Alternate dice rules

@djensen I remember a few years ago on the old site someone suggested a “medium” luck for dice. Don’t remember the specifics. It did get a fair amount of feedback.

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/post/26884

Some negativity. How’s this. Use low luck but if left over number is a 2 or less it’s a no hit. No need to roll a extra die.
Att
3 inf = 3
1 tank = 3
1 bom = 4
Total = 10 = 1 hit. A 4 left = 1 hit automatic
Def
3 inf = 6
1 tank = 3
Total = 9 = 1 hit. A 3 is left. 1 hit automatic
Or
Def
3 inf = 6
1 tank =3
1 bom = 1
Total = 10 1 hit. 4 left over. 1 hit
You could change the left over die number to a 4 or higher is a hit.
1-3 miss
4-6 hit
Or
1-2 miss
3-6 hit

@djensen said in Alternate dice rules:

Regular dice battles have too many wild swings of hot and cold. Low luck doesn’t have enough randomness and it’s mentally tiring.

What would be a good in-between?

• A certain number of guaranteed hits and then randomness? (low luck light)
• Mulligans (3, 5, 10 re-rolls per game)
• A deck of card to balance out the bad luck

One thing I like about Zombies are those cards. I’ve only played a few games but the cards never seemed to pile on to one faction. In many circumstances it could actually help the player who just had a series of terrible rolls.

Your thoughts please. If we’re open to changes, maybe the next game will include something that removes the crazy stupid bad luck that I, I mean some people, keep getting. :wink: (Yeah, this subject is completely selfless, sure).

If I remember correctly, I pitched an idea a few years ago about an alternate dicing method which would work as follows. I never worked out the full details, but here’s the general idea.

Googling “dice odds” will pull up lots of tables and images showing the probability curve of the results of throwing two standard six-sided dice. Basically, the distribution is a bell curve ranging from 2 to 12, with the lowest probabilities at the two extremities and the highest probability (for 7) in the middle.

The concept for the alternate dicing method would be that a player, prior to dicing something, would choose one of three tables against which to plot his results: narrow-range result, medium-range result and wide-range result. By using the first table, the player would know that his dice rolls would fall within a narrow range of outcomes centered on the middle of the distribution curve; the results would never be spectacularly good nor spectacularly bad, but instead would consistently be average. This would probably appeal to a player who is getting close to winning, and who wants to protect his advantage by playing conservatively. At the opposite extreme, the wide-range table would cover the full probability curve; the distribution would still favour getting results towards the middle of the bell curve, but it would allow for more variation – including the possibility of getting results that are either spectacularly good or spectacularly bad. This would probably appeal to a player who’s losing, and who therefore: a) has little to lose from a spectacularly bad dicing result, and b) has a lot to gain from a spectacularly good dicing result. The medium-range result table would offer a medium-risk option in between the two extremes of the narrow-range table and the wide-range table.

@djensen

I think there are two main concerns here:

• “Tail Risk”
• Simplicity of Application

I know what you’re thinking, and no, tail risk has nothing to do with the ladies. It’s about hitting the extreme ends of the probability distribution. Of course the bigger concern is hitting exceptionally bad dice rather than exceptionally good dice. People rarely complain about exceptionally good dice.

Here’s my proposal:

    1. Calculate the expected number of hits for each side similar to low luck
    2. Roll the dice OOB style and find the actual number of hits
    3. If the actual hits are below the expected hits by X, re-roll X dice that missed and incorporate the additional hits to your total

For simplicity you could say that the re-rolled dice will always be @3 or @4, or alternatively you could select from the actual dice that missed. (Easier if you are playing with hit dice)

This approach would leave the positive side of the probability distribution alone, but would condense the negative side. There would still be negative results, but far less game changingly bad results.

I think it also has the advantage of simplicity. It’s roughly the same difficulty to apply as low luck.

Ah dice rolls, the ultimate Love/Hate relationship. Having thrown them bones for A&A outcomes for 33+ years, here’s my observation: Dice suck!

Wild outcomes DO HAPPEN, in real life, not only just via an online application or computer dice simulator, in person too! We hate them so much, we’ve long ago implemented playing games via low luck rules. Yes, this does change the game a bit since there will be a guaranteed number of hits, plus potentially, 1 more hit. Does this hurt the game, IMHO, no it does not. Low Luck does what it’s supposed to do, eliminate the wild outlier results.

Is this perfect? No. Is such a perfect battle outcome decision process possible? Probably not. There will be some variance in a game where dice are involved.
Sure, you could totally eliminate the dice (ala NO luck), but that would be so boring, IMHO. Low Luck meets the need of eliminating excessive variance, while still offering some variance.

@djensen Low Luck doesn’t have to be based on autohits. For example, you can sum the total power of what you would be rolling together, divide it by 5, then rolling as many dice hitting at 5, then rolling for the remainder. That would decrease randomness a lot if, say, you would otherwise be rolling most dice at 3 or less.

For example if rolling 5@1, 2@2, 4@3, 2@4, one could:

Low Luck:
Get 4 autohits and roll 1 dice at 5.

Custom Luck at 5/6:
Roll 5 dice at 5 and 1 dice at 4.

It’s a hard problem. My favorite rule so far is to give each team 3 “low luck” battles over the course of the game. You can declare a low luck battle either on offense or on defense before any dice are rolled – but only 3 times per game. It’s your choice how to use them; you could use them on opening naval battles, or on the battle for Moscow, or on little fiddly battles where you really want a guaranteed hit to knock out your enemy’s only infantry … but you can’t use them all the time, so you have to think about where you care enough to do the math, and where you’re willing to just accept the luck of the dice.

My main objection to LL is that with sufficiently motivated players, it turns every battle into a chess game; people go back and forth furiously calculating all of the numbers and find a way to shift an infantry over by one territory so that they can pick up an extra 8% chance of holding both territories…it feels more like work than like play, to me.

If you let players use LL when they really care about the battle, and force them to roll regular dice the rest of the time, then that keeps the game moving at a reasonable speed without leaving you feeling like you lost the whole game because the dice went against you in one crucial battle.

@Argothair said in Alternate dice rules:

It’s a hard problem. …
If you let players use LL when they really care about the battle, and force them to roll regular dice the rest of the time, then that keeps the game moving at a reasonable speed without leaving you feeling like you lost the whole game because the dice went against you in one crucial battle.

Sure, if you save one of your precious 3 LL dice chips for that key battle, you might not have such remorse.

Also, what if the game goes 15 rounds? Is 3 really enough? Perhaps start with 3 and get an additional LL battle every 3rd round?

Allot comes down to a players level of comfort when allowing randomness into the game. Some players love the gamble, the long shot, the chance that we might still have a shot to win with some luck on our side in this last ditch effort.

Other players might become dismayed when the above scenario happens to them after all their well executed plans have them at a 99% chance of winning and feel that the dice has stolen their victory.

This is a grey area, there is no right or wrong when it comes to what is the proper level of randomness in a game of A&A?