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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9731434" data-attributes="member: 18">Personally funky dice are a hard red line for me. A couple of reasons for this:1) No king rules forever, and most don't rule very long at all. I've often played RPGs 10 or more years after they were published, and had a good time, and if a game is designed around funky dice, it makes it that insanely harder to do. Plus, stockists just often don't have the funky dice even for newer games!I experienced this recently with a game from less than two years ago, which didn't hard-require but strongly suggested funky dice. I thought "What the heck, how much can some dice cost, $10?". Turned out cost wasn't the issue. Literally no RPG or dice store or Amazon or similar being able to sell me even a single one of those dice was!I later found a person on eBay selling a small number of them (not enough to play the game really) for like, 10x as much as normal dice would cost + surprisingly insane shipping + it would take weeks.2) Most "funky dice" games don't actually need funky dice to do what they're doing, and often are not even more efficient. In the most extreme cases, it's clearly just a way to force people to spend more money and get more locked into their ecosystem (looking at you, FFG). I get that there can be situations where they would theoretically be beneficial, but even then, I think any designer thinking of going that way for non-cynical reasons should stop and ask - "Is it worth it? Will most people buying this RPG thank me for this decision once they play it?". It's definitely a barrier to entry and the long-term survival of an RPG, and also means that even if it really benefits, but doesn't come with the dice, people are likely to have a worse first-play experience than intended and less likely to keep playing! That's a lot of extra risk to pile on your RPG, an already-risky product!Most games at least have a translation table for non-funky dice, but with some it's complicated enough that it's not really worth it, so in a world where there are literally thousands of at least decent RPGs, maybe just play one that's easier to play?I mind cards a bit less so long as you can get them on PDF, because I've printed and cut cards from cardstock before. It's not great, but it prevents it being a hard red line. Especially if they game doesn't actually need them need them (like 4E and DH don't actually need them, they're just fun).With weirdly-sized dice i.e. d24s etc. I don't loathe them but it feels like a cheap gimmick to try and get nostalgia points for me. The only odd die my main group really enjoyed in the last ten years was me bringing out non-foot-hurting d4s recently! One of the players said it couldn't be done, and proceeded to stomp barefoot on one before accepting that indeed, these were basically safe!</blockquote>

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