just came across this comic book article about daggerheart at gen con. I find it interesting that daggerheart is moving away from d20s.
I love d12s. I see this as an absolute win
hell yeah. d12 best dX
Clearly the most satisfying shape!
Not just that, the d12 has a very useful amount of divisors (2, 3, 4 & 6), which gives a lot of options for different tables and it means it can technically replace a d2, d3, d4 or d6 …for a higher number of divisors in a single die you’d need d24 or d30, which isn’t very common/practical.
It could theoretically also be used as a d10 with 2 extra numbers that can be used for critics/fumbles (that’s what The One Ring does, their custom dice is a d12 with an “eye of Sauron”, a “Gandalf rune”, then numbers from 1 to 10).
It nicely matches the handles of a clock, so you could use it to represent direction/angle, as well as time.
It conveniently matches the months of the year, which could be used when you need a random date, or could also be used as a way to get a weather estimate, with winter months representing colder weather, summer hotter, Autumn rainy, etc.
A lot of occult / religion stuff matches to the number 12, so you could use it to determine, for example, astrological signs/houses (it might be useful when determining random personality / values for an NPC), Chinese zodiac (if you prefer that one), the 12 Olympian gods (each linked to a profession/theme), the 12 main Hindu gods (if you are more familiar with those), etc.
It’s a pity the d12 is often so overlooked.
Using a d12 as a d10 with extra bits is absolutely genius for me. I’m working on a dice-pool based TTRPG system that is based on d10, but I may incorporate this fun tidbit to get some extra juice out of dice rolls.
Huge fan of having a bell curve for most rolls, my main concern is that in combat the random initiative might make it kind of swingy; the initiative system is that if the hope die is higher the players go next, if the fear die is higher the enemies do, for about a 46% chance of enemies going next each turn. So that’s about a 15% chance of players getting three turns in a row- if the game is balanced for quick combats (which seems likely given what we know) that could make a massive difference in how hard a combat is- and in the counter situation, where enemies get three turns in a row (about a 9% chance) an otherwise easy encounter could go very wrong. This is all speculation, of course, but the initiative system being fully random does worry me, since the action economy seems like it would be a major thing in this system
This looks really interesting. A nice balance of simple mechanics that drive interesting stories.
I like the hero systems use of 3d6 so you did not need special dice.
Me too! I’m planning to run a Hero System 6e game soon.
in college I had a guy run a fantasy game based on it. He basically made up his own spells and used the variable power pool rules for magic. fyi champions online free to play is an mmo vaguely based around the champion rules and uses the ip from the game.
