Dice Like No Other
By The Warden
You really have to give it to Evil Hat Productions and everything they touch. Simply from a marketing standpoint – and maybe an awards standpoint and a business model standpoint – they are perhaps the ultimate success story for independent publishers out there. And I don’t just mean those still struggling to make their games known and have actual staff and an office, I’m talking about those of us sitting at home using a spare bedroom for an office. That’s exactly what Fred Hicks does and he’s combined it with a jealously healthy dose of stay-at-home dad. It’s the dream for everyone pouring their souls into the latest extension of roleplaying games everywhere, the equivalent of a 10-year old boy inheriting a toy store.
For proof, look at their latest exploding Kickstarter project, Fate Core, and the case is closed. As I write this very sentence, it’s sitting at $141,000+ with 47 days to go. This is a project combining instant rewards (pitch in at least $1 and you’re automatically able to download the text-only PDF) to long term goals (such as their latest stretch goal, Shadows of the Century, slated for release in 2013/2014). Or remember their award for Best Publisher at this year’s ENnies when they didn’t have a product released that year.
Beyond the Fudge dice and its mighty plus symbols!!
Powering their work and the FATE Core project, of course, is the FATE System, itself a derivative of FUDGE and powered by their FUDGE dice, an ordinary 6-sider adorned with pluses, minuses, and blank faces. It’s a simple system: roll four FUDGE dice and count up all the pluses, subtract the minuses, add up any related skill bonus, and you have your total. Obviously, there’s more to this system (or else there’s about 300 pages of wasted material), but that’s the core of its resolution and it brings us to today’s topic: unique dice.
There are a few games out there who found a clever cheat to a common independent trait: building RPGs using other sources of resolution than dice. Instead of creating games using ordinary playing cards, Jenga, or hand symbols (i.e. rock, paper, scissors), they turned to dice like all the big boys and changed the values of the dice or stretched the number of sides to untraditional directions.
IT’S ALL IN THE SIGNATURE
A collection of dice you’ll need to play the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.
The Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games is the latest and biggest game to specifically incorporate what’s known as Zocchi dice, such as the d3, d5, d7, d14 and more. If non-gamers look at a d10 or d20 as unusual, we gamers look at the d3 as a freak worthy of collection and starting conversations at conventions, much like a comic book fan earns the title when they place a Spider-Man bust on their desk or bedside table. Just like FATE or FUDGE, conversion rules for using traditional roleplaying dice are provided, yet these games are clearly intended and best played as directed with the suggested tools.
So what benefit is there to requiring dice-dependent players to purchase additional dice? It’s a signature. You know exactly what game you’re playing as soon as you see the dice. I’ve never been able to play the DCC RPG, but if I walked into a game room or past a table at a convention and saw those suckers rolling across the wood, my first guess would be DCC.
It can be a risky proposition to expect such a purchase of your potential market unless you have the resources to tout your experience and build such a game with an existing fan base who trusts you or tap into any existing system and take it to new levels, as Evil Hat did. FUDGE dice are now so common on many dice retailing websites and Kickstarter projects building dice that they’re listed right there with the d20s. One project I’ve backed in particular, Dice Rings, offered a FUDGE version of their product from the very get-go.
STEPPING IT UP A NOTCH… BAM!!
Signature aside, is it worth the effort to build such games? Personally, I’d say it varies. It’s incredibly easy to use unique dice simply as a feature or a “fun twist” of chart-oppressed, hardcore technical RPGs, but when used wisely yields extremely positive results. Once you’ve played any FUDGE or FATE game, it’s easy to agree those dice are essential to meet the game’s style and function. You could use ordinary d6s from your grandparent’s old board games at the cottage, but it does make things a little bit clunky at times and I’m never fond of converting the die’s value into something else. Was the 3 turned into a 2 or a 1? Visually speaking, it’s a remarkably efficient way to allow for dice pools and near instant success recognition. If you see a poopload of “+” on your dice, you’ve done good. Then you count the total.
Zocchi dice provide a very effective device for dice stepping, a common tactic for systems in which a character’s strength and training in a particular ability or skill is measured in dice. Using the standard dice pool, the only one available after the d12 is a d20, increasing the numerical range by 8 points. That’s large gap and the reason why many dice pool games never break out the d20. If you had something like a d14 and a d18 in the mix, you can easily climb your way using a more natural progression.
The only other method is to increase the number of dice at higher steps, as it is in the Earthdawn RPG. These steps provide a number of dice from a single d6 at Step 4 to 1d12+2d6 at Step 15, all the way to Step 40’s 5d12+2d10. Offering Zocchi dice instead allows each step to continue providing a natural 1 on the die, something dice pool steps may not provide. Earthdawn‘s Step 40 sets the bar at 7 for the lowest possible roll and that becomes remarkably improbable by that point. I have to admit when I first thought about using these dice, it felt more like a huge gimmick (and an incredibly effective one, don’t get me wrong) until recently. Now I have to confess it’s a rather ingenious solution I’d consider trying out in a future design. I am a dice nut, after all.
It allows the game to provide critical failures and DCC does it in spades by providing an intense list of hindrances and penalties when you roll critical failures in different circumstances, including spellcasting. While the chances of gaining those failures decrease with time, they remain an ever present visual cue of the risks your character takes in the game. Since Dungeon Crawl Classics is very old school-inspired, they wanted a game where heroes were made great by surviving near impossible odds by climbing to the top of a heap of dead bodies into eternal lore. Without these dice, there is no way to bridge the d20 gap while keeping the d20 in a game that’s clearly influenced by the first iteration of Dungeons & Dragons and they’re used to maximum efficiency.
NO LONGER UNCOMMON?
When I first started writing this piece, I referred to these dice as “unusual” and “uncommon” because of my own influences and that of my generation, but the term “uncommon” doesn’t apply as much as it used to. Many successful board games use unique dice as one of their signatures. If anything, it could be said that Fantasy Flight Games makes the entire concept of unique dice a signature of their entire product line. Their board games are stocked to the gills with unique figures, boards, cards, fold-ups, tokens, and playing pieces that using good old-fashioned d6s would be a slap in the face. And it’s carried into their new Star Wars RPG, Edge of the Empire. Even my all-time favourite childhood board game, HeroQuest, featured unique 6-sided dice with skulls and shields (along with the traditional d6s for movement).
Oh, and it goes deeper. Basic board game style editions of RPGs like D&D broke down the different dice shapes into colours and told young players to roll the “red die” to broker the learning curve and help new players connect the colour with the shape before they move into “grown-up D&D.” Other common board games simply refer to the absolute basic 6-sided die as “the red die.” It may not seem like much, but it demonstrates the incredible variety dice offer a roleplaying game beyond mere numbers for the sheer fact that it’s perhaps the best form of a portable randomizer we have. It’s been around for thousands of years around the world and modern technology has simply broken it down into a mathematical formula as a substitute, but they remain the basis for randomization around the world.
I feel shame to think that I forgot about the die’s influence in my gaming career and fell into believing the only ones that mattered were my precious d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20 with the occasional d10 inside of another d10 for laughs. And I call myself a dice geek. I should be ashamed.
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