Rules Discussion: Dice Manipulation

As much as anyone, I love chucking dice and seeing what happens. The thrill, the anticipation, the excitement of a good result, and the disappointment of a terrible result: dice can engender all of these feelings, sometimes sequentially, but sometimes simultaneously. Yet, I didn't used to feel this way about dice. From my childhood, I have traumatic memories of losing battles to a vastly inferior defending force in Risk, and of never landing on the three or four properties I needed to complete sets in Monopoly. Unfavorable dice rolls even dogged me when I played RPGs, as if rolling poorly was a ravenous bloodhound intent on devouring any sense of fun I could derive from gaming. Dice rolls in games conspired to filch the joy out of my gaming sessions, but I have come to discover a mechanic that is more like a game design paradigm: dice manipulation.

Dice manipulation is actually a time-honored idea, and I'm not referring to loaded dice with weighting to favor certain sides. No, I'm talking about in-game elements that allow players to change dice roll results to favor them. One way this is done is allotted roll attempts, which Yahtzee, in all its underrated glory, manifests beautifully; in that game, you can choose to reroll as many dice as you want to try to achieve a desired result. King of Tokyo, a modern classic, appropriates this approach, and is a wonderful filler game because of it. Another way to manipulate dice rolls is through bonuses or items earned in the course of play; Alien Frontiers, for example, not only employs dice as "ships," but it provides Alien Tech cards that let players change their rolls when they choose to activate or discard those cards. Castles of Burgundy provides workers that afford players opportunities to change rolls, as well. Kingsburg has a similar mechanic in which earned +1 chits can be applied to rolls. A third way dice are manipulated is team resetting, which is endemic to the Escape series of games; in those games, when all of your masks are locked into their black sides, teammates can help you out by granting you their gold "masks" or "faces."

Yet another method by which dice are manipulated does not really involve changing dice rolls as much as changing the role dice play in a game (pun intended). A brilliant exemplar of this is the Dice Masters system created by Eric Lang and WizKids. In Dice Masters, each die is either a Sidekick, a character, or a basic action die. All dice can provide energy of some kind to purchase character or basic action dice or to deploy characters, but the nice twist is that character dice, when rolled on one of three possible sides, are actually played as "characters" on the field. For example, a Captain America die has a Level 1 side, a Level 2 side, and a Level 3 side; Level 3 sides are the strongest offensively and defensively, but considering all three character sides of a six-sided die, you have a 50% chance of deploying a character, a 16.7% chance of generating two energy points, and a 33.3% chance of even generating one energy of a particular type. In addition, Sidekick dice have five energy-generating sides, but also a sixth side that serves as a "sidekick" with an Attack strength of 1 and a Defense strength of 1. In other words, the dice are THE playing pieces, as well as the determiners of the amounts of energy generated, but Dice Masters also involves re-rolls, "spinning" dice up or down levels (i.e. changing the faces of dice to match a certain Level), drawing more dice, putting more dice in the draw bag, and even removing dice from play. If anything, Dice Masters encompasses many dice manipulation principles.

I'm sure that there are more ways in which dice are manipulated or employed, such as in Panamax in which dice determine what kind of cargo is being carried and are placed on the ships themselves. I do invite comments about other examples of dice manipulation. What are your favorite ways by which dice rolls can be altered in a game? Have you encountered any unique mechanics that use dice?