DICING WITH DEATH

The Editor is in a polyhedral relationship...

Dice. Despite the number of card based (or card accessorised) wargaming systems, if there’s one thing that says ‘toy soldier games’ it’s dice. But what sort?

Leaving aside the strange Roman dodecahedrons that archaeologists still can’t indentify a purpose for, along with those platonic shapes contemplated at length by the Greeks (though I don’t think Plato played many RPGs), for millennia most people played games with six sided dice. I have an ongoing debate with those that tend to call D6 ‘normal’ dice (after all – in this day and age – what qualifies as ‘normal’?) but even six sided dice have been... adapted. For example, GW

invented (or at least I think they take the credit for) ‘scatter dice’: six siders with arrows marked on them so that throwing them determines a random direction.

When I first played WRG

games I was introduced to ‘Average Dice’ (that I’ve heard the innumerate mistakenly call D5’s). These have a 2,3,3,4,4,5 sequence. To counter those, many years ago I invented ‘Extreme Dice’ which we gave away at Salute. These had a 1,1,2,5,6,6 sequence and both of them helped fiddle with the

‘standard’ D6 results ‘bell curve’. Having said that – and frustrated by the number of games that required a ‘D3’ (which then ask a player to do maths on the fly with a regular D6) – we also produced ‘Demon D3’s’: D6 cubes with a 1,1,2,2,3,3 sequence. But... never mind the six sided shenanigans: what about that polyhedral bit?

I started playing D&D in the late ‘70s and so had access to the truly awful set of poly-dice that came with the game. I loved the concept but hated the actuality. I played Reaper fantasy rules and other games that needed a percentile role using two D20’s marked up as D10s (and then replaced them with some non-platonic D10’s). I then fell in love with ICE’s Silent Death which made a cunning use of the Polyhedral set. “This is the future!”, I remember thinking, and then...Warhammer appeared with its buckets of D6’s and charts... Oh well.

A couple of months ago I spent the day at the gaming retreat of an old chum, Jon Tuffley (owner of Ground Zero Games). We spent the afternoon in his garden gaming shed shooting the breeze and playing wargames, as people of our age often do. Many of the large legacy of games Jon has created (perhaps all of them) centre around the use of five

polyhedral coloured dice.

“I then fell in love with ICE’s Silent Death which made a cunning use of the Polyhedral set. “This is the future!”, I remember thinking, and then... Warhammer appeared with its buckets of D6’s and charts... Oh well...”

These are always in the same colours: Yellow D4, Green D6, Blue D8, Red D10 and Orange D12, and we played a simple 28mm skirmish game using a system based around those dice. He had some measuring sticks, also demarked in those colours (using dowels and coloured tape) and – by employing those dice and sticks – we played a game with no charts whatsoever and rules that fitted on a post card.

I want to emphasis the simplicity that this brought. There’s been a recent upsurge of interest in ‘one page rules’ (and capitalised, as more than just a mantra but as an alternative to the tomes of rules required to play – for example – Warhammer and 40K). Many of the recent systems from Osprey – especially the excellent work from Joe McCullough – use D10s or D20s as a short way to achieve percentile results delineated, effectively, in ten or five percent increments. I wholeheartedly applaud that. But Mr Tuffley’s system (used in a more intense form in the likes of his Stargrunt and Dirtside rules) really needs to come to the market.

Think of that: not just one page rules but (in the simple skirmish we played, at least) a game with no charts at all that was both challenging and fun! I encourage you all to experiment with your latent polyhedral urges...