Im wondering if FFG has play tested having different attack dies in xwing? They have different dice in Armada and Legion, wondering why they didnt do that in xwing 2nd edition. I think a different attack die for ordinances and an attack die with say no crits but more hits along with current attack die would add a better variety to the game. A ship like the quadjumper (no weapons in star wars lore) just doesnt feel right when there is a potential for it to roll 2 crits. With clone wars ships coming, having different dice available could open up design. Thoughts?

I think I remember Alex Davies mentioning them toying with adding dice in one of the Team Covenant preview videos but they decided against it for simplicity sake. Different attack dice would likely pave the way for different evade dice as well which might start getting a little complicated. Ships can be differentiated sufficiently with their ship abilities, dials, action bars, and upgrades so different dice seems unnecessary. That being said it could be fun.

I believe they said they tried it when developing 2nd edition and felt it didn’t add enough to be worth it.

It would've probably opened up a lot of design space, but it also would’ve required a total reworking of the game to get it right.

I would have liked to see more of a separation between accuracy and damage potential, whether through dice variants or other means

I don't think the Armada style would have worked for X-Wing but I could have seen something where your maneuver choice actually affects your offense or defense. So a straight maneuver at slow speeds wouldn't affect defense or attack but turning would maybe increase defense and decrease offense. I wouldn't think actually reducing dice rolled but if there were multiple dice for attack/defense, it could switch out or add a bonus die that's not as good.

But ultimately, it probably just complicates things more than is needed. Armada had a different goal and I think the variant dice there help to achieve it. X-Wing isn't seeking the same goals.

I’m not as fond of the Armada dice, but I like what they’ve done with Imperial Assault and Legion (and the RPGs) where the dice have surges that can trigger special effects as well as raw successes. Tractor, ion, jamming, and so on could all be effects triggered off enough surges if the attack hit. Ordnance could spend surges for increased damage, so they may or may not hit, but do more damage if they do. Upgrade and pilot abilities could trigger off surges and so on.

Part of the appealing aspect of X-Wing is the simplicity of the game itself. I think changes for 2.0 have been great and am glad little has changed as far as the game play mechanics. So please, no extra dice

3 hours ago, Effenhoog said:

I would have liked to see more of a separation between accuracy and damage potential, whether through dice variants or other means

Then we end up with this

Now of course the counter to this was Regen but that was also another point of contention for 1st edition that has been scaled back considerably.

26 minutes ago, martini74 said:

Part of the appealing aspect of X-Wing is the simplicity of the game itself. I think changes for 2.0 have been great and am glad little has changed as far as the game play mechanics. So please, no extra dice

^THIS^ More or less, the game is fine in its simplistic state. I mean Armada has different dice but that is a far different set up in terms of mechanics (and a more confusing one at that). I don't think the game needs more dice, different ways to use that dice which they have. They took the variety needed to refresh the game and put it into tokens. You now have focus, calculate, evade, target lock and force. All of these tokens work on dice modification in different ways. Thus why do you need more variety in dice when you have more variety in tokens? I think between more diverse tokens and more diverse dice, FFG made the better choice.

nope

My 8 sided dice always reroll to the same result. I hate rerolls now

2 hours ago, buckero0 said:

My 8 sided dice always reroll to the same result. I hate rerolls now

I like to call this the FGD law of focus (this has nothing to do with @ficklegreendice but if he wants to take credit for it he has it).

• If you have a focus token then your only results will be hits, crits, evades and of course blanks.
• If you do not have a focus token then you will roll a lot of focus results.

im honestly surprised they didnt add in blue/purple/black dice or something.

Considering i swear every other ffg game ive seen where custom dice exist they have color coding (destiny not counting since thats the core gimick of that game is everything has its own die).

Its kinda hard to implement some stuff like high rate of fire but bad accuracy when theres no dice variations. Or the opposite, low rate of fire but tends to not miss (but still can so the die roll is needed)

5 minutes ago, Vineheart01 said:

im honestly surprised they didnt add in blue/purple/black dice or something.

Considering i swear every other ffg game ive seen where custom dice exist they have color coding (destiny not counting since thats the core gimick of that game is everything has its own die).

Its kinda hard to implement some stuff like high rate of fire but bad accuracy when theres no dice variations. Or the opposite, low rate of fire but tends to not miss (but still can so the die roll is needed)

You can do high accuracy low damage, it is what TLT did, in canceling all results after a hit and does one point of damage. Thing is that the high accuracy became so consistent it was almost an auto hit.

