[Descent] Multi-Resolution Dice

[Mathew E. Reuther]

This is something which Fantasy Flight has been using in a number of titles (I believe they use it in the WFRP 3e rules too) which we ran across playing Descent tonight. ($100 board game a la HeroQuest where you explore a dungeon with a party of four, playing against the Overseer who is running all the monsters.)

The interesting thing about the mechanic is that you've got multi-colored dice.

Attack type dice (one face is a miss):
Blue are for ranged attacks.
White for Magic (which are of course also ranged, for the record).
Red for Melee (No range on melee, duh.)

Adder dice (no misses, these enhance in a big way):
Green
Yellow

Power dice:
Black are kind of minor/special modifying, they enhance what you're doing with surges that offer customizing through weapon stats or skills or character abilities and range/damage adder choices.

The thing which you get are faces of dice with 3 pieces of info on them. Like maybe a white die that indicates 3 damage, a surge, and 2 range all on the same face.

Essentially, you're rolling one die and getting 3 results, all without a table lookup.

***

Problem for mere mortals? The dice are obviously custom. This means they would need to be manufactured. (Dice can be silk-screened fairly cheaply.)

Still, first time I've played a system which uses these kinds of dice and I've got to admit it was kind of interesting.

[Mathew E. Reuther]

Oh yeah, forgot to mention the outcome (got all excited by the dice) . . .

Party (2 players, 2 characters each) explored the dungeon without a death, cooperating well as they did so. The end boss did not pose much of a challenge to them as they had very carefully distributed their hard-won items amongst themselves.

Not much for an RPG, but with RPGers even boardgames have their moments, so we had a laugh or two with the traits some of the characters seemed to have.