No dice

In its present form (v14!), the game requires 12 dice — three white, used in encounters and in the hubris challenge, three red used just in encounters, and three green used in the temple.  They work fairly well apart from needing to hand the green dice around in the temple and the white dice around in the hubris challenge.

Nevertheless I had a different idea for using cards resolving encounters that might be worth considering.  During the prep phase of the encounter, players ‘contribute’, which advances the market on the ‘investment’ track.  Ordinarily you get white dice equal to the value on that track divided by two.  But instead there could be, on each ‘resolution card’, a row of boxes that line up with the spaces on that track, and some of those boxes are filled with check marks.  For each check mark that’s in a box that is below the position of the marker on the investment track, you increment the success track, just as you would have done had you gotten ‘hits’ on the dice.  So for example, say a card has check marks at box 1, 3, 7 and 8.  If we as a group invested enough that we’re at 7 on the investment track, then we’d get 3 successes, whereas if we were at 8 or above then we’d get 4.  And the red dice could be handled similarly, and on the same card actually.

I think it’s possible this could speed up resolution a bit although it’s probably less intuitive and so might create some confusion or at least a learning curve.   But I think it has a few upsides.  The biggest is that these resolution cards could help sell the movie-making theme.  The idea of rolling dice to resolve encounters is a bit vague in terms of what it represents thematically.  These cards could be ‘storyboard’ cards, with storyboard art, and the idea could be that each flip of a card could be the screenplay saying what happens next.  (In a world where money was no object you’d have a separate resolution deck for each challenge type or city shape but I doubt we live in that world).  But viewing it this way, each player can also have a hand of a few of these cards, and they can be thought of as ‘script rewrites’ — you can play them to get a better outcome than what you just flipped, or to give the other players a worse outcome if you’re not currently in the encounter.

Another advantage is that it allows the investment to be more fine grained.  Currently every step of investment is worth half a die.  I don’t mind effects like this, but with these cards you could have 5 be better than 4 as opposed to being equal.  In fact you could still have effects like 5 is a little better than 4 but 6 is significantly better, and similar for 7, 6, and 8.  But that might be counter intuitive.

It turns out that the temple can be resolved with the same system and it’s actually much faster.  For each temple card, we find the number of peril symbols we have that match the temple card’s peril, then put ourselves on a track.  Then we each roll dice equal to the delta between our individual position on that track and that of the player who had the most matching symbols.  This requires handing dice around and is a bit slow.  But the resolution card approach could be quick.  Same as the encounter approach, there are a row of boxes with symbols and you line that card up with the track.  Just apply the symbols that appear between your marker and that of the highest player.

And the hubris challenge can be done similarly as well — look at the number of green cubes you hold, and apply all successes lower than that, each one eliminating a hubris.  In some ways this is a big improvement.  The hubris challenge can be really swingy.  I’ve seen times when on a given roll one player, rolling two dice, eliminated 4 hubris and another rolling three dice eliminated none.  This should even out but there may not be enough rolls for that to happen.  I can’t think of a way to do a shared dice pool if we’re all rolling different numbers of dice (roll one a t a time I guess but that’s slow) so this could really help making things fair.  There’s still luck but at least it’s not different luck for everyone.  Although perhaps in a way this is bad, as there’s no come from behind win; if you have 5 cubes and I have 4, you’re sure to get rid of as many hubris as I do.  Although we may not have the same number going in of course.

I see two downsides.  The first is that the number of cards needed to get a truly statistically ‘correct’ distribution may be impractical and we may simply have to settle for ‘the statistics are basically correct but we won’t see all possibilities that could theoretically have happened were we to have used dice’.  Maybe that’s ok.  And whether a particular card is good or bad depends on the circumstances.

The other is simply that rolling dice is fun and gives the ‘a-ha!’ moment of excitement.  I don’t know if these cards will still deliver that.

So this system offers a framework that can maybe enhance the theming, can give us more control over the statistics of outcomes, and can speed up some of the resolutions.  Possible downsides are inability to sample all of probability space and the loss of the tactile aspect of die rolling.