Tracking dice pool system for Combat

Creators & Designers
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Hey All!

Tell me if you think this would too complicated/too simple, not intuitive, not fun… and if you have thoughts/contributions on it. Hopefully it makes sense the way I share it:

  1. D4, d6, d8, d10, and d12 are used for this system. Not sure about a d20.
  2. Each combat, there is an attacker and a defender, once that is resolved, the original defender retaliates, switching roles becoming the attacker. That combat is then over.
  3. The attacker has 1 or more attack dice, rolling them all, keeping the highest value.
  4. The defender rolls their Stamina die (starts at a d12 representing their energy to dodge/withstand attacks) AND Armor dice together, keeping the highest value (might be a d4 for a shield and a d6 for some chainmail)
  5. If the attacker’s highest => the defenders highest, the attacker hits!
  6. If the attacker’s value is double the defenders, they hit twice, triple, 3 times, and so on.
  7. Starting with the defenders armor die, it is stepped down for each hit, being destroyed if hit at a d4. Then the stamina die gets hit, the defender dying if hit at a d4.
  8. Multiple attackers are rolled as a pool, keeping the highest.
  9. Melee defenders can’t retaliate against ranged attackers, and ranged defenders can’t retaliate against melee attackers.
  10. If a comrad is attacked and you’re in the same area, you can join the retaliation.
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After reading this I’m wondering what sort of game it’s for. Is it a dungeon crawler or more of a skirmish game? Some kind of hybrid?

Actually, I guess what I want to say is that your combat system has me intrigued to learn more about your game. Which is a good sign.

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A good sign indeed!

Right now it’s for a semi-coop/solo dungeon crawl with the working title “deck trap dungeon.”

But the reality is that, after designing games for decades I have tons of mechanics lying around like spare parts that could be used for anything.

It’s a pleasure to share and talk shop on this forum!

Daniel has had a huge influence on my design direction in terms of simplicity and fun.

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4

Hard to say how it will play out without testing it, but my first thought about potential issues is that it might put off people who dislike randomness. Sometimes you’re just going to roll a 1 on that stamina die on your first defense, or on your stam and armor. But I think people who dislike randomness may already avoid dice games anyway… So maybe that’s not a real concern. :smile: I might consider putting a cap on that multiplier though. 1s on defense could be brutal.

I like the decreasing dice sizes as a mechanic. Ker Nethalas and Salvage & Sorcery both used this for tracking certain things and I liked it in both.

As for complexity… I should say that I’m rarely put off by complicated systems or fiddly tracking. So you’ll probably want someone else’s opinion here. But it doesn’t sound like it’s too much to me.

And as an aside, my wife always says that we can’t play semi-coop because we’re too mean and no one ever wins. :laughing: We still try though.

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Yeah not many people like semi-coop games, but the experiece of my fiends stealing all the loot I worked hard for in diablo 2 as a kid really did something for me lol. I love cutthtoat caverns the board game.

I agree, the randomness could be brutal, but the design was intended:

  1. To resolve situations in as few dice rolls as possible.
  2. To keep book keeping to a minimum (avoid traditional hp tracking)
  3. To make it possible, however unlikely, to always be able to win. To face a very tough enemy who rolls 2d12 for stamina and armor and you roll 1d6 to attack and hit them for 6! That would be quite the story!
  4. To not need traditional modifiers (2d6 +4) etc.
  5. To avoid math as much as possible.

Also, “deck trap dungeon” is looking to be a roguelike where characters die frequently.

I call the genre a “loot and scoot” where youre invading a dungeon, pushing your luck to get better stuff, then running for your life. Not meant be a hero.

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Ah, you’ve got me thinking back to my adolescent days playing MUDs (text-based MMOs, if you aren’t familiar). There was one set up a lot like WoW, but low level players could kill high level ones if they were patient enough. And while you were unlikely to keep their gear because of retaliation, you could throw it all on the ground and sacrifice it to oblivion. So mean.

