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I don't remember much about last night's dream, all I recall is I with friends, and we couldn't play some game because "we didn't have color-coded dice." There was a big, complicated chart with numbers of different colors on it.
After I woke up I realized it wasn't a bad idea. It reminded me of roulette, where you have colors (red and black) as well as numbers, thus representing a multi-dimensional space with a single toss of the wheel. In RPGs we usually do this with multiple dice -- say, looking at both the total and the lowest or highest values on individual dice -- but I think coloring the die, in such a way that color doesn't strongly correlate with value, could work just as well.
For example, one cool element in the old FGU game Merc was its targeting system. If you were shooting someone, you took a diagram of the human body and super-imposed a plastic overlay, with a gun-sight diagram, over it, with the center of the diagram over the part you're aiming at. If you rolled well, you hit exactly where you were aiming. Rolled OK, and you'd a nearby part of the body. If you rolled poorly you'd miss. It allowed players to determine attack success and hit location simultaneously, and in an immersive manner.
You could try this with the color coding. Say you have a d20 based system, and you make an attack roll. If you beat the DC by 10, you hit your bullseye target; beat by 5 to 9 and you're slightly off, 0 to 4 and you're farther off (but still will probably hit something). The color on the die could then determine whether you shot too high (red), too low (green), too far to the left (blue) or to the right (violet). The overlay would have dots of the four colors. Colors could be distributed, say, as follows:
Black could indicate auto-success or failure, wild-cards, or what have you, depending on context. Thoughts?
After I woke up I realized it wasn't a bad idea. It reminded me of roulette, where you have colors (red and black) as well as numbers, thus representing a multi-dimensional space with a single toss of the wheel. In RPGs we usually do this with multiple dice -- say, looking at both the total and the lowest or highest values on individual dice -- but I think coloring the die, in such a way that color doesn't strongly correlate with value, could work just as well.
For example, one cool element in the old FGU game Merc was its targeting system. If you were shooting someone, you took a diagram of the human body and super-imposed a plastic overlay, with a gun-sight diagram, over it, with the center of the diagram over the part you're aiming at. If you rolled well, you hit exactly where you were aiming. Rolled OK, and you'd a nearby part of the body. If you rolled poorly you'd miss. It allowed players to determine attack success and hit location simultaneously, and in an immersive manner.
You could try this with the color coding. Say you have a d20 based system, and you make an attack roll. If you beat the DC by 10, you hit your bullseye target; beat by 5 to 9 and you're slightly off, 0 to 4 and you're farther off (but still will probably hit something). The color on the die could then determine whether you shot too high (red), too low (green), too far to the left (blue) or to the right (violet). The overlay would have dots of the four colors. Colors could be distributed, say, as follows:
- Red: 3, 10, 11, 18
- Green: 4, 9, 12, 17
- Blue: 5, 8, 13, 16
- Violet: 6, 7, 14, 15
- Black: 1, 2, 19, 20
Black could indicate auto-success or failure, wild-cards, or what have you, depending on context. Thoughts?
