Okay so the other day someone said something and it kinda made me realize how strange attack dice are. See, when you think of aerial combat or flight sims and such, there's generally two things that go into shooting. The first is the relative maneuverability of the involved craft, the second is the power the attacker can put out. But in X-Wing, both are represented by the same metric: attack dice. But if you think about it, there are a lot of ships whose superior speed and maneuverability should make landing hits very easy, even if they don't do much damage. But craft that are speedy and nimble like A-Wings, TIEs, and some others just have two dice, which can make landing hits fairly difficult against ships that should by all rights be sitting ducks against them.

So, I'm not gonna try to propose a "fix" exactly, but I'm kinda curious to hear what people think of this and what systems they'd use if they were making an alternate X-Wing that had a two part attack process, like how most RPGS have a 'hit' roll and a 'damage' roll. Or maybe you'd implement a static damage amount, with only a hit roll? Maybe some ships would have a "hammer down" action that has all guns firing at the expense of speed or maneuverability in the next round? What do you guys think?

Modification: rapid fire blasters

Range 1-3

4 attack dice

If this attack hits deal one damage and cancel all results.

0 or 1 point

Modification: heavy blaster

Range 1-3

1 attack dice

If this attack hits deal 4 damage and cancel all results.

The short, short version is that you can see FFG has learnt from X-Wing with the implementation of different dice in all subsequent SW games: Armada, IA, Legion in order to allow differentiation between powerful but hard to hit weapons vs weapons that might put out a lot of shots and hit multiple times but yet only do light damage.

To be honest, keeping to a single set of dice is one of the things Im surprised they kept in 2.0.

Adding +1 dice when attacking a ship in your Bullseye arc would help. Nimble ships with a high PS could really take advantage of it.

10 minutes ago, Chucknuckle said:

Adding +1 dice when attacking a ship in your Bullseye arc would help. Nimble ships with a high PS could really take advantage of it.

Well, with the arc now printed on all the bases; the opportunity for such things now exists in the design space.

13 minutes ago, Dr Zoidberg said:

The short, short version is that you can see FFG has learnt from X-Wing with the implementation of different dice in all subsequent SW games: Armada, IA, Legion in order to allow differentiation between powerful but hard to hit weapons vs weapons that might put out a lot of shots and hit multiple times but yet only do light damage.

To be honest, keeping to a single set of dice is one of the things Im surprised they kept in 2.0.

I feel that was likely more a case of them wanting to keep the game simple, and to keep the backlash down since you know people would be complaining about having to buy new dice on top of everything else. Just look at the issues they had trying to add a new damage deck with the TFA expansion. Still, they have said at one point they did play around with the idea of different dice for the game but ultimately decided against it.

14 minutes ago, Dr Zoidberg said:

The short, short version is that you can see FFG has learnt from X-Wing with the implementation of different dice in all subsequent SW games: Armada, IA, Legion in order to allow differentiation between powerful but hard to hit weapons vs weapons that might put out a lot of shots and hit multiple times but yet only do light damage.

To be honest, keeping to a single set of dice is one of the things Im surprised they kept in 2.0.

i've been saying this for a long time

16 minutes ago, Chucknuckle said:

Adding +1 dice when attacking a ship in your Bullseye arc would help. Nimble ships with a high PS could really take advantage of it.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you don't want to live in the world were Supernatural Vader gets to smack you around with 5 dice attacks.

This has been discussed before many times and I think the consensus is that there should be an attack phase and a damage phase. So those two attack dice ships should roll something like 3 attack dice, and if they hit, roll 2 dmg dice.

Where as something like Bossk should be 2 attack dice out of arc, but then his 3 dice + ability for damage.

Gives a lot more options for ships and pilot abilities.

1 hour ago, That One Guy said:

The  first is the relative maneuverability of the involved craft, the second is the power the attacker can put out. But in  X-Wing, both  are represen  ted by the same metric:  attack  d  ic  e  .  

I consider manoeuvrability is represented by the ship dial, repositioning actions and pilot skill. If you have a good combination of these it allows you to get attacks attacks that you wouldn’t normally be able to get. Defensively you can avoid attacks by moving out of arc and additionally you have the agility value. Getting an attack and avoiding ones through careful manoeuvring is the core of X-Wing as a dog fighter game. I don’t think we need more mechanics to show this.

1 hour ago, Sasajak said:

I consider manoeuvrability is represented by the ship dial, repositioning actions and pilot skill. If you have a good combination of these it allows you to get attacks attacks that you wouldn’t normally be able to get. Defensively you can avoid attacks by moving out of arc and additionally you have the agility value. Getting an attack and avoiding ones through careful manoeuvring is the core of X-Wing as a dog fighter game. I don’t think we need more mechanics to show this.

Exactly. If you have a set of generic targets moving across the board and ask both a B-wing and an A-wing to engage them, the A-wing will be getting to shoot more often, and with range 1 bonuses and focus tokens that the B-wing (which is slower and has to use red moves more often) won't have.