What are your thoughts on TTRPGs with non-standard dice?

[Parmandur]

Don't you? That sounds awfully like Daggerheart or PtbA or Spire.

What's the distinction you're making?

I mean Daggerheart has you roll two dice, no special dice, and the potential results are:

2 of the same number	Critical success
Beat DC and Hope die is higher	Yes and...
Beat DC and Fear die is higher	Yes but...
Failed DC but Hope die is higher	No but...
Failed DC but Fear die is higher	No and...

That seems like exactly the kind of 2-dimensional resolution you're explicitly saying ONLY funky dice can provide without "unacceptably slow" tables. Yet it's extremely fast lol.

Am I missing something? I guess your table technically has more gradiations but that seems like a minor difference of degree not a fundamental difference of functionality.

Now that table is a very interesting bit of convergent design evolution with the Plotweaver system the Stormlight Archives RPG is using, which gets a pretty similar spread of narrarive results by adding a d6 roll to a standard d20 test:

• Success and "Opportunity"
• Success and "Complication"
• Failure and "Opportunity"
• Failure and "Complication"
• Plain failure
• Plain success

Technically the d6 used is a funky die (which is why I got an extra set in the Kickstarter add-ons...), but the results table to just use a normal d6 is straight forward.

 

[Argyle King]

I'm just profoundly unconvinced that this actually produces as a better outcome than, I dunno, other systems. Slightly different? Perhaps but better?

One thing I don't hear is a lot of like, exceptional praise for Genesys. It's well-regarded but like, moderately so. It's definitely good to get away from a binary, but I'm not hearing anything that makes me think you gain anything remarkable here.

I don't have much time with Genesys. Even though it is the underlying generic version that was extracted from the Star Wars games, I think Edge remains a better game.

It's more than just one design choice that leads to the game being good. The dice are a big part of the experience, but they also work in conjunction with design choices concerning armor ("soak") and damage to create an overall good game.

As said earlier in the thread, I went into Edge of the Empire thinking that I wouldn't like it at all. After playing it, my opinion was the opposite; it remains one of the games that I enjoy the most.

 

[Cadence]

I mean, aside from the d10, those others are anciently recognized geometric set of 3 dimensional symmetrical shapes: all the other weird dice shapes (including the d10) are weird kludges.

Just because they aren't Platonic solids doesn't mean all of the others are totally weird cludges - the Catalan solids are still mathematically a thing. The d24 shape naturally occurs in copper and fluorite crystals and is a Kleetope too (which no one probably cares about, but the name seems amusing).

Tetrakis hexahedron - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Parmandur]

Just because they aren't Platonic solids doesn't mean all of the others are totally weird cludges - the Catalan solids are still mathematically a thing. The d24 shape naturally occurs in copper and fluorite crystals and is a Kleetope too (which no one probably cares about, but the name seems amusing).

Tetrakis hexahedron - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Touché.