Design & Development: Simplifying dice pools

[Pants]

I've never had that kind of problem. The dice rolling is the most exciting part of our sessions usually.

And won't that system eliminate the really low rolls? Those always really get my players fired up when I have a real crap roll on something that does big damage.

Oh yes, it would remove some of the excitement, but I could see where such a system might be useful.

I'm not endorsing it or anything, just pointing out a different viewpoint.

 

[Wik]

You know, I think it's a good idea. But then, I'm weird. Anything to speed up play if aces by me - I'm not a huge fan of dice rolling in any situation. Really, if you use average damage for even half the dice, and roll the other half, it'll speed things up without messing with the results too much.

Instead of rolling 20d6, why not roll 10d6 and add 35? Hell, why not roll 5d6 and add 52? I personally think it just makes things SO much more easier.

Dice rolling gets boring, quickly. We once played Axis and Allies in the later stretch of the game, with 40 odd infantry on each end. Each round took a good five minutes to resolve - and there was no ADDING there, just counting the 1s you rolled. I could imagine how painful something like this would be at a D&D table.

"Alright, um... you hit for..... uh.... what's 23 plus 38? 61? Alright, yeah, you hit the Giant for 61 points of damage. And the giant, uh, he swings.... and hits you for... hey, can I borrow 6d12 from you? Thanks.... yeah, he hits for.... uh.... 125 damage. Um... where were we again?"

 

[Imruphel]

I've been using average damage for years as a DM and I also give my players the option of doing it.

We drop it for exciting moments but otherwise use it to speed up play.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

But looking at the chart and seeing simplifications for 5d6? This may come off as insulting but if you can't add 5d6 quickly you are probably going to have a lot more problems DM'ing 3e than dice rolling.

One thing I do is to group my dice into 10s to make counting them faster.

Also, with my melee death machine, with lots of situational modifiers, I add in all the modifiers before it's my turn, so when it *is* my turn, I can do it pretty fast. "Smite, Divine Power, Feat of Strength, Rage, Divine Wrath, Power Attack all of it, so that's 3d6+73." This isn't quite as fast when, say, the situation changes right before you go, but that doesn't happen that often.

Brad

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Dice rolling gets boring, quickly.

It does? This is a dice game at heart. I love rolling dice and the anticipation of what result I will get.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It does? This is a dice game at heart.

Different strokes for different folks. Me, if I want to roll a lot of dice, I'll play Yahtzee.

 

[Thomas Percy]

Noonan done a lot of work to show D&D is too complicated.
These easy to use sheets are not easy to use for me... everything is easy until you don't see all these small fonts "add +1 for dodge", "defensive stance adds +2etc." and you must do all this maths again.
In my opinion every designer who design something like "Your BAB becomes equal to your character level (which may give you additional attacks), you gain a +6 enhancement bonus to Strength, and you gain 1 temporary hit point per CL" should be fired.
It's good for computer games only (for me of course, because I'm not good at maths).

 

[Thomas Percy]

I love the idea of "dice simplifications", especially this done by MerricB. I will use it. Thanks.

 

[delericho]

I'm torn by this suggestion. On the one hand, even if you can add quickly you probably can't do it instantaneously, and so if you have to add lots of dice often it will slow the game down (unless you use an electronic dice roller, but I'm also sceptical of the randomness of these). Plus, the more dice you roll in a given pool, the less likely it becomes that you will roll really high or really low.

On the other hand, rolling 20d6 for damage is really cool, and those rare occasions where you do get the unlikely rolls tend to be very exciting. On reading the suggestion, something in me just rebelled.

For a high-level one-shot game, and especially if I'm expecting inexperienced players (or don't know), I think that the suggestions in that article match what I would do very closely (and I'm very impressed by the ability to fit 20th level characters on one side of a sheet of paper). For campaign play, I might use something like that... for NPCs. I think, perhaps, players get more of a kick out of rolling lots of dice than DMs, and it's also the case that they have far fewer dice rolls to make.

One other possibility springs to mind: instead of simplifying the rolls by using a two-thirds-constanr/one-third-rolled, there's no reason you couldn't develop a set of look-up tables for the big dice pools. For each pool, work out six possible reasults of varying lethality, and then roll 1d6 to index into the table. (So, if the dice pool was 10d6, the values could be 15, 27, 33, 37, 43, 55. Obviously, the numbers would need to be tweaked to better represent actual probabilities, as opposed to my current generation scheme of pulling them out of thin air.)

 

[MerricB]

I love the idea of "dice simplifications", especially this done by MerricB. I will use it. Thanks.

Hope you find it actually works.

I have some players that are exceedingly slow at adding up. One will be using a PDA, but everyone else can use this system.

Cheers!