Dice

[EvilWizardCharacter]

Thanks all for stopping by and reading through some of the early content. More to come and very soon.

As for the composition of the new orange and purple dice, I too was disappointed when they did not arrive looking like the photo shown so often above. I will say, however, that the Orange dice provides an interesting balance of devastating attacks with absolutely fruitless ones.

I had all the Elf Monsters in "The Mage of the Mirror" roll orange dice for both attack and defense, and while it made them heartier and fearsome, they were far from unbeatable, rolling zero skulls as often as they rolled six. As far as straight offense is concerned, black seems to be the dice of choice for the Heroes in my Questing Party, even if purple presents the best odds of the highest caliber attack.

And while some here understandably opt for few dice variants, it's pretty fun to unload a whole ziploc baggie of multi-colored dice onto the gameboard and divide it all up before we start. That said, once we start anew (and we'll have to eventually if we don't want each Quest to take eight hours), I will add the colored dice more sparingly, like Lemmermon has done with his wonderful cards.

[Count Mohawk]

Somehow half of this thread has disappeared.

As it turns out, there are actually two threads named "Dice", both started by Pitbullsandaks - and within four days of each other, no less! This is the other thread.

[sorcerersapprentice]

Somehow half of this thread has disappeared.

Just in short, I feel that there is not a lot to be added beyond the colored dice from Germany. Maybe if you manage to have some cobinations he is not offering, and if they really are HQ style, my interest awakes and I would buy some.

Some products/ideas reach a maximum zenith and realistically can go no further having met all possible function and or form required for their existence... and trying to push beyond that boundary is often needless.

I have some 100+ spell cards, and while I didn't use them all - I did use a lot of them. Having too many cards on the board for the players to handle tied up the available space to set things out for the players. So I started using dice for wandering monster, random treasure, random trap, random weapon finds and even poison indicators or critical hit indicators but just as normal coloured D6. I think there is some advantage to having dice available where you can put anything you like on them and cheaply too - but naturally whether you buy them or not depends entirely on how you like to play HQ. I think the german dice are very nice, but I think there is room for plastic/custom derivatives too.

[Anderas]

So in fact you are not talking about the reinvention of a combat die, but instead you want to put other things on the die.

[sorcerersapprentice]

Exactly. no reinvention is necessary or was ever mentioned. It's a cube with stuff on it. that's about its lot. choosing what stuff goes on the cube can be a simple affair of accepting available choices, such as wood and HQ symbols, or having the option to put your own stuff on the cube including, for example: ALL skulls or ALL Shields on one, or red skulls with a lightening texture on two sides, triple blue skulls with a mountain background on two other sides and I dunno, purple and orange symbols on the other two sides. Or maybe you want a dice with a wizard, barbarian, elf, thief, skaven, dwarf on the six faces... whatever it might be someone wants, I'd just be offering an inexpensive way to do that (i.e. custom design) the six or twelve dice. I get a few bucks, the customer gets custom dice with all the cool stuff they want on each die, (not necessarily just six of the same dice) and theoretically, everyone's happy

[sorcerersapprentice]

Yep thats not a problem Count Mowhawk... I could put 9 of the symbols on one side if necessary. be a touch hard to read but a single symbol with a x9 would work as well...







Anyway, I've ordered some prototypes, I'll take photos when they arrive. I will also post images of the new HQ pieces I've been working on in the not too distant future.

[sorcerersapprentice]

I just did a quick mock-up of some other types of dice you might consider. As you can see, using 9 symbols for instance makes the dice hard to read at a glance, but you could just add roman numerals or a 'x' sign and have more powerful rolls without compromising on image integrity.

[IvenBach]

Those black shields look nice. Easily distinguishable. May want to remove the red in keeping with black/white of the original.

[sorcerersapprentice]

Thanks Ivan. Anyone wishing to change the colour of the designs inc the image, background, texturing, and which types appear how many times on each dice, could do so.

Here's a couple more mock-ups of potential dice that I'm looking at creating.



This is a Trap & Treasure set. I designed it for rolling random treasure/traps instead of using cards but also for use by the GM when players are repeating quests so the adventurers, cannot rely on memorizing certain layouts and treasure spots next time they play through but experience chance encounters of both trap and treasure. I feel that keeps things more exciting for both the GM and adventurers. (Note that the images are just temporary samples).



And the following is a set of Trap & Treasure Dice that use actual matched pictures of the tiles I use. So the gas trap image, looks just like the gas trap tile. The sand trap tile looks just like the sand trap tile and so on.

In play, the GM would take turns using one then the other to determine an outcome.
So for example, I set a room up with 'X' type of tiles - could be sand, could be snakes, could be fire, could even be a ladder to a secret room. So this dice changes what I put out and keeps things interesting even on a 2nd playthrough.

There are multiple opportunities for using coloured and additional dice I think.

Such as to determine the strength of a door, a poison attack, critical attack, luck, even what a trader might sell. etc. etc.

In one/two of my Quests I had the adventurers pursued by armies of orcs - too many to stand and fight, so they had to get through the level as quickly as possible. One of the unique rules I implemented was that doors could be barricaded.
They could barricade a door, but had to use all the furniture in a given room to do so, and could either only barricade the door or search for traps and treasure. They could not search for traps and treasure and then barricade the door, there was no time.
When barricaded, and the GM's* turn I rolled a normal dice and if I got a black shield the door was considered broken through. Anytime a door broke, the GM either got to send in 8 orcs or one random wandering monster per player to attack. (2-3 if the adventurers were seasoned).

Having extra dice to determine certain rules and outcomes, would, in my experience, have been rather useful. Yes you can do everything with just a few dice if you need to - but when you are operating 8 orcs, 4 monsters, putting out traps, handing out cards, setting up the board etc, the less time you can spend on crucial and repetitive decisions/outcomes is beneficial to the momentum of the game, especially one as white-knuckle as the one I put players through where they had to flee for their lives through a maze/trap infested nightmare of ravines pursued by an army of orcs

Just examples.

* GM - Game Master = Evil Wizard

[EvilWizardCharacter]

The treasure and trap dice look like a fun variation; you could probably conceive of a system that would allow for some uniquely random moments in the same way Warhammer Quest is almost entirely random, and you'd never have to worry about the awkwardly evolving gameboard that never seems to obey the table you're playing on. Three rolls on these and other similarly faced dice, and you could generate the number and location of doors, monsters, traps, etc.

We use random events in our Quests to keep an element of uncertainty and suspense, but randomly generated rooms in a couple places could have the same effect. That could even be a gimmick for a whole string of Quests--perhaps questing in the mutli-tiered castle of some mad sorcerer whose random lair mirrors his random moods.