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What fascinates me most about this post isn’t the rule itself (although I do like the rule) but as an example of how the OSR blogsphere can create ripples that influence game design for many years to come. This post is the probable origin of the usage dice mechanic made popular in OSR games like The Black Hack and later Free League’s Forbidden Lands. A few days ago, I even learned they’re making an appearance in the newly announced MCDM Dungeon Crawler “Crows”. While the original post advocates for a dice chain where a roll of one downgrades you from one die type to the next, alternatives frequently involve a pool of dice that tick down after use.
My perception is that usage dice have somewhat fallen from favor in the OSR crowd and most of my GMs say “we’re all adults here, track your arrows and rations” My two copper pieces is that usage die rule is most effective at in-person tables where you can visually reference a die you have set aside for this purpose. I think why I personally like usage dice is it adds a layer of unpredictability to certain aspects of gameplay that can make it harder for players to best their environments through rote preparation, but it really depends on the style of game you’re playing.
However, I think the adaptability of the usage dice concept is impressive and creators are still exploring other innovative ways to use the mechanics. Kobayashi, of the Black Sword Hack recommends reserving usage dice not for tracking arrows but as an abstraction for more important things like debts. Warren over at Prismatic Wasteland even explored the idea of usage dice as part of a random encounter system. There’s probably many more I am missing.
What’s your experience with usage dice? Do they cut down on bookkeeping or add unnecessary clutter to the game?
I think for discrete objects like arrows, the usage die is silly; the idea that an archer who depends on these arrows to keep him alive in combat would, you know, count them seems intuitively obvious. I’m willing to accept that they fit the fiction a little bit in the case of something like a first aid kit, where they could represent “hey, three people in a row needed a pressure bandage so now the kit is out of those” but the bookkeeping has never struck me as easier than making a check mark next to an item.
I could see that objection. I think some tables emphasize combat rounds as one roll per attack in a six second time frame, while others treat rounds as a more nebulous time period where a single roll represents multiple attacks. So I guess how jarring it is depends on the level abstraction happening in a fight.
I see the mechanic working really well in forbidden lands which abstracts more of the adventuring locations environment and to my mind is a more “zoomed out” approach to fantastical roleplaying. But I could see this mechanic as an issue in an OSR game where you are encouraged to interrogate the fiction but can’t definitively quantify your own resources.
For me, usage die is an definite improvement over playing to always ’ handwave’ resources and may encourage those groups to track important items in a different way. I think when I DM, I want players to be running out of things, sometimes at rate they can’t predict to add additional elements of “push your luck” to adventuring (but it depends how much of this already exists in a system or table’s rules). I reckon if the mythic underworld can gutter out torches and jam doors it can spoil rations and break arrows.
I like usage dice. They’re a step up from not tracking limited resources, though in some cases I agree it can feel a little too squishy for tracking important resources. Similar to clocks, designers have found a lot of interesting ways to use them. In my games, I mostly use them for tracking uses of magic items, since I like magic to be somewhat mysterious and unpredictable.
My favorite system with usage dice was in a playtest of one of Evlyn Moreau’s games, Orbital Megastructure. It’s heavy sci-fi where everything from equipment to playbook abilities have usage die. Overall, I like them but can understand how in a delve, it could feel real bad to run out of something useful. Two thoughts about them.
The first is it would be interesting to scaffold mechanics around usage die to mitigate them stepping down. For example, say ammo is tied to a die, but it’s your first shot of the day, then you have a +1 to the roll or something similar. Then it becomes more about protecting your equipment both mechanically and in the fiction as opposed to being punished for a whimsical roll.
Second, it would be interesting to combo usage die with Stress. For example, a situation calls for you to take on Stress, but you have a single usage die of “Get it the fuck together” and it buffers a certain Stress amount you would normally take.
As a designer, I enjoy my toolbox of mechanics and ideas. This is one I need to ruminate on more!
These days I really only tend to use them for “non-quantifiable” things: Protection Scroll Durations, Disease Progressions, Wand Charges, etc. Things that you can’t physically count. Here the uncertainty is a feature that helps introduce a Timer or a bit of Tension because the depletion or countdown can’t really be measured.
This is partially because a run of bad luck on those can somewhat obviate the importance of Player Choices when it comes to their Supply and Gear: A cautious Party that buys/carries extra Torches and Rations only to have them run out far swifter due to chance despite all of that lovely Planning. It seems a bit counterintuitive to a quality we try to encourage most of the time. I feel that Players ought to be rewarded for making those decisions, and Usage Dice just add too much of those fickle randomizers to the equation for me most of the time.
My one “hack” for them, if you do decide to use them for Arrows, Torches, etc. is to make that d4/smallest die deplete to “Last one” instead of “You are suddenly out.” There’s nothing quite like the delicious tension generated and the lovely stories that can develop form being down to that “Last” Torch, Arrow, etc.
I’ve never used them. I never had issues with counting arrows when I played archer characters (and recovering them after a fight involved a roll to see how many I could reuse). I certainly wouldn’t have played an archer if a few die rolls could have left me without ammo.
I could possible work with them on things that aren’t discrete in number, such as spell durations. I don’t know how a usage die would compare with simply a roll for duration at the outset of the spell, though I can see how it could feel different in play. Which provides a better flavor for the magic? A roll of 2D6 for number of rounds duration or rolling a usage die each round?