Monday, November 8, 2010

Changing Penalty Dice

Last time I talked about increasing the number of penalty dice a wound slaps you with. This time around, I'm going to throw out a small rules tweak mostly geared toward cleaning up play a little, but that also adds a splinter  to the pain wound penalties inflict.

Penalty dice are d9s. Roll a d10 and reroll if you come up 10. Just ignore it and roll again. We did this because my group thought d8s didn't inflict enough of a penalty and d9 was 33% worse than a d6. Sure. Okay.

But why not just make it a d10? Mathematically speaking it's a little less clean, but in gameplay itself it's smoother. I've seen a lot of rerolls to get around those 10s, and while some people have die roller apps that they can program to use a d9, there's still plenty of people who like picking up oddly shaped plastic pieces and tossing them on a table. I'm one of them.

So let's skip the rerolls. Penalty dice are now d10. Yes, that worsens your odds a little more. They're penalty dice. They're supposed to hurt. And hey, it's not like you're rolling pools of d12s. That would hurt for all sorts of reasons. You ever notice those dice have a tendency to keep rolling right off the table? It does so more than any other shape, except for maybe that golf-ball looking d100 one of my players has.

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