But it sounds like the potential of that multiplier is doing exactly what you want it to do. And each hit is a single damage in order to simplify the math.

My next thought is that if it’s supposed to resolve quickly with as few dice rolls as possible, are the dice used for hit rolls high enough (compared to defense dice) to not get stuck rolling missed attacks repeatedly, back-and-forth on both sides of the combat? Obviously, “too much” will be very subjective… And I don’t really know all the variables for the combat system. I’m just trying to play devil’s advocate for you to bounce ideas off of.

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Combining dice pools and polyhedral dice sounds great to me, two of my favourite things.

I’d cap the “triple causes three wounds, etc…” rule at two personally.

There’s plenty of scope to add in special gear to manage the randomness. Like a magic sword of re-rolling or whatever.

I actually logged in today to ask about kid friendly dungeon crawls using polyhedral dice, this sounds like the sort of thing I’d buy into.

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The only potential issue that jumps out at me is dice management - how many full sets of dice are needed to play? And how to track them - e.g. D10 attack, D6 defence, D4 helmet, D4 shield, D8 armour, D10 health, etc. Vs. a 2D12 monster could be hard to keep track of without a slick character sheet

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No No I’m grateful! This is just the kind of conversation I’m itching for. Obviously there is a lot to this game as it stands that I’m leaving out to just talk about the dice mechanics so I’ll elaborate a little bit.

The original conception for the game, was presenting the players with constant choices of working together, or being selfish. Enemies don’t necessarily attack each turn (you draw chits from a bag sort of like clank! to see if they ambush you), but there is always a chance that they will attack YOU or the other players. So do you go for the enemy while your friends are searching for loot? or do you put it off, hoping to not bump into any bad guys, or do you convince another player to that you’re going to go for it, and that you need help, but then ditch them so they hopefully beat the enemy while you find loot. So it isn’t a “enters combat, goes on forever because you roll misses over and over” situation, it is a “I’m going to try to deal with this… fail? alright either someone needs to help me next round or I’m not dealing with it” Does that make sense? You as a player choose whether to do combat, or something else, each round. “Enemy attacks” are almost an event that you draw, and choosing to attack an enemy “clearing its lair” is a choice. There will arise situations where, you’re just not going to have very good odds of defeating an enemy, and you’ll go searching for a better weapon, risking random attacks each round you explore and fending them off.

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This is actually a concern of mine.

Right now, I’m thinking that each color of die corresponds to a certain thing, (e.g. attack, stamina, armor, light, food, etc.) So it is possible to roll Armor, stamina, and attack together, or food and light together, and not get them confused.

So at the very least, a few sets of each size, IN EACH COLOR.

When it comes to monsters, they are mostly represented by cards that are never moved on the board, sort of “ever present wandering monsters” once revealed. Just their stamina and armor would need to be tracked for the most part.

So either I’m going to need a TON of poly dice so that a board full of monsters can have their health tracked OR…

Since there are potentially 6 poly dice, I could use mini d6s to track which each one should be set to when doing the actual rolls. (e.g. a 1 = d4, 2 = d6, 6 = d20) and just place corresponding d6s on each enemy, and have each player have just a little card with spots for the dice to sit (or slots if I was being fancy).

So in the case of a 2d12 monster, they would have 2 “Stamina” d6s set to 6.

Or just little boxes with dry erase potential?

Personally I like the idea of having just a few poly dice of each color that allows for complex resolutions in a roll, and using mini d6s… but it might feel fiddly on the board? I’m not sure. Again, nothing needs to be moved once a card is placed/drawn until it is removed.

Suggestions welcome!

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Ah, ok, so whether or not to engage in combat is sort of a strategic choice each round. With a meta-game involving other players at the table. And I think this is where I like semi-coop a bit better. Games like Nemesis or Sea of Legends force you into conflict with the other players, and you know it’s coming, so you never trust them and end up working to make sure you tank their game whenever it’s convenient. But I backed Pandora Celeste because betraying other players or working against them looks much more like a personal choice during the game rather than a forced and inevitable one. And I’ve got high hopes for this sort of semi-coop working better for us. Because if myself and my wife are both at the table playing Nemesis (in semi-coop mode), I guarantee you that no one is going to win that game. But if we can choose to work together the whole time and still succeed, even if backstabbing is an option or personal short-cut, we’re not nearly as likely to do it.

