Buckets of dice rules ?

[Vermis]

back to the 70's we go

Not me; was never there the fist time!

Okay, I admit I thought cards could make a good mechanic, back when I still thought Malifaux was an interesting system. Thinking about it in the last five minutes, not so sure anymore. Looking up Dead Man's Hand, fr'instance: besides activation the cards seem to be essentially 'magic spells' to cast on your cowboy models, rather than result modifiers. Blergh.

[Funghy-Fipps]

In my personal experience buckets of dice = hellishly long games (it's what killed WHFB for me. I seriously have better things to be doing than spending five hours straight playing a tabletop game) and chipped miniatures. Those who've read my ravings elsewhere on this forum or on my blog will know that I'm an indie gamer and indie games tend to rely on commonsense and simplicity when it come to mechanics. Just look at sets like 'Crom' or 'Mayhem' and try and tell me that a buckets of dice-style game can be anywhere near as intuitive. It can't because there are far too many variables involved for the average human to appreciate. I also feel (like Scurv) that the additional time it takes to roll handfuls of dice and then pick through them etcetera disrupts the flow of a game and is frankly bloody tedious. I guess some people just like rolling dice...

a thousand tweaks and traits are just as stupid as a bucket of 90 dice.

As Duncan pointed out, this is essentially what happened with SoBaH which, if you have all the supplements, has about 100 different 'abilities'. This is a prime example of an incredibly simple system over-relying on special rules to add flavour. Obviously there is a fine-line between too much mechanics and too few!

[Funghy-Fipps]

As an example, one of my friends is an Ork player. His squads are 30 strong. Their ranged weapons are Assault 3 which means h he get's to roll 3 dice for each model in that unit. 90 dice!!! For one roll!!! (we don't even have that many dice so he has to roll several lots) And for any that hit he then has to roll to wound!Then for any that wound his opponent has to make saving throw's. It can take upwards of five minutes to resolve one unit's shooting.

That is truly retarded. I would actually rather give up gaming than have to regularly jump through such hoops. I feel your pain Diakon!

[Diakon]

That is truly retarded. I would actually rather give up gaming than have to regularly jump through such hoops. I feel your pain Diakon!

Thanks for the sympathy. 

I also feel (like Scurv) that the additional time it takes to roll handfuls of dice and then pick through them etcetera disrupts the flow of a game and is frankly bloody tedious. I guess some people just like rolling dice...

Yeah, and also related to my previous example. Picking out 5's and 6's from that many dice is just ridiculously hard on the eyes. All the dots just bleed into each other.

[Diakon]

Also, I finally managed to play my first game of IHMN last night and it was really fun. Okay, the modifiers were a bit of a pain to work out but towards the end of the game I was pretty much on top of it. The only real thing that slowed us down was lack of experience. Think I'm gonna enjoy this one. 

try this  LINK

I already knew about this but I got the IHMN rulebook for my birthday. I'm really into VSF and have a small, growing collection of figs. Enough to make 2 companies anyway (including my old west figs as a US company I call, The Bureau) so was quite easy to talk a few people into playing it. 

[Andrew May]

How many people do you think play WH/40k because its a good ruleset? 

[Andrew May]

Exactly, they think that they're good rulesets but that's not why they're playing them....

[Westfalia Chris]

They are bloody awful Andy, but I put to you almost everyone playing them does think its a good set of rules. Mainly because they have not seen any different.

The worrying thing is, these huge player base games create rules conventions that then hang about like a bad smell for decades weather they are a good idea or not.

For an example I throw up the humble hit point increasing as the character levels up. Before D&D there were no hit points. Now try playing anything on the board table or comp that does not have them in it and does not have them increasing as the being 'levels' up.

Fundamentally the hit point is poor mechanic for modeling damage. Especially if there is no degradation in performance as they reduce. Yet its taken as gospel these days thats how its done.

Hear, hear. I actually do enjoy the rules from time to time, but miss 2nd edition - these did make much better use of the fundamental mechanics than anything thereafter. Still doesn't detract from a) the fact that melee is grossly overpowered and b) the extremely swingy gameplay due to (poorly) balanced different factions.

Also, the purported simplicity of the 3rd ed rules (and following) is a myth, IMHO, as damage allocation and melee rules seem awfully complicated in any edition since 2nd, regardless of the concept used (in addition, they scale up very poorly as noted before).

IMHO, the current one actually works quite well but doesn't overcome the fundamental heavy-handedness of the system and its mismatch of mechanisms and game scale. Also, the ridiculous amount of special rules just freaks me out. Good idea, but by Jove, it's cumbersome.

I've recently taken a liking to the Showdown rules by Pinnacle. Not half bad, although I remember The Great Rail Wars to be less fiddly (and some stuff like armour effects is painfully unbalanced unless you introduce your own guidelines).

