What say you kids of the forum, you think that a new version of X-wing without Def Dice?

They do seem to be the most hated part of the game. Darn green dice.

It'd require a fair bit of rebalancing. You'd have to readjust hit point values for the different defensive options. You'd have to revamp Attack Dice to interact with the new mechanic (Similar to how Armada's dice can disable defensive tokens). The Focus, Evade, and Cloak actions would all need to be completely redesigned.

You'd have to introduce defensive tokens/actions that are different enough from each other. You could to some extent port the ones from Armada but instead of getting evade tokens, maybe you'd take the Brace action to get a Brace token, etc.

are you peeking into my **** dreams now?

I don't see this happening as Xwing is a tactical squad comatose game where ships move and dodge fire. In armada it's more about how accurate your firing is and a chance to respond to an incoming barrage.

I could see it, potentially by having the agility value deduct attack dice for some other effect for elusiveness. For example, baseline Agility of 2 yields no attack bonus. 3 would subtract 1, 4 subtract 2. Agility 1 would add one, agility zero would add 2. Additional modifiers for range, plus potentially defensive maneuvers. Maybe the evade action deducts dice from one/all attacks, for example.

It could definitely be worked; the question is whether or not FFG sees that as something that would improve the game. I don't know that I see that as inherently true.

Taking out green dice sounds too much like Armada.

I love the green dice. They bring excitement, unexpectedness, chaos, and craziness to the game. Nothing is certain. Living on the edge...

#GreenDice4Lyfe

Taking out green dice sounds too much like Armada.

I love the green dice. They bring excitement, unexpectedness, chaos, and craziness to the game. Nothing is certain. Living on the edge...

#GreenDice4Lyfe

I agree...while I love Armada, I enjoy that X-wing is different. You want diceless, play Chess. Sure the dice can screw you, but i've seen some super fun, laugh-out-loud games because of those crazy green dice.

for X-wing, I'd much rather see a Warmachine implementation where green dice are replaced by a system that separates accuracy and damage

In Warmachine, you take your relevant attack stat (RAT for ranged, MAT for melee) and roll 2d6. If you meet or beat the enemy's DEF, you hit it.

Then, you take the weapon's POW and roll 2d6, subtracting the enemy's ARM for the amount of damage dealt

You could do the same in X-wing, without the need to distinguish between ranged and melee values (have yet to see any light-saber wielding space ships). This would be for an interesting split in weapons and ship roles so that you wouldn't get things like HLC just being straight better, and it'd reduce the impact of sh*tty green dice by limiting the impact of multiple instances of rng.

For example, if you go to Warmachine, take a giant Robot touting a man-sized cannon, and apply said cannon to some poor nameless bastard, you only have to roll to hit and then the POW of the gun would breach the ARM no matter what you rolled. This is balanced by the opposing player being able to manipulate how hard his poor nameless bastard is to hit through clever use of terrain or defensive spells.

In X-wing, instead of long range and obstruction just adding more green dice which rarely do a **** thing, it would simply add to the enemy's DEF or agility value forcing the opponent to roll higher to hit.

of course, this'd all require a complete system overhaul so eh. as long as PWTs finally get some sort of limitation on an otherwise failproof mechanic, the game will be as perfect as it needs to be as then you could avoid green dice through proper play

I hope it's considered at some point, because (IMO, of course) it's by far the weakest aspect of the game's fundamental design. An attack by an X-wing against a TIE fighter is most likely to do 0 damage, but it's possible for it to wipe the TIE out in a single hit, and that's too much variance for my taste--and more importantly, it makes the game more difficult to balance than it would be otherwise.

Right now defense dice is good because it allows you to measure out damage and survivability only in pure statistical formula. You can't tell exactly how many hits a ship will take until the green dice have been rolled.

With defense tokens (like armada) it removes the unknown aspect of it. Ships take a long time to get destroyed (almost all 6 turns of Armada) and there really is no tension for defending. You already know what your ship is going to do an how much damage it can cancel.

I think defense dice works perfectly for X-wing system. I don't see anyone trying to change that aspect of the game.

If we're talking about an overhaul of the dice system, may I propose the following:

The attack stat is broken up into 2 stats - Accuracy and Power. For the sake of color coding things, let's say Accuracy rolls orange dice, and power rolls red dice.

Agility is broken up to Evasion and Mitigation. Evasion would roll green dice. Mitigation would not roll any dice and would be a set value for each ship type.

An attack would occur as follows:

1) Declare a target

2) Roll Accuracy dice

3) Modify Accuracy dice

4) Roll Evasion dice

5) Modify Evasion dice

6) If there are uncancelled Accuracy dice, the attack has hit

7) Roll Power dice

8) Modify Power dice

9) Deduct Mitigation stat from the Power dice and resolve any remaining <booms> on the Power dice

This allows you to model highly powerful but inaccurate weapons along side of a highly accurate weapon with low power. It also allows you to separate agile ships from ships that just take it.

