AA diceless varient, well playtested

@Emperor_Taiki:

Diceless games of A&A however are terrible. A&A is made to be played with dice, thats how it simulates battles.

but this is where you are wrong. A&A doesn’t simulate anything. The only way to “simulate” battles is to make a very complicated and advanced computer game.

In the long run, the better player will win regardless of LL or dice, but for single games, dice makes it so random that in a 1vs1 game with experienced players, the lucky player will win. How anyone can think that is more fun than with at least somewhat less randomness I do not understand. I started playing with dice until I got fed up, but after a lot of games and experience, it was obvious that the randomness was just too much.

But each to his own…

@Subotai:

@Emperor_Taiki:

Diceless games of A&A however are terrible. A&A is made to be played with dice, thats how it simulates battles.

but this is where you are wrong. A&A doesn’t simulate anything. The only way to “simulate” battles is to make a very complicated and advanced computer game.

Like I said, I play A&A for its WW2 theme, if you dont care for the theme I sorta see how you wouldn’t care for dice. However less randomness does not equate to more strategy. Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers have no randomness yet only very simple people would call them strategy games.

One example of how dice add strategy to A&A is that when your losing you may need to figure out how to engage in a decisive battle in order to force a decision even though you will likly lose the battle. In a diceless game once your losing you might aswell give up and order pizza.

When your winning a dice game a wise  player is still caustious, they must build up there advantage and not get drawn into battles that they would have better chances of winning in subsequent turns. In a diceless game having the slightest advantage allows players to roll over there opponents with no question of their victory.

Just a thought… how do you handle Bombing raids and AA fire in a diceless game???

As the game is if a player is having a bad day concerning dice… he can make up for that with planning and strategy.  at the same time… a player who is suffering from a poor move can have a great dice roll and recover from poor strategy.  removing the dice simply takes those options out the game.  not necessarily a bad thing… but i dont see the point when the game was designed around Dice & Strategy.  ill just play chess … like 3d chess or hexagonal chess… if i dont want the probablility. but for Axis… give me the field marshal dice so i can see the flags on all the 1’s i roll

by the way this is a great discussion, thanks

Many of the LL bashers haven’t even tried LL, at least not much. I started playing dice in f2f games (A&A classic), but then we created the same LL system that TripleA supports, even though this was 20 years ago and there was no internet or TripleA. We decided that we could choose in each battle to use either regular dice or the LL system. I choose to play LL rather than dice after several TripleA games, where in 1vs1 or 2vs2 games, too many times the game was decided during the first two rounds b/c dice rolls favored one side.
There is no strategy that can beat bad dice, only if you start having extremely good luck, which is unlikely b/c of mathematical facts, if you have bad luck in the first round of a game, you must have much better luck than your opponent afterwards, b/c the opponent then will have a much stronger position and more units on the most important territories.

As I already mentioned, it is fully possible to lose LL games b/c of dicerolls, and it has happened many times, even though it does not happen very often compared to all those LL games where the best player wins. LL is no guarantee that you won’t lose b/c of bad luck, but it is much less likely than in regular dice games.

Ever thought of switching to a D10 die system?  i know there are posts that list the unit values… I think it would help alot… you could make infantry Att on 2’s making it a 1/5 chance instead of 1/6

A&A dosnt allow you to account for weather, sick generals, miscommunication, bad recon, the element of surprise and a host of other important factors that effect a campaign. Without dice the stronger force will always beat the weaker force given a combat, this is entirely unrealistc and contrary to the games theme.

It seems that your main concern is making sure that the better player always wins, I dont share that concern and I am prefectly fine with the better player losing. I dont see why dice make the game less strategic or interesting in fact I listed reasons why it makes it more strategic and more interesting.

Julius Ceaser agrees with me anyways “the die is cast”

@Keredrex:

Ever thought of switching to a D10 die system?  i know there are posts that list the unit values… I think it would help alot… you could make infantry Att on 2’s making it a 1/5 chance instead of 1/6

I have played some games using a d12. I found it was just confusing, i have been thinking about converting the stats into d8 or having different dice based on what unit is rolling.

@Emperor_Taiki:

I have played some games using a d12. I found it was just confusing, i have been thinking about converting the stats into d8 or having different dice based on what unit is rolling.

Yeah i made an attempt at working with d8’s then i heard A&A P / E 1940 were adding a Tac Bomber Unit.  Figured id up the dice to d10 to give a greater range between unit strenth and also allow percentage rolling if need be.  Which can make for interesting Tech rules or situations.  for example ive seen house rules that have Sub detection rules, which i think the percentage dice option would make it easier.

take away the dice, you take away the fun. i LOVE rolling dice.