21 June 2011

Sound Off! d6 or d10

Which dice do you prefer?

The d6 - stolen from Yahtzee and Risk games everywhere and considered "dice" by most of the non-gaming world?

The d10 - a bit geeky but very versatile, with base-10 spreads and percentile capabilities?

Sound off in the comments!

By: Brant
Posted by Brant at 16:44
Labels:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Again, "it depends".

Sometimes I want a Bell curve, so I use 2d6. These are also handy for a random event table that will hold up to 66 equally probable events. And everyone has d6 lying around the house.

But d10s have a greater spread, and do percentiles as you point out - so I use them sometimes too. But they are less common, so if you use them in a game, better to include one in the package (I remember getting a People's WarGames game once, and it contained the tiniest d20 I had ever seen - less than half an inch!)

21 June, 2011 17:09
Matt Purvis said...

d10 all the way. More options with few dice. Besides, who can't figure out percentages on the fly with a base 10 system?

21 June, 2011 17:44
Dan Eastwood said...

Consider what level of detail you want, and how much difference it makes to have a "+1" to a die roll.
For example, suppose in an average game each player will roll the dice 100 times: How many of those results will change?

With a d6 it makes a big difference (1 in 6 or ~17 total), a little less with a d10 (1 in 10, ~10 total), and with a d100 percentile roll a +1 will only change the result in one out of 100 rolls (on average).

28 June, 2011 21:27
Brant said...

^ damn statisticians! :P

29 June, 2011 02:26
Dan Eastwood said...

^ damned liars every one! :-)

At risk of providing way (way way) too much* information, here are two links to posts I've written on related subjects:
http://giantbattlingrobots.blogspot.com/2009/10/games-and-reality-are-probably.html

in which I conclude that most any sort of dice do about the same in representing the odds of success or failure if the odds are between 1-to-3 and 3-to-1, but don't do so well when tasks become very hard or very easy (the dice rolls become impossible or automatic).

And this:
http://giantbattlingrobots.blogspot.com/2010/12/dice-and-information.html

in which I describe the Shannon Information of dice. This was fun in a geeky sort of way, but I doubt it is useful for a game designer.


* way way way way way way too much.

29 June, 2011 20:36

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)