The core dice system - Radlandz developer diary.

Well, lets start talking about the core game systems and how they make Radlandz the most awesome little skirmish game out there.

Here are the core concepts behind the dice system

• Radlandz uses several dice, d6, d8, d10 and d12. 
• Dice are rolled against a difficulty number in most cases, the number of dice that equal or exceed this target number are successes
• Target numbers are rarely changed, most effects allow you to stage up or stage down a dice. 
• Staging up allows you to replace a dice with one higher type, say a d8 to a d10
• Charging, aiming and ganging up normally allow you to stage up dice. 
• Staging down forces you to replace a dice with a lower one, say a d8 to a d6
• Wounds, being pinned and other negative effects normally cause dice to be staged down
• A lot of rolls allow you to expend a dice roll of 4 or more that didn't succeed to add 2 to another roll. This means rolling 5,5,5 when the target number is 6 means you can actually succeed, and reduces a bit of the luck element.  

How do i determine my dice pool?

Well, a models stats determine their starting dice pools before any modifications. The three stats that have dice pools are

Fight: Melee pool

Shoot: Shooting pool

Grit: Morale/leadership/special powers pool

Example

Say your model has a Fight pool of 2d8/1d6 and wants to shoot a regular trooper in light cover. That troopers defence in light cover is 7, so you will need to roll 7's to hit. With 2d8/1d6 this is pretty difficult to do. 

So, the model aims gaining 1 dice shift and also has a scope on their rifle which adds an additional shift when taking an aim action.

This is a total of 2 positive shifts which can be added in any way to your dice pool. You could boost a d8 twice to make it a d12, giving you d12/d8/d6, or boost both d8s to d10's, giving you 2d10/1d6. Or any other combination. 

The final choice is to boost the d6 twice to d10, for a dice pool of 1d10/2d8

The roll is 9,5,4 on the three dice. The nine is good enough to beat 7 so scores 1 hit. You then choose to burn the 4 to add +2 to the 6, making it an 7. Also good enough to score a hit. 

A 2 hit shot does considerably more damage than a 1 hit shot, but we will cover that another time.

Conclusion

By making most adjustments in the game dice shifts, and keeping target numbers relatively stable, it makes the game variable, without producing massive swings. Even with all the best modifiers in the game, the average shooting target number will be around 6-8, so d12's, while a lot better, hardly mean you are going to always hit and always kill someone.