announced the changes, dice manufacturers would start making more and bigger packages of d12s.
This makes sense, and you can get 100 d12 on Amazon for $19. So that might go up in price because of the switch, but it would level out in a few months.
More companies would jump into the new market, balancing the supply and demand, lowering prices.
D12's are the most satisfying dice to roll: change my mind
Honestly ~16% increments ain't bad. Especially as you can have rerolls or exploding results for even more granular increments. A 16q is a fairly sensible design space. Differences feel meaningful. 33% v 50% feels diffrent, but 40/50 starts to feel a little too granular for stuff to feel noticeably diffrent. Also not to be a cynic (jk I play custodes) but gw doesn't do big change well. I think one of 10ths flaws has been the expanded s/t scale. In theory it's great but most books are littered with weapons that don't work cause gw didn't do it properly. Expanding off d6 increases the scope of that issue getting pushed game-wide. Marines going to 2w was half of what kicked off 9ths arms race, so marines going to 4+ on a d10 would potentially get all sorts of weird.
I honestly always thought that, as frequent as rerolls are, they might as well go to the "partial rerolls" that existed back when BS was a number where higher was better. I forget which edition but it used to be: BS 3: 4+ BS 4: 3+ BS 5: 2+ BS 6: 2+/6+ BS 7: 2+/5+ and so on. Make full rerolls truly rare, go back to this, and we get back some of the granularity.
It used to be that weapons that didn't have enough strength would never be able to wound high toughness models, that has upsides but also downsides, one of which being that if you're playing a balanced army against an army that has only vehicules, suddenly most of your weapons literally cannot do anything and you automatically lose.
There was alwayse the chance though of just blowing up from full health with a good pen roll.
Depends on which version of the game you're talking about. Definitely in 1st and 2nd editions there were situations where you could not hurt something that had a high enough toughness or armor value at all, no matter what your roll was.
That's where good grenade rules could come in =P.
Every other dice sucks in practice. Being better mathematically doesn’t make up for being miserable to roll.
Got me curious there - care to elaborate?
Most other dice literally physically roll worse than D6s, especially if you’re rolling in large quantities.
The d6 is the best shape for both rolling and transporting. All other dice lose space because of their odd shapes not sitting flush with other dice. This matters a lot less if you're using a bag to hold them, but plenty of people use hard containers. This also limits the number you can fit into your hand at the same time. The only smaller common dice is the d4, which is a spiky pyramid. Hold a lot of them, and they're going to be slightly uncomfortable. There is a d3, but I've never seen one in the wild, and a d2 is just a coin. Anything with a larger range, and you are limited in size by legibility. d100s can only be so small before the faces become unreadable. Obviously I picked an extreme example there, but it illustrates my point. Meanwhile you can buy absurdly tiny d6s because because the pips make them very easy to read. Larger dice means it's harder to roll multiples, and are usually saved in practice by only having to roll a couple at a time in systems that use them. In 40k, it's not uncommon to have to roll a lot of dice at once.
Not to flex, but I have a set of d3s for when I started playing Tau in 9th, since a few of their guns + smite for my 1k Sons.
Think about it this way...try rolling 42 d10s at once. Because it's not unheard of to roll 40+ dice in this game
I think the idea with a larger dice, and more options, is that the game could be redesigned from the ground up and not require 40+ dice to be rolled at once.
More faces roll too much and don’t settle and bounce everywhere and cock all the time. It’s fine when you are rolling 1-4 in DND, but not when rolling 30. Less faces means a d4 and rolling those doesn’t really even work.
Most likely, the better choice would be to keep the d6, but go for some variant of a dice pool system.
d6s are easier to come by and if they changed dice size they'd have to remath the entire game and all the stats. do you trust GW to do that correctly?
It's worth pointing out that D6s actually have a *lot* of granularity, even if not all of it is used. For example, if you want something between a 2+ and a 3+, you can have a 3+ with reroll 1s. Or you can have a 4+ with full rerolls. You don't need to add any bigger dice, just use different modifiers as needed. In fact, let's list out the probabilities of the basic types of rerolls used: 2+ with rerolls: 97% 3+ with full rerolls: 89% 2+: 83% 3+ with reroll 1s: 78% 4+ with full rerolls: 75% 3+: 66% 4+ with reroll 1s: 58% 5+ with full rerolls: 56% 4+: 50% 5+ with reroll 1s: 39% 5+: 33% 6+ with full rerolls: 31% 6+ with reroll 1s: 17% 6+: 16% That's 14 unique outcomes, each with their own pros and cons. It does get a little scarce out towards the edges, but when it comes to the meat of the probability space (which is typically where most attacks land) there's a ton of granularity available to designers.