For example, an A wing could be considered a highly accurate low power weapon. As such, perhaps it rolls 5 accuracy dice, and 3 power dice. Whereas a tie fighter isn't as accurate but has the same power, so they roll 3 and 3. Meanwhile, an HLC is a high powered weapon, but not very accurate, so it rolls 2 and 5. This also allows ordnance to be highly powerful highly accurate weapons as well, rolling perhaps 5 and 5.

The reason for the increased number of dice rolled would be due to the "mitigation" statistic, which would be designed to allow ships like the MF "absorb" some damage, while the fighters just take it to the face. Obviously the MF won't have 2 mitigation and 13 health, so the health pool would have to be adjusted as well. But the A wing may not have any mitigation because any hit to it is basically going to be a good hit since it's so small.

And regarding the modify dice part, both the accuracy and power dice would take the same modifiers - thus it makes you choose which you want to modify. Do you spend your focus on the accuracy portion since you're trying to hit an interceptor? Or do you save it for the power roll so if you do hit, you blow it out of the sky?

Obviously there would have to be a complete rewriting of the mechanics of the game, along with the point value for each ship, so this won't happen unless there's a complete V2.0 release, but I really like the idea of decoupling accuracy with damage.

Edit: and basically ninja'd by FGD. One other thing I wanted to add - certain ships could have a "piercing" type effect that negated the mitigation stat. Just one more way to distinguish ships from each other.

I hope it's considered at some point, because (IMO, of course) it's by far the weakest aspect of the game's fundamental design. An attack by an X-wing against a TIE fighter is most likely to do 0 damage, but it's possible for it to wipe the TIE out in a single hit, and that's too much variance for my taste--and more importantly, it makes the game more difficult to balance than it would be otherwise.

Very true....but in the movies do you ever see a TIE fighter take a hit and survive? I know, I know...balance and all that. But still....theres a reason Academy Pilots are 12 points

I hope it's considered at some point, because (IMO, of course) it's by far the weakest aspect of the game's fundamental design. An attack by an X-wing against a TIE fighter is most likely to do 0 damage, but it's possible for it to wipe the TIE out in a single hit, and that's too much variance for my taste--and more importantly, it makes the game more difficult to balance than it would be otherwise.

Completely missing and Completely obliterating seems much more thematic to the films than slowly chipping away doing one damage each time.

Though I tend to always lean towards theme over balance....

I'm against adding more dice. Balance what's there or take one set away.

This maybe just me, but I don't want any more of my chosen games to become a different version of WarmaHordes. I understand it is a very popular game, but with Warhammer Fantasy already going that route, instead of the Napoleonic era roots it has had for as long as I have played the game, has me currently unhappy. Also this game doesn't need to add more sets of dice to roll, or go the way of Armada (with no green dice). I could see possibly changing the attack dice similar to Armada, in that there are "primary" dice, "ordnance" dice, "heavy weapon" dice, etc. This would allow for the accuracy vs. power discussion to corrected.

I don't see this happening as Xwing is a tactical squad comatose game where ships move and dodge fire.

I actually find playing X-Wing to be quite lively.

I hope it's considered at some point, because (IMO, of course) it's by far the weakest aspect of the game's fundamental design. An attack by an X-wing against a TIE fighter is most likely to do 0 damage, but it's possible for it to wipe the TIE out in a single hit, and that's too much variance for my taste--and more importantly, it makes the game more difficult to balance than it would be otherwise.

Completely missing and Completely obliterating seems much more thematic to the films than slowly chipping away doing one damage each time.

Though I tend to always lean towards theme over balance....

It's not a problem, per se, and I agree that theme is important. But the problem I'm talking about is that you could actually find yourself chipping away at a TIE fighter for one point of damage at a time, or you could obliterate it in one hit, or you could miss repeatedly. It depends on how well you're rolling and how well your opponent is rolling.

And asking the game to handle all of those possible outcomes equally well all the time is an unreasonable expectation. It works for the most part, but it would work better if we removed one of the sources of variation.

I dunno. Armada doesn't use dice because things aren't really evading.

I like green dice for x-Wing. They're messy just like dogfighting Should be.

Right now defense dice is good because it allows you to measure out damage and survivability only in pure statistical formula. You can't tell exactly how many hits a ship will take until the green dice have been rolled.

With defense tokens (like armada) it removes the unknown aspect of it. Ships take a long time to get destroyed (almost all 6 turns of Armada) and there really is no tension for defending. You already know what your ship is going to do an how much damage it can cancel.

this isn't really correct

having played lots of games of Armada, I can safely say there's quite a bit of tension to defending provided you're actually getting hit by something scary

due to the mechanics of defense tokens (1 use = exhaust token, 2nd use = you lose it forever) getting hammered by multiple attacks quickly punishes you for mispositioned. Moreover, cards such as Intel Officer can quickly cripple a ship if it moves into the wrong arc (such as a VSD's front) by forcing the opponent to discard the used token or suffer a terrifying amount of damage. Finally, accuracy results on dice add some element of randomness by allowing the attacker to prevent the use of defense tokens. There is more than enough randomness in just the rolling of the offensive dice, and especially in the squadron combat.

