What is the most strange/funny/odd dice mechanic you met?

It does… In its own odd way

You multiply them. Lots of low results–1 to 20–and then results get strung out further and further. The highest three possible results, for example, are 81, 90, and 100.

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The ACT system also appeared in Indiana Jones, the Conan RPG, and Gamma World 3ed.

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I wanted a drunken mishaps table for The Hangover. Can’t find it, but some items included were:

  • get a tattoo that says …
  • try convincing someone to change jobs
  • tell the bouncer how you reallly feel about them. 50/50 like or despise
  • Sing and dance your own song

Beginning Idol, a game about playing idol singers, has this fascinating and convoluted dicing system for how it handles performances.

The character performing rolls a number of D6 equal to their appropriate attribute for the performance. All dice with matching faces are removed; the remaining dice are tallied to get your performance score. If you have no dice left, you get 10 points. If the remaining dice are 1-2-3-4-5-6 you get 30 points. If another PC has a bond with you, they can use it to add dice (equal to the level of the bond) to the roll, and if doing so results in no dice remaining it’s instead worth 15 points +1 for each character who helped. There are also a number of effects that you can use to manipulate these rolls, like not removing matched faces, removing all dice showing a certain number, changing a die face to a different number, etc…

The performance score is later used to calculate how many new fans you made, and to determine whether you did well enough to impress the key personality for the scenario (i.e. whether you “won” or “lost”).

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Seems like a mini game on itself! Never heard of Beginning Idol, so twice thank you!

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  • One Roll Engine: Build a dice pool from stat and skill ratings. Any matching rolls gives a success. Group dice by value, pick a group. Number of dice in the group (width) and their shared value (height) both indicate different things - width for speed/power, height for effectiveness. Throw in hard and wiggle dice, bonuses and penalties, and iirc some games also read hit location out. Star ORE probably is the shortest summary of it all (it’s what I’m cribbing from).
  • Lester Smith’s RPGs: These all do different fun things.
    • D13: Actually a D10 read 0-9 and a D4. You can’t roll a single D13 if you have it, because doubles are significant. There are elective rerolls triggered by player or GM of one or more dice depending on difficulty. The result gives both action order in a round (lower strikes first) and effect (but higher does more damage). My favorite bit here is for an uncertain roll: player rolls the D9, GM rolls the D4 in secret. Only the GM knows the final result, but the player can make a guess based on the D9. Is that person lying to you? Eh maybe. (There’s also some fun use of cards esp for possibly out of control paranormal powers.)
    • D6xD6
    • Bookmark
    • D4ce
  • Trey: Dice position relative to the roller is relevant for reading data out of some tables.
  • Cortex: It’s a whole thing.
  • Carcosa: Randomizes the dice used in each encounter for hit dice and for damage done on each attack. Characters lose and regain HD. The value of those dice though depends both on the polyhedral rolled (do you get D4s or D12s?) and the values rolled on those polyhedrals (D4s, ugh, but each die is worth between 4 and 1 HP for that encounter). Damage is applied to the higher rolls on down.
  • AGE system: Does a thing with stunt dice.

I originally ran into many of these by reviewing dice roller modes. :laughing:

I swear I’ve seen “negative explodes” somewhere too, but I can’t recall where. Something like a die that comes up 1 gets rerolled, and its new result subtracted from the total.

I have my own copy of Godlike proudly displayed on the shelf! Really clever!

This is really straing, I promise. I like the idea of having different dice that interact with each other.

Something like a dice drop. Clever as well.

I’ve got the book sitting on some backup folder, I need to read it somewhen

Pure madness (pun intended)

Is it from (but not limited to) Fantasy AGE? I’ve got it as well. I feel though that stunt dice are somewhat broken, but it’s fun. Not played much…


Imploding Dice, let’s call’em this way. First time I heard of. Seems like a really interesting concept. Think of Into the Odd/Cairn saving throws. The worst the die, the worst the consequences.

Oh I remembered another! The Polymorph system (used in The Excellents, Business Wizards, Rebel Scum, Nancy Druid, Sentai and Sensitivity…)

You select a class or type of character and that assigns you one die (from d4 to d10) and then you get a list of numbers that are considered a success on each skill / trait (there’s 4 or 5 of them, plus crits and fumbles).

It’s really simple (you just roll your only dice and compare with the skill numbers) but classes are still important (some have more chances of getting a success on skill than others).

The die is basically the width of class abilities. a d4 class is very specialized while a d10 class may be a jack of all trades kind of class! Beautiful!

Came across this one today, looks very interesting. Its a worldbuilding game involving dice stacking and then when the stack tumbles, It uses a drop table.

Oh, and while I am here, I did a skill based dice drop table fishing supplement:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/380923/a-tactical-simulation-of-land-folk-fishers-plumbing-the-watery-depths-of-a-fantastical-world

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The usage die has my heart, body, and soul. I also want to call out Adam Vass’s die mechanic where you fill a bag with dice to represent the blood your vampire has drained, but if you have too much, you have to “barf” it out of the bag. In other words, pour everything out of the bag.

I’m still waiting on an RPG that uses the die mechanics from the board game Formula D, where you’re pushing your luck by changing gears and rolling bigger and bigger dice. The game is all about knowing when to shift gears and make deadly turns without falling behind or spinning out.

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Sounds interesting. I have to admit I’m not a great fun of drop tables, but surely it’s a shining example of thinking out of the box!

I wonder… is there any TTRPG that implements the usage die for characters’ conditions? Such as: roll Strength check, fail, now you roll a smaller dice until rest. Might be interesting.

Masterpiece.

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The drop mechanic Marcia used for the platonic TTRPG Fishing Minigame.

It made the world a better place.

Good catch! (pun intended)

Who is making David and Goliath dice? Anti-inductive dice - by Richard Green

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This reminds me a lot of the weapon damage charts in Troika!.