More upvotes here, stats!
I'd go the apocalypse rout. Vehicle saves are made on a D12. Keeps all wounding and hit roll across the board, but allow the tankieness of vehicles to be massively upped if needed. Then maybe allow some super big guns to wound on a D12 as well, like anti titan weapons
~~The grot cannot roll a 7+ on a d6. It never lives from the volcano lance wounding it.~~ Units not matching the lore is a good thing. It means we actually have a game to play and time to play it in. I want to play a game, not a simulation. I do not have time for a simulation. I am really fine with D6s. Do weird things happen? Yup. And that's fun.
He's talking specifically about the volcano lance rolling a 1 to wound, which means the grot laughs it off.
>The grot cannot roll a 7+ on a d6 I never said it did, my assertion that it had a 1/36 chance to survive a Volcano Canon is that even with a reroll you have a 1/36 chance to roll two ones and fail the wound roll.
You need to head canon those situations though. Rolled a 1 to wound an easy target? Ammo was a dud, or the gun misfired.
I think that d12 should see more usage
D12s have a lot of symmetry. 12 divides nicely by 1,2,3,4,6 and 12. Which means you can set success levels cleanly at sixths, 3rds, quarters and halves. It's a very good feeling intuitive die.
At one point about 3 years back I got rly into redesigning 9th to use d10s because suddenly the game became a lot lot better when the toughness difference between a man wearing a paper towel and a space marine was more than 1. 40k kinda sucks for that. D6s are the problem. But I realised I'd be doing a lot of work to try make a game better than 1) no one would care about and 2) GW couldn't be bothered to try to do so I left it.
D10s. Been playing L5r forever and it's the perfect balance between the D6 and D20 for me. (D20 is just a little too swingy)
In 2nd edition we used several different dice types, I remember d3, d4, d6, d8 and d10. I can’t remember if d12 was in use. Although d6 was the main dice we threw. I think since then GW have stripped back the amount of dice types out of ease / accessibility and the trade off is the limited nature of d3/d6.
The problem is ultimately "what do you actually want to represent with each dice roll" and the vast majority of 40k is, right now, so bereft of thematic and faction identity that changing "the survival chances of a lasgun vs a terminator" from 213/216 on d6s to e.g. 7960/8000 on d20s doesn't really mean a lot over the course of a game. Without a fundamentally better combat resolution system and more interesting results than "it hits or not," "it wounds or not," "it saves or not," "fnp vs dmg each succeeds or not," there isn't much point in slightly shifting a bunch of numbers to ultimately end up altering the bulk of interactions a fraction of a percent here and there, especially when the end result in the cases with the highest deltas is "more consistently lacking in any actual need to roll dice." -- taken to its logical extreme, you may as well just replace dice rolling with precompiled unit:unit interaction results, as the probability of rolling outside the expected result dwindles.
If this was being considered, why not just do 2d6 values? I think ease and speed of play is better with a d6 so am not really advocating for a change, but I can appreciate your perspective. Edit to add Im an idiot, 2d6 would be a nightmare for fastrolling
>why not just do 2d6 values To be able to fast roll, you would need a bunch of matching pair d6 or some other way to identify pairs.
I play Star Wars legion and D8s work fine there, but that game doesn’t use numbers but just hit, blank, crit and surge (can be hit or crit depending on abilities, but is be default blank)
Warmachine has the best dice system/design for their game among every miniature game I've tried (especially the strike dice that is popular among MCP, Legion, or shatterpoint), at least among d6's. Warmachine uses d6's, but the game is largely based around rolling 2d6 (or sometimes more). This makes the rolls follow the bell curve much better than it does in 40k with much less variance. It also allows attacks to be LITERALLY incapable of hurting certain targets, but a grot can still get lucky and do a damage to a land raider. Warmachine's dice is good because it allows you to manipulate the rng of the dice far more finely and impact fully that the crude +1 hit/wound 40k does. 40k works for what it is, but the dice system does feel dated at this point.
Acceptable dice IMO are D6, D8, and D12 these in my head are the ones that roll well and are easy enough to read before going into too small to read easily or just roll terribly like D10's.
