I’ve played a lot of games.  From board games to table top wargames, to card games, and being involved in these hobbies and owning my own hobby game store for five years exposed me to an even wider range of games and consequently game mechanics.  Game mechanics are one of the things about creating a game that I really get excited about.

There is a science to creating good game mechanics and there is also some artistry to it.  Ensuring that the game has a flow, the mechanics make sense, and that they are not so archaic and byzantine that it takes a committee of lawyers and linguistics professors to understand them are all things that, if the game is doing them right, can almost become invisible to the players.  This is not a bad thing; the primary goal of any game should be that those who play it enjoy it, and if the brilliance of the mechanics is lost on the players so be it!

So, lets begin. Today I’m going to talk about a mechanical element of our new game Aggressor Recon that really gets me excited for you to play it.  Ten-sided dice.

Aggressor Recon uses 10-sided dice.  My primary bread and butter gaming experience has always been a tabletop wargame in the vein of Warhammer 40,000.  I’ve played more 40k games than I can remember.  Anyone that’s played it knows it uses the venerable six-sided cube dice.  The six sided die is simple, ubiquitous, and for me… boring.  I’ve also gone the other direction and played wargames like the original Warzone that used 20-sided dice, which if you’ve rolled one of those you know that it might just keep rolling and rolling and rolling until you land on a result, i.e. cumbersome over the course of a 2 hour game with hundreds of dice rolls.  In using a 10-sided system to build Aggressor, I think we’ve struck a nice balance between the two extremes.  Let’s explore why.

Firstly, flexibility and variety.  If I’m referring a player to a table and that table requires a roll to see a result I can have the player roll a single ten-sided die and have four additional results then they would rolling six (variety).  Now one could make the argument that you could have them roll two six-sided die but then you get into averages with whatever table result that lives on six or seven being the statistically more numerous result.  With a 10-sided dice system I can also allow for a greater range of success or failure and expand the range of unit characteristics (flexibility and variety).  Let’s couch this concept in terms of another game you might have played, 40k.  When shooting, a marine only misses on a one or a two and a guard misses on a one, two, or three.  In Aggressor Recon, though we can say an elite marine misses on a one or two, a regular marine misses on one, two, or three, an elite guard misses on one, two, three, or four, and a regular guard misses on one through five.  We’ve doubled the variety of unit types simply by changing the dice (which requires the same effort to roll a ten-sider as a six-sider by the way).

The second reason is the math.  The math is just simpler and why not just make it easy?  10 results on a die, each one representing 10% incrementally.  If a player has to roll 6 through 10 for a success then simply put, that’s five spots on the die and thus a 50% chance.  On a six-sided die a math averse player might have to back into the percentage using an extra step.  I need a four, five, or six to succeed.  That’s three results on a six-sided die; three is half of six and thus a 50% chance.  Please understand, I’m not trying to patronize the player base, but if this design decision helps even a small portion of players make a quicker calculation, isn’t it worth it?

Still not convinced?  How about the fact that a ten-sided die points in a certain direction when it lands on the table and stops rolling?  I’ve just eliminated the need for an additional die showing direction when attempting to randomize say… artillery fire?

Let us know what you think about dice mechanics on our forums.  This has been a blog post.  See you all again soon!   

Rob, the Notorious DEV