May the force be with you.

Question for the week,

If you could replace dice in X-Wing what system would you use?

I would go to the Armada system of Defense tokens and remove green dice personally.

Like DnD. Basically To Hit with predetermined damage values combined with armada defense.

But I just wanted to post. I like the wildness of the dice.

I dunno. I like dice a lot, but if you used tables/charts instead it could make the game go a lot quicker... But I think that would take a lot of the fun and excitement out of it.

I would replace dice with chance cubes to make it more thematic. 😛

Seriously though I don't mind the dice, although I think it would be better if there was more separation between accuracy and damage. I'd probably still use dice in some fashion but tinker with how they work. Or maybe draw from a bag of tokens (and put them back after each attack)? That would be slightly more consistent and has the potential for some neat interactions. You could replace some dice mods like focusing or Weapons Failure with adding or removing things to the bag, and even add special tokens which have different effects. Something like "I'll show you the Dark Side" could add a token to an enemy ship's bag and have some unpleasant effect if they draw it, for example. Might be a bit fiddly with all the components though.

I think dice are best. With the number of rolls that need to happen, the mechanic needs to be pretty quick. Dice do that. X-Wing also has the quickest dice, with just hits and evades.

• Cards would require too many draws, too much shuffling. It works in Catan with one roll per turn, I don't think it'd work in X-Wing.
• Too much math with standard "number" dice, ordinary D6, D10, and having target numbers.
• The "inevitability" of Armada style defense tokens works for capital ships, but I think it'd feel really odd with starfighters.
• Going to something like Imperial Assault with three different factors on the dice (hits, surges, range) isn't something that I love.
• I could almost see going with something closer to Legion. Different colors of attack/defense dice, with different ratios of hit/evade to "focus" to blank. That'd allow a lot more granularity than 0-1-2-3-4 dice, but it adds complexity. If I had to pick something other than status quo, this would be it.

Basically, I like that X-Wing dice are simple, so more thought can be spent on dials and position. I want the RNG mechanics to be nearly effortless.

9 hours ago, Cubanboy said:

I would go to the Armada system of Defense tokens and remove green dice personally.

Me too. I am quite fond of Norra with her guaranteed evade and Decimators and VCXs with Reinforce, which do the closest thing we have to this.

I haven't played Legion, but that sounds interesting @theBitterFig ?

24 minutes ago, Gilarius said:

I haven't played Legion, but that sounds interesting @theBitterFig ?

I've played a little bit of one game, but here's a breakdown of the dice sides from the wiki ( https://starwarslegion.fandom.com/wiki/Dice ). Surge is kinda like focus, but units often have something like Expertise, where they convert all their surges into a different kind of result. I'm a bit hazy on the finer points, but X-Wing with similar dice wouldn't have to be exactly the same.

• Attack Dice
  • Red d8:
    • 5 Hits (62.5%)
    • 1 Critical Hit (12.5%)
    • 1 Surge (12.5%)
    • 1 Blank (12.5%)
  • Black d8:
    • 3 Hits (37.5%)
    • 1 Critical Hit (12.5%)
    • 1 Surge (12.5%)
    • 3 Blanks (37.5%)
  • White d8:
    • 1 Hit (12.5%)
    • 1 Critical Hit (12.5%)
    • 1 Surge (12.5%)
    • 5 Blanks (62.5%)
• Defense Dice
  • Red d6:
    • 3 Blocks (50%)
    • 1 Surge (16.66%)
    • 2 Blanks (33.33%)
  • White d6:
    • 1 Block (16.66%)
    • 1 Surge (16.66%)
    • 4 Blanks (66.66%)

Looking only at the defense dice, you can have 1/2/3/4 successes per roll on White, White + Surge, Red, Red + Surge. This allows a lot of customization on how tanky they want a unit to be. For attack dice, seems like you can get 2/3/4/5/6/7 successes per roll, depending on how surges are handled. One thing that seems nice: a surge is better than not, but it looks like it's better to have a die improvement than a worse die plus a surge (again, I'm not really deep into Legion).

Stormtroopers roll red defense, white + surge attack. Rebel Troopers roll black attack, but white + surge defense. Rebel Veterans have the same black attack/white defense, but get surges on both attack and defense.

Another example: two different Clone Trooper attachments. Rapid fire dude with 6 white dice, or a more sniper/heavy blaster guy with 2 reds. They seem like they'll yield somewhat similar average firepower in the end. More dice can mean more hits which can mean more units removed against infantry if you're lucky, but more critical results seems like it's probably good for punching through heavier armor. That's pretty surface, and I could be missing some key mechanics.