Also, to get this thread off the GW Bashwagon trail, does anyone remember the Void 1.0 and 1.1 rules? They worked similarly to the Warhammer structure, but used D10s and alternate activation, which in my recollection made for an interesting and rounded game (not that a D10 by itself gives a much better bell curve than a D6, but the interaction of factors IMHO benefitted from the larger range of results).

[Andrew May]

Oh, I wasn't bashing GW. Whereas the rules may be unwieldy, as a kid I thought the fluff was the best thing since sliced bread. I'd pour over the books constantly, my favourite was "Waaagh the Orks", there wasn't even any rules in it!! That's a big reason why it's folks favourite rules, that and the models themselves it all goes hand in hand.
 
Anyway aside from that matter, I've given the subject some thought myself and decided that, yes I like rolling dice. Maybe not 90 dice for a a squad shooting (never mind the saves and armour!) but I do like the back and forth. I personally do feel more excitement rolling 20 dice between me and my opponent to get an eventual 5 "kills" than rolling 4 and "losing" 1 for the same result.

[Diakon]

You got a link for Warengine, Scurv? Did a quick google but the rules site couldn't load. I'm intrigued.

[eilif]

Void was a solid rules set. If I played squad scale these days I would consider it for my rules.

One game that I think got it right was warengine. Paul's views on it differ to mine but as far as I am concerned it had a nice solid little system that was easy to pick up and gave a good feel. I think it was what SOBAH was based on....

...the other thing is I cannot think of any other game where I would roll 90 dice several times to possibly get no result. In warengine it was possible to roll about 40 dice total in an attack if you chaps had auto plasma bazookas or some other horrific weapon of maxi death but about 20 was the average. 10 guys in a squad with roll 2 dice keep 2 dice weapons. The big difference was the scale of the armies and it was one opposed roll to get the result. The armies scaled to original rogue trader sized stuff and although overall there would be about 20 to 40 dice rolled they would be in a bunch of individual rolls so no more than about 5 dice rolled at one time. It was fast, fun and rather realistic feeling to me anyway.

...The rules are free to download and I would strongly advise any budding rules writer or fan of rules to check them out.

Warengine is an excellent ruleset and I agree that it does a great job of capturing the feel of the 40k universe. This is especially true in that it seems to emphasisze CC and Ranged combat in roughly the same proportion as 40k, while managing to have more tactical options and still have far fewer rules.  It's only drawback for 40k fans is that it doesn't handle any but the lightest of vehicles. It's definitely worth joining the yahoo group

However, if SOBAH stands for Song of Blades and Heroes (SBH), I should point out that the two games are absolutely nothing alike.  I also love SBH, but it's the polar opposite in terms of mechanics and dice throwing.  You never roll more than 3 dice, and only one for combat, but IMHO, it works well with the 1v1 combat that SBH emphasizes.

I do tend to like to roll more dice if there are more figures involved, but in the end, the main things I look for in rulestes is simplicity and streamlining. and my experience is that it can be found in games with fistfulls of dice (Kings of War, WarEngine) or just a couple (SBH, Panzer 8 Sci-Fi).

[Lowtardog]

Now I age WFB, WAB etc can be a pain with the buckets of dice. However the best games were using Dark ages armies in WAB with shieldwall and Age of arthur, the characters and traits did make for cracking games where SAGA and Dux dont give that feel of shieldwalls clashing.

On the flip side I had a large hundred years war army where the massed archers saw literally hundred of dice being throwing whihc did bog down (we played 3000 point games)

[Conquistador]

Based on a few real life fights and the possibly useful SCA/re-creationist styles of combat I have seen melee is short, brutish, and nasty.  Three rounds of massive dice rolling doesn't capture that. 

Gracias,

Glenn

[Conquistador]

For a feel of arrow versus armor, black powder shooting, and melee I think MOTW (Matchlocks on the Warpath) did a good job of capturing the feel of combat in an age before Colt/Maxim changed the dynamics.

Gracias,

Glenn

[Hobbit]

A little late to the conversation...

Personally I like Black Powder/Hail Caesar/Pike & Shot - I'd describe them as a "limited BoD" approach (a maximum of 9 dice for any given attack). I've known people who detest systems that involve saving throws, but who insist on tank games using a roll to penetrate the target's armour; surely a saving throw but by another name. I also wholeheartedly agree with the comment posted earlier that saving throws, or the like, exist to make the combat process more interactive; the defending player has (or has the illusion that) the fate of their unit is never entirely out of their hands.

I've played "single" die roll games - some of the old WRG systems spring to mind - but they usually involved tediously enormous look-up tables of factors and the end results were usually so limited in variation that there was actually little point in rolling the die at all.

My experience with "limited BoD" is that you usually get a reasonably average result BUT you can occasionally get extreme results - but then history is repleat with "occasional" extreme results (if that is not a contradiction :-)).