Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Wed, 07/03/2007 - 22:29.

• dice
• games design
• six bullets
• steampower publishing

I’m writing a game called Six Bullets for Vengeance, my quirky little story game which is best described as a Kill Bill meets Memento. It uses several dice pools as its core mechanic, but it didn’t occur to me until my last playtest, when I found myself buying a brick of dice specially, that it might use too many dice.

Now don’t get me wrong – we’re not talking thousands of dice here, Exalted style, but we are talking some. Maybe 10 per player, plus a few more for fun? And you’re rarely required to roll them all at once. They’re d6s too, and most people have a fair few of them lying around, especially if they play Warhammer.

In fact, part of the reason Six Bullets uses so many is that it uses dice as its counters and tokens, which could easily be replaced with real tokens. I just like the image and tactility of dice as counters, of grabbing those tokens you’ve been using to measure your gun shooting or vengeance or whatever right off your character sheet and throwing them down on the table to resolve a conflict. Truth be told it excites me a little! And for that I’m prepared to stick by my big brick of d6s.

I sometimes have a problem with Godlike and its many many d10s, but I get over that pretty quickly when I remember how cool the system is. Dogs in the Vineyard uses a lot of dice too, especially the obscurer types, but I’m learning to stock up on d4s and d8s now.

So I guess my question is – is there such a thing as too many dice? Or tokens or counters or whatever? Have you ever picked a game up and read it and gone “urgh, I can’t play this – it uses too many dice!”?