Also worth noting: one defense die gets rolled per hit, rather than the same number each time you defend. If I were doing X-Wing with Legion-style dice, I'd keep the X-Wing style of rolling the fixed agility plus range/obstruction.

The legion dice model is kind of neat, as you have the ability to make a large pool with inaccurate dice for large variance swings, or smaller pools with better odds for higher accuracy or consistency.

But, I’ll be honest for xwing I prefer what we have because that would be a radical departure. Then again the entire post is theorycrafting a 3.0 and what could be different.

HFCB!

Personally I'd replace all dice rolls with rock/paper/scissors.

I would add accuracy and damage as separate sets on the roll. No reason you could do it with the same number of dice.

I don't remember if it was outright said, implied, or just heavily presumed in reaction to one interview, that separating damage and accuracy was skipped because it would make the game too daunting for the younger crowd, but I don't think that has to be true. That sort of separation is complicated in other tabletop games because you have to compare two numbers and consult a chart (or memorize the chart) on a case by case basis to even find out what would be a positive result for you in the given situation.

In X-Wing, things are much simpler than that to begin with. The cards tell you how many dice to roll and once you roll, you only need to compare successes vs failures. Frankly you could add a hundred different kinds of dice and it would never really be overly complicated. Tedious with a hundred kinds, but not hard to follow for a younger crowd.

I am definitely for these ideas. Either separating damage and accuracy, "better" and "worse" damage and defense variant dice, or some combination. They give the developers a lot more variables to work with and I think they're one of the best ways to do it. Adding ship-specific rules, extra basic rules to remember (like new types of obstacles that differ in subtle ways), or even just wordy upgrades to work around problems are way more complicated and easy to lose new players in than simply "you roll dice of the color and number on your card and compare".

23 hours ago, Cubanboy said:

If you could replace dice in X-Wing what system would you use?

Dice.

When it comes to doing something other than dice to begin with, I'd be for it, I just don't have a specific idea.

Dice seem to be a sacred cow in tabletop gaming, and I'll admit that even I heavily associate the two, but I've really soured on them over the years.

The real turning point for me was a day like any other with our boardgame group. I was used to my brother having really bad luck with dice, but in this game, it finally just hit me how completely unfair the dice were. One player was getting every roll in their favor, and they were blowing everyone else away. Someone else, who was playing exactly as well, was getting further and further behind, and there was nothing else they could do. Everyone just sort of looked at each other, and no one enjoyed the experience.

Now, I don't think it's necessarily an innate problem with dice. Randomness makes things interesting, but I feel like tabletop games utilize too much variance. For example, just look at the fact that a d6 is sort of the generic dice for most boardgames. It's only six sides! Even if only one of those faces is a failure option, that's a 17% failure chance. That's a pretty high chance to outright fail whatever it is you're trying to do. And I think for most games, there's usually a range, like you succeed on a 3+ or 4+. Even a 3+ is a 33% chance of failure. That's insane.

It doesn't even have to be dice. I am reminded of City of Heroes, a defunct superhero MMO (for completely unrelated reasons). You were never able to raise your chance to hit above 95%. Doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that you're slinging superpowers at dozens of henchmen at a time. You're going to notice a 1/20 chance to miss. Maybe that would be fine in a realistic war game simulator, but when was the last time that you saw Batman accidentally hitting walls with his batarangs against generic criminals? The fact that the animations were tracked, and thus a miss would mean your character would often suddenly aim and fire straight up into the air (so that it was a visual miss, not just claimed to be a miss in the combat log), didn't help make this hard-coded miss chance feel really bad.

Outright failure, in general, is just not an outcome that I think belongs on small dice. Outright failure is just not that likely in real life, especially on most generic actions in tabletop games. I notice a wave of narrative-focused RPGs do seem to be moving away from this, but it's still extremely common. When we're talking about something like a dogfight simulation, like X-Wing, then certainly, missing is definitely a more logical part of the experience, but even then too much variance just feels bad. It's always going to be miserable when the random element can say that you accomplished nothing and your opponent accomplished everything, and I have that happen more than enough for it to ruin the fun. Most shots miss in real life, even from skilled soldiers, but it's not because their experience means nothing.

The random element of dice should be covering a much smaller range of outcomes that your actual choices brought you to, rather than potentially being the difference between utterly failing and masterfully succeeding regardless of what you did.