The other thing you can do is what Auto-blaster does which ignores evades, but again they were worried it would be so powerful they restricted it to range 1 and it was not without cause. Can you imagine autoblaster at range 2 (or even 3) in 1st ed?

I’d rather have different defense dice, and they are rolled per hit like Legion. Seems like it would help keep low attack dice ships relevant.

1 hour ago, Vineheart01 said:

im honestly surprised they didnt add in blue/purple/black dice or something.

Considering i swear every other ffg game ive seen where custom dice exist they have color coding (destiny not counting since thats the core gimick of that game is everything has its own die).

Its kinda hard to implement some stuff like high rate of fire but bad accuracy when theres no dice variations. Or the opposite, low rate of fire but tends to not miss (but still can so the die roll is needed)

10

There are issues both ways...

Say you have a new dice that's very low chance to hit (1in6) and you have a weapon that fires 6 of these low chance to hit dice, well they average in at 1 damage each time they roll but every once and a while they roll 6 hits and just demolish something. It adds a ton of variance, that can be fun, and it can be extremely frustrating. At the end of the day you can accomplish these things with existing dice by simply adding or subtracting results. you could have a 6 dice attack that reads "after rolling dice cancel up to 2 hit/crit results, you must cancel as many dice as you are able to.". This accomplishes the same thing (high rate of fire low accuracy) but removes the insane spiky levels of simply having a new low chance to hit dice. (this setup would allow you to possibly roll 4 hits but would be much much harder than the same result from 4 normal dice, as well as lowering the low end so it's not just an auto damage weapon)

The tools are there if ffg wants to do something like that without introducing more dice.

Anyone who plays legion and has had a full health squad wiped by an unaimed Z-6 trooper while sitting in full cover knows how frustrating dice variance can be on "low accuracy" dice.

There have been some valid points made as to why it might not be wise to add more dice. In my experiences with 2nd edition, crits can be lethal. My focus would be on certain ships not being able to hand out too many potential crit dice. As stated in above posts; there are other ways FFG could go about doing that.

I've had this in my google drive for more than a year, so suffice it to say I think it would have been an improvement to have more attack die types. but I can well believe that following testing the improvement would have been too marginal for the benefit.

Accuracy die (blue): has no crits, and several double hit symbols, also fewer blanks (e.g. 2 double hit, 3 hit, 2 focus, 1 blank). Double hit symbols require two evades to cancel, but deal one damage if uncancelled. Used for missiles (canonically small, fast, nimble things designed to track and kill light ships, but didn't do much damage against big things with lots of shielding and armour) but also for any similar high-accuracy-low-damage scenarios like flak cannon equivalents, TLTs, etc.

Normal die: the current red die.

Damage die (black): has a lot of crits, and several double crit symbols, also probably more blanks/eyeballs (e.g. 2 double crit, 2 crit, 1 focus 3 blank). Double crits require only 1 evade to cancel, but deal two critical damage if uncancelled. Used for torpedoes (canonically slow, powerful things that are almost impossible to tag fighters with but can cripple large ships and capital ships) and other high-damage-low-accuracy weapons such as HLC.

Cancellation order doublehit>hit>doublecrit>crit

Abilities and attacks could also add double hits/double crits or extra dice of a given colour.

Also, addition of surges - depending on weapon, adding extra control effects (e.g. ion cannon could spend a surge for an extra ion token or extra damage once per attack, or maybe do ions with hits/crits and damage with surges)), or just flexibility on damage - most units wouldn’t come with surge abilities, but upgrades and unique pilot abilities could spend them for extra effects. Surges more common on blanks and eyeballs. Surges could potentially also work even if the attack was dodged in some cases.

Would it not be fairly simple to emulate a lower power attack by just cancelling crits?

Or, as mentioned above, after rolling attack dice, cancel so many hit results.

Even, cancel all hit /crit results, then convert all focus results to hits.

Or.... For low accuracy, hard hit, convert 1 hit to a crit, then cancel all other hit results.

Epic has the Single Turbolaser ofc, which doubles defence dice.

Difficult to come up with things that would be actually worth including. Most of these mechanics would just boil down to Autoblaster/Accuracy Corrector/Mangler.