A constructive and narrative use for all of those dice?

[Jexik]

At this point, there are an awful lot of different Heroscape dice out there. The old timers have the inefficient red attack and blue defense dice. There are the vanilla white combat dice from the 2nd RotV printing and on. There are 5 different colors of Valkyrie dice. Some of us are lucky (or skilled) enough to have dice that we have won from tournaments, or crafty enough to paint some up on our own.

But what's the point? Why have so many colors of dice?

On Saturday, I felt like I made my already slow army ('trons) even slower by taking time to count up all of my bonuses. This is even worse towards the end of the game, and you're taking your final attacks. "Okay, this Blastatron is attacking that Redcoat. There are three dudes adjacent," *counting on fingers*, "I have height, Astrid, and the base attack of one. Okay, 6 on 2. Four skulls."

Here's an idea: use them to represent different things.

Homing bonus for Glads/Blasts? Bring 5-8 Vydar dice.

Jungle bonus? Keep 1 Ullar die handy. (Might also double well for Melee defense 1, since the two will never be needed at the same time).

Champion bonuses from Grimnak, Nerak, Swogs, Krug's wounded smash, etc? Utgar dice.

Raelin's defense aura? Keep two Jandar dice at the ready.

Height advantage and glyphs? Take one or two other valkyrie dice... Einar perhaps?

Then use whatever desired color for your base dice for the A/D numbers listed on the cards- I'll bring my Steamroller dice most likely.

I'm probably not the first person to mention this. I once saw MattserTruckRally using 4 or 5 different colors of dice, and he might have been doing this exact thing. In fact, I have seen killercactus post saying that he tried using two Jandar blue dice to see the true effect of Raelin's aura. I'm just extending this to its logical conclusion.

I've often felt that the dice offer a great way to explain the improbable in friendly games. If Grimnak rolls a 15 when trying to chomp Agent Carr, you can mention how he started to pick him up, but Carr did a backlip out of his maw, getting a bit of a tear in his shiny leather coat. On a 1, maybe Grimnak decided to chomp a squirrel in a nearby tree. When a Krav agent dies to a ranged attack when he had height and Raelin's aura, I usually say that he was tying his shoe or cleaning his sunglasses.

I've never been into heavy roleplaying; even when I did play D&D in high school, we mostly just ran around killing orcs and taking their stuff, but using different colored dice to represent different effects might aid that narrative element of gameplay. If the Jungle die is what saves you, you might say that the branches or foliage obscured the attacker's vision, or that the tree actually got in the way of the arrow or whatever it was. Inspiration from champions, deflection from Raelin's force field, the magic of a glyph, etc... the list goes on.

Seems like something worth trying.

[MattserTruckRally]

Originally Posted by Jexik

I'm probably not the first person to mention this. I once saw MattserTruckRally using 4 or 5 different colors of dice, and he might have been doing this exact thing. In fact, I have seen killercactus post saying that he tried using two Jandar blue dice to see the true effect of Raelin's aura. I'm just extending this to its logical conclusion.

I just used different colors just to do it but this is a great idea to help out with bonuses.

[dok]

I'm not particularly into this idea for the narrative effect, but I like it for two reasons:

1. If you explain what you are doing with your opponent, it makes it very easy for the two of you to double check that you are using the proper dice.
   
2. As killercactus has suggested, playing this way will help you develop a better intuition about how often those bonuses are coming into play.

Now, I just need to get more than two different sets of dice. (Gilbert's my only flagbearer.)

[Hogg]

This would be an interesting way to analyze the dice.

[Warlord Alpha]

In most games at my house I will roll my normal white dice for defense but if I am in raelin's aura I will add two blue (the first edition ones) defense dice so I can see if Raelin helped at all.

I have to admit though, this is a pretty good idea. I have four different sets of dice at my house currently.

[Hogg]

Originally Posted by Jexik

At this point, there are an awful lot of different Heroscape dice out there. The old timers have the inefficient red attack and blue defense dice. There are the vanilla white combat dice from the 2nd RotV printing and on. There are 5 different colors of Valkyrie dice. Some of us are lucky (or skilled) enough to have dice that we have won from tournaments, or crafty enough to paint some up on our own.

These are really more efficient than the white dice. The attacker and defender can roll at the same time into the same box and still see the results clearly. It saves a lot of time for my group and help keep the pace of the game going.

[spiteofthedice]

We used to roll 12 dice each for initiative and count up the skulls, simply because we had the dice and it felt good to drop that many dice on the table. We switched over because we found we had more respect for the d20 the more often we rolled it.

I like the idea of treating separate dice as the various aspects of the environment and crediting the jungle brush with a block or a homing die with a kill. This is a great way to build on the narrative that I think we all have running through our heads when we play.

That said, you're a huge geek and you should be ashamed of yourself.

[Creationist]

I think the perfect set of dice would be 10 white, 5 red, and 5 blue. The red and blue are the only ones needed for bonuses. Treat all of the bonuses in one group.