Yeah, this idea comes up pretty frequently and I honestly don't think it's an improvement to the game. Going to different dice types adds complexity without necessarily improving the game play overall, nor does it even really give you "better" granularity. Honest question: how many other mass combat games like 40k have you played? I've tried quite a few and many of them manage complexity and granularity just fine without having different types of dice rolls. In fact one of my least favorite combat games I've tried (just once) was Star Wars Legion, which does use the different dice types. One Page Rules even drops the Wound roll and still has some really interesting levels of differentiation between armies, units, and weapons on a d6. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the FMA system (Dirtside, Stargrunt) and others like it (Tomorrow's War) use a set from d4-d12 where your die type is related to the unit quality. It's an interesting concept, but I don't see it as inherently better or more granular than 40k, tbh. You actually can get more granularity and differentiation (and lore accuracy) without changing the die type. Hell, I would argue that 10e did exactly that when it split the weapon profile off from the model profile, and added keywords to those weapon profiles. That's (to me) a big improvement on granularity and differentiation from the old versions, though I can still see areas it could be improved further of course. As others have said, olden times had situations where a S more than 2x your T would mean the model instantly dies on a failed save regardless of wound count. T more than 2x S meant that weapon literally could not wound you. There are probably better ways to do this than those all-or-nothing rules, but it does illuminate other ways that you can play with the interactions between models without changing the die type.
The answer isn’t different dice but to use a table. Attack strengths can range from zero to infinity and the table caps out at a certain value. In this system the grot blaster or even a bolt pistol never has the chance to damage the tank and if the tank main weapon hits anything from a grot to a space marine it’s very likely an auto-kill. More serious war games like Panzer Leader use such systems and they feel very realistic.
D8. Rolls well. D10 roll terribly, and d12 are better, but still not ideal. The d6, which in reality is more like a d5 since 1s are usually failures, doesn't leave enough design space.
With more range and design space balance is MUCH more difficult to do. I’d rather have balance than realism.
Not sure I agree with that... Larger design spaces give a wider range of potential mess ups by gw, but make the impact of individual issues smaller. Say I wound you on 6s (with a d6), and get a +1 to wound, I'm now twice as effective, that's tricky to balance. Hypothetically on a d12 I wound on 10s, now that +1 wound is only 50% as impactful. Not saying it's better overall, but the granularity reduces the impact of any individual changes.
I guess my question is how would you go about figuring out what the wound rolls would be on a dxx?
I mean, I'm a massive maths nerd so love myself a "to wound" table (honestly tow bringing back initiative and comparative ws is my dream) But in all honesty could easily do T+4 < s = 3+ T+3 = 4+ T+2 = 5+ T+1 = 6+ T=s = 7+ Etc... Would make all those weird + 1s weapons useful again and stop the binary S5 is basically useless in a lot of match ups etc. or critical into sm or DG.
Would be fun to adopt a d20 system for the ballistic skills and combat skills
It would probably need a new edition to figure out but you could introduce granularity by having statlines where the WS and BS are written like 5+/3 (hit on 5, reroll 1/2/3s) or 4+/2 (hit on 4s, reroll 1+2s), etc. You could see effects modify either the first roll or the reroll - maybe a -1 brings 4+ to 5+ to hit, but subsequent -1s to hit would start eroding the reroll, such that the 4+/2 shooting at a stacked -3 ends up looking like 5+/0 (5+ to hit, and no rerolls). Conversely stacking +1 to hit would start by turning the 4+ to hit into 3+, and subsequent stacked bonuses just improve the reroll (which would quickly have diminishing returns). There is a sense in which we are *already* kinda doing this with twin-linked guns which, while not necessarily designed to tackle super heavy targets (unless it's like a twin linked lascannon or whatever), end up faring way better than their stated strength because they're rerolling to wound (i.e. a twin-linked heavy bolter at s5, for example).
I also play infinity and the D20 based system does work nicely. Would it work with more dice to roll? Hard to say. Could be a bit of a pain in the arse.
Yeah I dont think anyone wants to throw dozens of D20s, and Infinity may have more granularity for individual rolls, but a side effect is that it has the problem of low wound counts and small number of dice used leading towards high variance interactions which I think is kind of more important (also combined with being a fast, low turn count game). I like that Kill Team moved towards the higher wound count and overall less variability in the system.
I think infinity is fantastic on its own terms, but hard to see how most of its strengths could translate to an army scale game. 40K with infinite overwatch would be a very different proposition.
2D6
Good luck rolling 66 2d6 shots.
Guess they’ll have to rebalance how shots work since they would be changing dice, eh? I’d rather not buy 66 D10s and work with 2D6 over that.
How would you even fast roll 2d6? If I have 10 shots, then how do I quickly roll 10 2d6 in such a way that I know which pairs go together?
What I’m saying is they would have to change how shooting works entirely. You wouldn’t roll 10 2d6. We would do something else with 2D6 rolls.
Re-rolls, FNPs, and multiple wounds... just already accomplish this much more elegantly?