Quote from: TristramEvans;728608Sure, but WH3 dice not only tell you if you succeed and how well, but also in what manner-i.e. you know if it was inherent talent that let you scrape by, superior skill and experience that win out, or blind luck just twisted fate in your favour.

Never played WH3, but again those ideas are not new and I already have experience with them. Even the idea of solely personal skill v. extra effort and help v. outright external intervention is very familiar to me. Thus the only thing that those ideas now matter to me is the quality and ease of their presentation.

Quote from: Opaopajr;728627Yes, I know, I have played the game. And again the idea of DoS and Crits, even on separate axes, is not new nor hard to integrate for me.

Crits, DoS and additional benefits/setbacks on seperate axes. IMO the Crits are the least important and most confusing aspect. But the additional benefits/setbacks (that are directly related to the dominant intended result) is the better part of the EotE dice system, as it does the most to create the kind of snowballing action that is common in Star Wars.

Also, if something has to be 'new' to have any value, then you are overlooking a great many valuable things. I don't think anyone is arguing that EotE is either new or has a monopoly on a specific result. It's just another dice system that does a bunch of things in a way that some people like. Cool, huh?

Quote from: Opaopajr;728628Never played WH3, but again those ideas are not new and I already have experience with them. Even the idea of solely personal skill v. extra effort and help v. outright external intervention is very familiar to me. Thus the only thing that those ideas now matter to me is the quality and ease of their presentation.

Id be very interested in whatever system youre refering to that translates all that info plus combat stances and speed vs precision into one roll w/o math/charts and is quicker and easier than the WH3rd dice system.

Money.

Quote from: Dog Quixote;728610I think anti-piracy is the big reason, along with attempting to increase price margins.

I don't know if that was specifically their motivation, but it's quite cheap to get custom dice machined these days.

Quote from: Skywalker;728619If your intent is to trip someone up and not to harm them, then it doesn't use the attack action.

Google doublespeak, then fuck off.

Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;727344Have "Fate dice" become common enough to avoid this problem, or are they still considered an unusual die type. I see them in pretty much every FLGS, and they're available from lots of online retailers as well.

For the record, I'm not a fan of the Fate system.

Good question. I really like how Fudge dice work and I've had a bunch of Fudge dice for at least 15 years, maybe more, but when I play in public venues like clubs or conventions I find I still have to explain how they work. So when I released my bounty hunter game I felt compelled (pun not intended) to put a Fudge dice roller online to go with it (https://sites.google.com/site/atomicwastelands/home/fudge-dice-roller).

Considering how much effort I put in making the game accessible and easy to pick up, using the Fudge dice as the default (I do offer d6-d6 as an option) seemed like a rather strike against it. Such is life.

But going forward, assuming the hobby doesn't end up only being played in care homes I think people rolling dice on their mobile devices may well take over so that all the restriction imposed on us by the physical, geometric properties of dice will fade away. Roll on all you d11s and d43s!

Maybe their reason for using special dice is to make a better game? I dunno, it's out there but that may be a reason.

Quote from: Endless Flight;728682Maybe their reason for using special dice is to make a better game? I dunno, it's out there but that may be a reason.

I think you are correct.  I sincerely doubt their intent was malicious.  I think they wanted to make a fun game, with cool dice (fiddlybits), with ideas they thought were new and unique.  But, as Opaopajr noted earlier, they were neither new nor unique.  I think the designer(s) got a bit too full of themselves and confused ideas new to him (or them) with something new and cool to everyone (I think this is easily seen by reading the design blog on FFGs website) without really thinking about whether it was a good idea to do so.

And I think the existence of an inexpensive (in general*) phone/tablet app to do the rolling shows that the dice weren't a money grab.  I have no problem with FFG making money, it's what keeps them making cool boardgames and wargames.  But they need to keep their boardgaming and wargaming fiddlybits in their board and war games.  RPGs have a tradition of people bringing their own fiddlybits to the table and for those fiddlybits to work in more than one game.

Without evidence, I generally attribute bad decisions to ignorance rather than malice, or in this case I suspect a bit of internal design culture (groupthink) within FFG.  With evidence, I'm willing to change that attribution to stupidity, but I don't think there is evidence of that in FFGs case.

*The app is inexpensive in general, but very expensive for a phone/tablet app, which I again attribute to ignorance, not malice.

In terms of WFRP 3e, I think it was a desire to use as many unique advantages that FFG had as possible to distinguish the RPG from others.

In terms of EotE, I think it was cherry picking the part that received the best reaction from WFRP 3e, and adding it to the otherwise successful formula of WH40K RPGs.

Both are decisions to increase RPG sales. Once the decisions were made, there has been subsequent drivers of making the most money and best design from that decision as you would expect.

Odd how these "bad decisions" created one of the best selling RPGs of the last year (EotE).

Could it possibly be that they weren't bad decisions, but instead work for different people other than you?

RPGs are games in my mind, first and foremost, and 50%+ need some kind of "funky" dice not normally found in a house.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;728723Odd how these "bad decisions" created one of the best selling RPGs of the last year (EotE).

Equating sales with good decisions is a slippery slope.

Quote from: Skywalker;728727Equating sales with good decisions is a slippery slope.

RPGs are a leisure activity for having fun, people buy them to have fun, so the assumption that something is a bad game is that people aren't having fun with it.

The idea that it is selling remarkably well, and is continuing to sell remarkably well, implies that tons of people are buying it, and having fun (why else would they buy more).

At some point, people have to be able to separate "bad game" from "game I don't like". I don't like Pathfinder. Its still a good game and people around the globe enjoy it. Hell, even if he had just said he thought it was a bad game, I would probably let it slide in thinking that he is talking from his own perspective, with an implied "for me" in there.

But when he starts addressing it as a "bad decision" and saying that FFG was "ignorant" to release a game with these things, he is veering directly into a path that is ultimately pretty stupid. Saying it was a bad decision and ignorant of them to publish a game that is selling incredibly well and being enjoyed by a very significantly sized audience is dumb.

FWIW I wasn't saying that FFG's decisions were bad ones or that the propriety dice are objectively bad in some way. I disagree with both of those statements.

But good sales aren't the best evidence of good decisions for players either (it only shows good decisions from FFG's POV).