But yeah, this sounds like you’re achieving what you want with your dice mechanics here. And it also sounds like a fun system to play with. I’m certainly interested in it.

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I think I’d be worried about players having to translate the sides of a D6 into other dice values.

Have you thought about dials? Or tracking boards listing all possible stamina amounts, with a marker cube to place on the current tier? I assume the chain always the same, like 2D12 > D12 > D10 > D8 > D6 > D4 > Death with each hit? Then you’d just move the marker as stamina got drained. But you’d need a board to cover every potential enemy that could be out at one time. That might end up more pricey than dice eventually?

You could also use colors to differentiate between monsters, so each had a different colored cube designated to it. And one big board with the dice chain listed in over-sized spaces. And all the monsters could have their cubes tracked on that board. So component-wise it would be a single board and three marker cubes of unique color per potential monster on the board. One cube to mark the monster, and the other two to mark stamina and armor position. And something to differentiate the stamina cube from the armor cube…

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I felt worried about players translating the sides of a d6 to other dice values, but I thought “double it!” 2 = d4, 3 = d6… 6 = d12 didn’t seem terrible.

I’ve been racking my brain thinking about all the different ways to do this, and limit components as much as possible.

The chain IS always the same, but for each die (i.e. 2d12 is actually 2 d12s, and each one is stepped down independently for each hit, so the first hit would turn 2d12 into 1d12 and 1d10… and so on.

One piece of information I left out, was that the board is always a 6x6 grid of cards, so to your point, in theory, I could have a board with little cube holes for each step, and put colored cubes (corresponding to stamina or armor) matching the coordinate on the grid of cards. So if an enemy card with all its rules was at 2x3, you could have some cubes plugged into the tracker board at 2x3. It would take a little bit of extra referencing (shrug).

Again, grateful for the input. I’m trying to make the game’s UI as easy as possible, keeping things as tight as possible, and still achieving certain experiences. Ideally taking up a small footprint and easy and quick to set up. All of these considerations will inform the final design.

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Would it be possible to increase the size of the 6x6 card board and have cube counters down the sides, next to each card? That would have all the stats right there for each enemy. And maybe lower the amount of components too. That would be 3 cubes for each enemy for 18 total? 2 stamina tracks and an armor track added to your boards. But if you use small cubes (thinking like Awaken Realms’ little red ones) those tracks could probably be the same length as the card slot and only add a bit of width to each enemy’s spot on the board.\

Edit: That’s assuming we’re talking poker-sized cards.

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We are talking poker sized cards and that is a pretty good idea.

You wouldn’t even need different “tracks” for the types of dice, just something for tracking the size, and use different color cubes to represent the type of die (stamina/armor etc). Then you would just need to make sure that you have enough holes for the cubes so that you can have multiple dXs of the same/different varieties.

If the 6x6 board was 3.5" by 3.5" and you have 1" x 3.5" space for all of that in addition to the 2.5x3.5 inch card… that’s plenty of space and it’s only a 21" board, pretty small.

Though I still wonder why not just use colored 12mm dice as trackers. Game crafter charges about 18 cents per 12 mm “cube” (about the same for 10/8) and 31-61 cents for a 12 mm die depending on its style. I wonder if the custom crafted “board” would end up eating any savings, or might provide a solid asset to make the game more enjoyable or allow additional markers to be used in ways I just haven’t thought of yet.

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Yeah, that’s something I don’t really have any experience with. Figuring out the most cost-effective way to put your components together. :smiley:

But you could totally hand-draw a prototype of alternate styles on a piece of paper and just test it out that way. See what feels best.

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Looks like I’m going to be ordering some dice and cubes sometime soon lol!

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