Enabled per-comment hyperlinks, which should make things easier to follow. And to put them to good use…
“It’s an RPG, but the dice rolls themselves are arbitrary. On the middle of the table is a large target of concentric circles, and your performance is based on how near to the bullseye you get with your massive handfull of dice. Somehow managing to get all twenty of you d20 into the centre of the target (the size of a large coin, say) would probably destroy evil, all of it, with no saving throw.”
“It’s marbles played with polyhedral dice - each player has a set of dice in their own colour, and they throw them into a circle to either knock opponents’ dice out, knock them onto different faces, or simply roll high scores in safe places. Whoever has the highest total values at the end is the winner.
Possibly some strategic dice-selection elements at the beginning, where lower-scoring D4s are more stable than D20s, but also less good at knocking other dice out. (Perhaps players start with 30 sides-worth of dice, of their choice.)”
Like I said in that thread, I think these are worth combining, under the mental tag of “tactile objects first, random numbers second.”
Here’s my pitch: Everybody brings his or her own set of dice; these dice must be all the same color, and that color must be unique in the group. When you roll, you have multiple objectives:
- Get a decent number.
- Knock a competing player’s high-scoring dice onto lower-scoring faces.
- Land your die in a more central ring, which means a higher multiplier or bonus.
- Knock a competing player’s dice out of those rings (or, alternately, help move a collaborating player’s dice further in).
I’m thinking maybe your effectiveness in the current situation, whatever that might be, is determined by your current-highest die / multiplier / bonus combination (rather than the sum of all your dice). This could help sharpen a players’ goals (”I regain control if I just knock out that one 8 in the second ring…”).
Advantages: Dice are fun to throw! Moreover, this would balance the old “randomness is king” RPG trope (and board game trope, for that matter) by making player skill a factor. The situation could be in constant flux as players pay [resource] to withdraw dice from the table, gamble more dice in an attempt to disable an opponent, et cetera.
Problem 1: As Kevan pointed out, the d4 would be a midget muscleman here–not a high scorer, but almost impossible to change faces. The d6 would have a similar advantage; you’d need something more unbalanced like the d8, d10 and d20 to get interesting rerolls. I’m inclined to suggest that this be played with the tubes of 10d10 that people buy for White Wolf games.
Problem 2: Anybody got a theme? Kevan’s “er, magically summoning demons into a chalk circle” is good, but why are we summoning demons? What are the consequences of failing your summoning (do they just poof, or escape and eat your pets)? Do the demons get to roll?