Things die really fast in Armada if you properly position to hammer it to death, they just rarely get one-shot by unbelievably bad luck (has happened though, had a neb get annihilated by an unbelievable roll from a VSD-2, but only in the absolute worst scenario of being in close range and exposing a side arc to the VSD's front).

what defense tokens do is remove the possibility of a single attack getting lucky and slaughtering you

the system makes Armada far more tactical and strategic, rewarding you for good play and not running intro depressing scenarios where your autothruster ship gets annihilated by a single PWT attack because your green dice forsook you.

In a tactical game, the more you have to worry about getting ****** by dice the less your decisions as a player matter.

This maybe just me, but I don't want any more of my chosen games to become a different version of WarmaHordes. I understand it is a very popular game, but with Warhammer Fantasy already going that route, instead of the Napoleonic era roots it has had for as long as I have played the game, has me currently unhappy. Also this game doesn't need to add more sets of dice to roll, or go the way of Armada (with no green dice). I could see possibly changing the attack dice similar to Armada, in that there are "primary" dice, "ordnance" dice, "heavy weapon" dice, etc. This would allow for the accuracy vs. power discussion to corrected.

That's true, and something else I've actually brought up regarding the X wing title. I proposed a blue die that would come in whatever Aces pack fixed the X wing, and a Rogue Squadron title for 1 point or whatever that would allow that X wing to roll blue dice instead of red dice. A blue die would have 2 <kaboom> 4 <boom> 1 <eye> 1 <blank>. Essentially making their regular attack act as a focused attack. This would open up their action to do something else (spend the F on defense for example, or take EH, etc), while still allowing them to have quality attacks that don't necessarily do extra damage over a standard attack.

And then there could be a 1-2 pt mod that allows any ship to roll 1 blue die instead of a red die, so everyone could make use of the new dice if they wanted to.

Just imagine, a 37 point Wedge with Rogue Squadron, Predator, Engine Upgrade. He could use his action to boost into R1, and then score an average of 3.51 <booms>, which is enough to do 2.77 damage against a regular TIE, 3.14 damage against Whisper (assuming uncloaked), or 3.51 damage against Han/RAC.

I will say the dice system here is probably the most elegant in its simplicity. Take some other table top games? They often have the 2 roll system using d6. First is to hit roll which is only meant to thin out the attack dice poll, then is to wound, which is the part where attack dice actually do damage. Then the defender get a defensive roll called a save roll which all it does is gives the defender an illusion that they can use their skill in order to keep their units from getting destroyed when really it is just another statistic. Go to warmachines there is an additional roll for damage as where on the stat card it is applied to.

X-wing has only 2 rolls made possible by using a D8 which has more results thus a wider distribution of probability. The token system for adjusting rolls does give player a little more control then just turning over their fate to the dice. Having cards for damage also removes the need for rolling for damage effects. Just 2 rolls is all that there is, one for attack and one for defense. It is simple and elegant.

the only system I can think of where it's hit-wound-save is warhammer (even using that exact terminology)

Warmachine uses two rolls (to hit and to damage), and sometimes one or both can be completely bypassed. If it hits, a bigass cannon will carve a hole through a tiny little warrior, while a dinky sword won't ever scratch the paint of several tons of walking armor. The Thunderhead, this hulking warjack baring an electric contraption that would make dr frakenstien weep with envy, will just fry any lightly armored infantry within proximity of the discharge no matter how dodgy they are. Certain marksmen have the SNIPER rule, guaranteeing one point of damage to anything they hit (which, against warjacks, can be allocated against any hull column to help knock out essential systems).

X-wing has made some admirable attempts to cull the undue influence of rngesus in things like Oicuun and bombs (come on, Wave 7!), evade tokens and autothrusters, not to mention awesome stuff like simply not being in ships' arcs , but the ugly spectre of green dice still blights any game featuring loathsome PWTs, allowing for possible games where nothing you can do will overcome poor rolling.

And of course there's Armada, which did the smart thing of just removing defense dice altogether for the far more reliable, elegant tokens. One roll per attack is all you need.

the model in X-wing is serviceable, mostly because the tactical (manuevering) portion of the game is so **** solid and involving. That said, the system could be better. It doesn't need to be, again it's very serviceable for the desired simplicity of the game, but it could be.

I prefer the simplicity between red vs. green dice. I've played with D6 systems in 40k and Warmachine and I hated the amount of calculation and charts you have to read and memorize in order to get the game going. It disrupted the flow of the game for me as a beginner and even as an experienced player and I was sick of it, which is why I shuffled my way over to X-Wing as soon as I could. I love how the attack/defense system can all be settled just by looking at the die results: Hit, Focus, miss vs Evade, Focus miss. All the added factors people are suggesting are just unnecessary and it wouldn't be X-Wing anymore, and I feel like a lot of people play the game for its simplicity.

Is the dice system we have now busted? I don't think so. Green dice are supposed to be worse than red dice or else the game wouldn't progress at all. As for the variance mentioned by Vorpal, I really like that I can obliterate a TIE off another TIE/X-Wing. It adds a lot more fun to the game.