![Bolt Action Painting Tutorial – WWII American Paratrooper [7 Days Early Access]](https://images.beastsofwar.com/2021/03/Bolt-Action-American-Paratrooper-coverimage-225-127.jpg)
Cult Of Games XLBS: Randomless Wargaming; Time To Ditch The Dice?
January 31, 2021 by warzan
For some website features, you will need a FREE account and for some others, you will need to join the Cult of Games.
Or if you have already joined the Cult of Games Log in now
What difference will having a FREE account make?
Setting up a Free account with OnTableTop unlocks a load of additional features and content (see below). You can then get involved with our Tabletop Gaming community, we are very helpful and keen to hear what you have to say. So Join Us Now!
Free Account Includes
- Creating your own project blogs.
- Rating and reviewing games using our innovative system.
- Commenting and ability to upvote.
- Posting in the forums.
- Unlocking of Achivments and collectin hobby xp
- Ability to add places like clubs and stores to our gaming database.
- Follow games, recommend games, use wishlist and mark what games you own.
- You will be able to add friends to your account.
What's the Cult of Games?
Once you have made a free account you can support the community by joing the Cult of Games. Joining the Cult allows you to use even more parts of the site and access to extra content. Check out some of the extra features below.
Cult of Games Membership Includes
- Reduced ads, for a better browsing experience (feature can be turned on or off in your profile).
- Access to The Cult of Games XLBS Sunday Show.
- Extra hobby videos about painting, terrain building etc.
- Exclusive interviews with the best game designers etc.
- Behind the scenes studio VLogs.
- Access to our live stream archives.
- Early access to our event tickets.
- Access to the CoG Greenroom.
- Access to the CoG Chamber of Commerce.
- Access the CoG Bazarr Trading Forum.
- Create and Edit Records for Games, Companies and Professionals.
Happy Sunday! Codebusters is back!
Thanks to this Billions Suns malarky I’m currently off new projects and dusting off old fleets from BFG, Star Trek Attack Wing, some 3D prints of Go’uld ships from Stargate and I’m looking with great interest at the future release of Star Wars Armada clone fleets. @Avernos you’re personally derailing my painting timetable with this stuff!
My Night Goblins just had the Silver Tower Spider Goblins added to their ranks.
Have you thought about reaching out to Bernard Cornwell for an interview about your book club for an interview?
There’s a good little video showing most of the populare SciFi ship s in scale to real life buildings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTPwbVqU6lc&t=3s
Cool to hear A Billion Suns has grabbed people’s imagination
I’m not derailing I am expanding your gaming world view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6K2Jqr60cg&ab_channel=EagleModels
well that’s all kinds of awesome
‘Appy Sunday ! Ditch dice eh?? What will I obsessively collect now then?
It’s the XLBS Show……..Happy Sunday fellow Cogs!
for the record….which “Winter King” book is the one to be read? Bernard Cornwell?
For the record @warzan your daft to want to continue this pandemic way of life….I get what your saying, but you are wrong! 🙂
@lloyd your chin rest is the ‘Bees Knees’! I can’t wait to give it a try.
So after watching @avernos talk about B5 and ABS last week, I then went to your Project and read more. After seeing the Babylon 5 model kit I had to stop and go rummage through my model kits in the basement. Guess what, I still have that model myself. It’s looking like I might just build along with you.
……Well, now snagging the extra decal sheets for printing. I still use the ‘Testors Decal Paper, Clear’ but I’ve just had a look on Amazon for different papers as I’ve been watching this show. I might buy some of the Lazer transfer paper and take it down to the local print shop and see if they’ll give it a try and print them for me on that paper.
.
.
.
.
On the subject of “RANDOMLESS WARGAMING; TIME TO DITCH THE DICE?” 3D Matrixing sounds soooo much more complicated. PLus, if your burying your nose in charts it’s no different than the Dice, stats, and numbers your ditching. Someone remind me what’s wrong with DICE?
Sounds like a boring way to game. To me, others may love this. Guess I’m a grognard.
As to removing dice from the table(time code [1:33:50])…..we never throw the dice on the table, they are always rolled in a tray that is NOT on the table. We also, don’t allow cards or paper sheets on the table.
At time code [1:37:07] @lloyd talks about lists for armies. If there is no Randomness, won’t people just copy the same Champion List, and now tournaments will look very boring, (we already have this in some tournaments). Also, Games will die off as no one will buy anything that is not on the Killer List. You’d have to constantly NERF stuff to change it up and that will piss folks off in a BIG WAY.
Maybe I’m missing something. It just seems to change things from being a ‘GAME’ and making it a ‘Tabletop Simulation’.
yay you can join me on my painting journey
If I can get my studio table cleaned off I’ll take pictures of the opening of my B5 box and try starting a new project on OTT.
(unless it blocks me from starting a new one because I suck at finishing up projects) 😃👍
.
@avernos you spoke of the Fleet Action ships being possible too small compared to the B5 model, do you think the other B5 ships are scaled closer? Table space is not a problem for me so slightly larger minis are not a show stopper for me. Unfortunately I don’t have any surviving minis on hand of the larger ones to compare with.
no fleet is around two thirds the size they should be, B5 Wars ships would be three or four times larger than they should be.
good luck with the project
> Someone remind me what’s wrong with DICE?
