Dice Battle Mechanic

When I first read it, it sounded like just a rip-off of Risk, although the more I think about it, the different types of dice could put a very interesting twist on it.

Have you tested it? Does it stay fair, or do the d30s make things unfair?

I like the idea that a player can use and choose different kind of dices during a fight.

You can give a "maximum" score to each player, like as 60, and player has to choose if use 2d30 or, for example, d30 + 3d10 as you say or 10d60.
Or, in other way, players have to roll one kind of dice (ex. d30) and they can choose others dices, as they want...

The dice dont have to alway represent a numerical value. You have three different type of dice sets, and each dice can have like 3 rock symbols, 1 paper, 1 scissor, and 1 blank (wild). And similar ones for paper and scissor. You can then have this type of interaction with a set of dice beating another set (statically) but you can still have a set of dice win against another. So if you have the 5 rock dice, and you opponent has 2 paper dice, it can still mean that the rock dice will lose even if it has more.

This is a good theme if you have something like a war game, where you have anti-tank units, anti-air, and anti-infantry units. I dont know all the numbers behinds this, but i hope this can spark some ideas.

I just came up with a similar idea (originally posted on BGG)

Hey, so there were a lot of discussions here about a year ago about what the perfect RPG-lite Boardgame would be like; which of the current crop was best; how specific mechanics interacted to make such a game, and so on. I've been working on such a game off-and-on for a few years, when inspiration strikes, which has resulted in a "study," Dungeon Derby, and mountains of insane, rambling notes. Last I left off with the idea of a game in which a party of heroes was questing to defend a kingdom from hordes of invading monsters, gaining abilities, looting, and raiding dungeons. Now I see someone's making Defenders of the Realm. Which is cool, and I don't see how I could conceivably be not buying it. But I'm going to soldier on because I'm not sure it's exactly what I want; specifically, the combat looks shallow.

I've been caught trying to come up with a combat mechanic that would have some tactical depth (without getting into grid-based minis), be quick, and allow an AI-run mobs to be distinct and require some thinking to beat. I was extremely impressed by the mechanic in Delve the Dice Game: The Party rolls dice en bloc and, with a single roll, deals and receives damage at once. Awesome. Well I said I'd probably steal the idea, and just today I think I had the epiphany required to make a functional mechanic.

The Party rolls Combat Dice which result in "Hits" and "Blocks". The Monsters roll theirs, with each side's Blocks canceling out the other's Hits, and with excess Hits turning into Wounds, which can be reduced by Armor but otherwise stick around. So, if the Party rolls 7 Hits and 3 Blocks, and the Mobs roll 4 Hits and 4 Blocks, then the Party would have one Wound to deal with and the Mobs would have three. Wounds would then be assigned evenly to the player characters, probably with some abilities allowing PCs to "Tank" by taking extra wounds (sparing the weaker characters); Mobs would be assigned wounds in order of an "Aggro" stat (i.e. if there's 3 wounds to assign, and an Aggro 3 Demon and an Aggro 2 Cultist, then the Demon takes two hits and the Cultist takes one.).

Tactics would happen in two ways:

First, Five types of Combat Dice: 'Aggressive', 'Balanced', 'Defensive', 'Ranged', and 'Magic'. The first three would have different amounts of Hits and Blocks; for example, the Aggressive die might have three Hits, one Block, one "Two Hits", and one blank; the Balanced might have three Hits and three Blocks (I'm going with 6-siders just because this will be a free Print-and-Play and I figure custom d6's are easiest to make). So even though the Aggressive die has a blank, it averages more Hits. Ranged and Magic dice would have "Ranged" and "Magic" results instead of Hits. I'm not sure what Ranged and Magic results would do, but
What Combat Dice you roll is determined by your items and abilities. Thus a Wizard would be expected to roll lots of Magic dice and not so many of the others- but give that Wizard a giant-ass enchanted two-handed battleaxe, and suddenly he's chopping mobs in half like he's been doing it his whole life.

Second, players can spend their rolls to use abilities instead of counting them as Hits or Blocks. For example, there might be an ability called "Stunning Blow" that costs three Hits and says, "Prevent target monster from contributing Combat Dice next Monster Attack Phase. You may set that monster's Aggro to 1 this turn". If the party's Fighter has that ability, and he rolls four Hits, he could either contribute all of them, or only contribute 1 but take the biggest baddie out of the picture for a turn. But if he only rolls 2 Hits, the ability can't be used at all. "Ranged" and "Magic" results would be used for Archery-themed special abilities and for spells, respectively, giving four 'resources' for ability costs. There could even be an ability that triggers off rolling a blank; why not?

Thanks, Delve! XOXOXO
(Game design is like a science, we all build on each others' ideas. If you want to make money, people really only pay for the bits and chrome anyway.)

So I was just wondering what people think about this mechanic, if they had any suggestions, and if there were any games using a similar mechanic.

you look pretty good for a bot

..just be careful with the outcome. If two parties face off and both sides would be using the same number of "balanced dice", the only possible outcomes would be that the exact same amount of damage are being made to both sides.
To avoid this, you need to add blank faces on the dice.

Otherwise, an interesting idea.

After this reading this I was intrigued enough to test the probabilities in an excel spreadsheet. i.e. 3x d10's vs 1d30. Interestingly the advantage seemed to be held by whomever wins on draw. And rolling many, many low sided die vs one large die (1 -> sum of the maximums of smaller dice) will approach 1 / e. ~36.8% with respect to the larger dice winning. That is with the assumption that ties are won by the smaller die. Its real easy to test the situation of many 1 large die (say d60) vs 60 "1" sided dice. A "1" sided die will always roll 1, so it'd beat a d60 only when the d60 rolls 1. Under the above rules, the 1 sided die would have 60 "lives" though. So the d60 wins with probability 59/60. (Any roll greater 1.) But it needs to win 60 times against the many smaller dice. The probability of this is (59/60)^60 ~ 36.5%

Now if you test this with ties going to the larger dice, it skews in favor of larger die. Even with 2 d15 and 1 d30, d30 still win nearly 60% of the time.

The last situation I briefly tested. If you take a tie to be a reroll, a larger number of higher sided dice will still have an edge over more dice with a lesser range. It will just be less so than the case where it ties go to the larger sided die. Which makes sense.

I figured I'd share this little bit of information with anyone who might consider using any of the mechanics listed in this thread.