Dropping down another $35+ on a set of rules and finding rules you already own.
That’s not even wargames. RPGs are almost all dice-driven, and dungeoncrawlers with miniatures will cost you $100+ apiece. No point buying more games if they’re not all that different than the ones you have. IMO, Dice, much too often, lead to game design traps, resulting in samey games, with a much smaller game design space than we could have. The popularity of Gloomhaven shows that you can have a very different dungeoncrawler game without dice mechanics. Magic the Gathering and Eurogames are entire genres of mechanics often without dice. That’s not to say you can’t have an innovative dice game system, but the next step from output randomness (eg. roll to hit) is result mitigation (spend resources to change a die result or roll more dice) which, imo, doesn’t capture the depth some card games have. (Of course, few card games involve a two-dimensional positional game area, which is a standard in most wargames.)
BGG had a thread on dice in wargames back in 2017: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1709076/wargames-dice-or-no-dice
Well, I’ll never trade dice for a card only based system. I stopped playing Magic the Gathering in the beta days. Watching good folks almost go to blows over card interpretation was enough for me to walk away from that. Not to mention the unending Chase for the “Random” Super Card that that game lives on. There’s more Randomness for you.
As far as the price of games, (you mentioned +100 for same’ish product). It’s a hobby and we love buying the new shiny. IPs of popular games will continue to draw us in as it’s something we love. Game Companies, and retailers like Wayland would go out of business if we stopped buying games.
In my humble opinion, the removal of Dice/Randomness would remove the “longshot, underdog, hail Mary” in gaming that says, “anything can happen under the rarest of occasions”. Life IS Randomness. To remove “Random” from gaming is to create an artificial environment that doesn’t exist in life and soon players would abandoned the game as Not Feeling Real.
Again, IMHO. 🤔. YMMV
Not saying it’s a bad idea. But how many similar $35+ rulesets, $200 miniature models, and another hundred hours of painting does the market need? I’m also sure there’s just as much rules lawyering for dice-based games as there is card-flopping ones. Dice aren’t the only form of randomness. A card system is often random, typically when a deck is shuffled and a card is drawn.
If someone wants to spend another few hundred dollars on another similar game system, be it dice, card-flopping, deckbuilding, worker placement, FPS, or what have, I don’t particular care. But, personally, I’d rather have game designers be “revolutionary, not evolutionary” with their game design.
HAPPY SUNDAY!!
Gary Chalk brought out a fantasy game some years ago that didn’t have dice rolling or any combat randomness in it. Was very boring
I guess removing the dice could make things less exciting during those clutch moments – but it could still be a very interesting experiment
@warzan – I’ve also enjoyed the lockdown format of the shows and don’t think you need to go back to the studio for the weekenders. Many pros coming out of the pandemic.
My employer resisted work from home for years and now having been forced into it and seeing it works they’ve started selling off offices and committed to full time work from home for all employees. It’s amazing.
We also had our second child in July2020 and I got to see everything and be here for those early months instead of just 2 weeks.
Bloody Warren, always punishing the queen by charging up the rear ….. sigh
Hmm, you’ve got me thinking about deterministic X-Wing now. I think you could easily remove the dice from the game and make it a real manoeuvring tactical affair, without the feel badsies of a crap dice roll affecting the outcome.
I miss the studio. It still feels a bit like patchwork. But Ben being able to see is a good thing.
the first boss from the construct quarter?
There are certainly some games that would benefit from a reduction in randomness. But in many cases there’s a place for something to account for luck. That lucky longshot across the board, through various wind patterns, that hits its target just at the correct angle to find a weakspot in the armour and a major vein. The plucky Aguacile foot soldier whose automatic single shot against a rampaging TAG takes it down despite the odds. That lucky swing of the un-martial-trained medic’s torch that hits the swordmasters temple You know… those cinematic, water-cooler moments!
I rarely play boardgames with heavy reliance on dice, but a good euro-game like that is a very different prospect to a tabletop game. OK, there may still be some randomness in a shuffle of an objectives deck etc, but even then there’s usually a choice and time to pursue or not a tactic to score points by different means.
If Lloyd’s beard was luxurious enough he wouldn’t need a foam chin-rest, would he Gerry?
correctomundo
Diceless games without a random element would mean @lloyd woukdnt be able to play some of his favourite games like Saga for example
Well, not in its current form – but he’d be able to mod it to work with the ability to pick powers from the battleboards with a currency system rather than rolling for them.
Hi COGz an the XLBSers.
As they say in the film “dice”….. “the dice must roll”….
One of the issues with comparing wargames with chess is that in chess, which ever piece attacks always wins. Wargames that reflect the randomness of war can include a failed charge/attack. What dice give us is that randomness that happens in war.
For example at the battle of Pharsalus Caesar ordered an uphill charge by infantry against a numerically superior opponent. Without a random element like dice, Caesar’s victory would never happen in a tabletop battle. If that battle was based purely on terrain, numbers and expectation, it would always end in Pompey’s favour.
Wargames like KoW can give you a simulation of how a rear charge can potentially do more damage in a charge. What the dice do is remove the guarantee of a kill with that rear charge. When you charge the queen in the rear, you assume you’ll damage her, but sometimes she spins around and damages you!
Just on Modern military using wargames for simulations, my favourite was Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, before the invasion of Iraq. Really worth a read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002#:~:text=Millennium%20Challenge%202002%20(MC02)%20was,Armed%20Forces%20in%20mid%2D2002.&text=The%20simulated%20combatants%20were%20the,characterized%20as%20Iran%20or%20Iraq.
@warzan/COGz you should dig through the richplanet videos they have been on the channel a few Times about the burial site and the history of Arthurian buildings.
Check last week’s episode, the book’s in the comments Ben.
https://youtu.be/keSC6emL1O8 one of the King Arthur video’s @Warzan
Happy Sunday all, the answer is more dice hands full of dice to launch at your nemesis when they play that special rule you totally forgot about 🎲🎲🎲🎲😳🎲🎲🎲🎲
An then Justin turns up an Alpha strikes everything? Lol
We’ve used ‘averaged’ rolls in our games. My chum rolls terribly – we think his dice are cursed – and as a result was never carrying off those ‘on a 6…’ abilities.
By averaging all our rolls we could concentrate on strategy and tactics.
ever swap out your dice for average dice and see what a difference it makes?
Have to admit, I’d not heard of them before and thus we didn’t. For us it was easier to simply do the maths as a ‘deterministic’ (if that’s the right term) result.
it’s worth picking a pair up they’re handy to have
There was a book of diceless rules for historicals put out in the early 1970s. It was called Rules for Wargaming by Arthur Taylor and published by Shire Publications. It’s been reprinted by John Curry (with John Tunstill’s Discovering Wargames and Bill Lamming’s Medieval campaign and Battle rules) in his History of Wargaming project – http://www.wargaming.co/recreation/details/ewvol5.htm
I think there does need to be some random element (what Charles Grant used to call the Imponderable) in wargames to reflect the way things never turn out precisely as expected in real life. Whether dice, cards or something else (the old Avalon Hill postal boardgames club used to use share prices on the New York Stock Exchange) is less important though.
Lol love the kid? toys at the end Guy’s
Thanks for the Golden Button guys. I really enjoyed making Age of Plamsa although the idea was Warren’s.
I want to take a crack at this no dice nonsense, I think I’ve got an idea but I’ll think on it a while.
Best laugh I’ve had in a very long time! 😂😂😂 what a way to close the show.And a very big thank you to Jerry for reminding me to read more Discworld.
Randomness represents unpredictability, and that’s what people are. Ulitamately our minis do represent people and the more the rules have them act like people the better.
Whether randomness is a commander falling off his horse and preventing a unit moving that turn, a group of pikemen telling you where to stick the idea that they’d charge that bunch of shiny lads in armour over there, or a group of militia holding off Napoleon’s Old Guard all afternoon; those are the things we’ll still be talking about years later.
Seriously lads, when you’re introducing multi-dimensional arrays into combat resolution you’ve lost me. I’m a programmer for a living and have written systems that used them. Ex-colleague (very bright fella) still moans about it 15 years on.
It’s an interesting topic but as a game? Well it’s probably not for me.
Good discussion topic. It is only by thinking about alternatives that we truly see the advantages of our exisiting way of being. @brennon is right. If you want a reliable deterministic mechanic then look no further than board and card games. You could do worse than play Magic to see the possibilities of combat without dice based randomness – still almost infinite complexity. You could do worse than playing Stratego @lloyd, that’s chess with a few more troop types. I’ll be sticking to my dice and card based random factors – but at least I better undertand why now.
00:00 Happy Sunday
00:20 @warzan blowing his load early… no chance for @brennon to cut his internet XD
01:30 yeah… Mastermind.. was never good at it XD
12:45 hearing books via audible is all fine and dandy but if it runs “in the background” I doubt one gets all information fed that is needed for a book club.
18:30 From a viewers perspective: I think the discussions have taken a hit a bit because you can’t throw things at people. But maybe that’s just the adjustment phase.
34:00 Chinrestpainting… . XD
42:00 hole punches punch holes… holy punchman!
47:20 @lloyd only doing a hand full of pictures?! Madness!
51:15 It’s a biiiiig cigar
1:03:00 Randomles wargaming is a myth! Hoax! Heretics!
1:20:00 I think I’ve had too many waffles…. I hear what is said but I can’t follow along mentally for the life of me… *blinks*
1:35:00 still very much not understanding anything…. I still blame the waffles…
1:36:00 Eurogames…. that’s why I can’t make head nor tails from this… never got behind games like that…
1:40:00 Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagaaaaaaaaaaaaa PEW PEW
1:46:00 If you want to see great weird rip off go to YouTube and watch ashens. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxt9Pvye-9x_AIcb1UtmF1Q
1:49:50 E.T. light up finger! I told you it was a real thing! @limburger
I’m signing out… night.