Will says a few things:
“How about an RPG involving magic where the success of the casted magic (in fact, the casting itself) relies not on the player rolling dice, but the player’s character rolling dice? This sort of breaks the fourth wall, but you could explain it away by making them need to be magical dice. Maybe the practitioners of such an art are called “dieslingers”. They could travel to the far reaches of the earth, righting wrongs in their own edgy, outcast way. This would probably end up being terribly tongue-in-cheek, but maybe that’s the point.”
Given the existence of things like Cardcaptors and Yu-Gi-Oh!, I think this would be accepted with a perfectly straight face by most of our demographic. By the same token, though, I’m not sure it’s enough to hang a game on. I think it could be cool as a Final Fantasy-style job / class; I may be thinking of FF Tactics’ “Calculator Mage” or whatever, but I like this better (and I think they were weak in implementation anyway). When I have a little more time I’m going to start a wiki for a group-design catchall RPG, and I think this would be neat to plug into it.
“What about a battling game where what dice you roll, and in what combinations, determines what kind of attacks you can throw at your opponent? There could be arithmetical modifiers depending on the situation which could allow you to multiply two results together or whatever to augment your attacks. You could keep track of that kind of thing with cards, but I don’t think the cards should dictate the attacks you could do - it would be the dice which had that control. Instead, you would have a set number of attacks you could do, but you would have to use dice rolls and interpretation thereof, in combination with the use of your limited modifier cards, to discover and make an attack.
The attack (or spell, or whatever) types themselves would be basically limitless - you might notice that you’ve rolled (amongst all your dice) your birthdate^2, so you use your Square Root modifier card to get your birthdate (in DDMMYYYY form), which allows you to take a modifier card at random from your opponent’s stack/deck/hand/whatever.”
I think this is awesome. Roll a big handful of dice and partition them however you want on a graph–columns for sums, rows for consecutive digits. Use them to activate the semi-fixed set of spells, homonculi and items you brought to the table, and both players draw from the same deck of number-mod cards. Once you’ve used a set of dice to power one of those spells / quasits / items, you put them back in your pool and reroll them. Or maybe you’re not allowed to reroll until you manage to use them (or draw the appropriate mod card)! That would be a powerful incentive to bring in a set of use cases that provides good coverage of your die results, but of course the rare ones would do the big damage. (Will, is this something like what you had in mind?)
Advantages: Combines game-opening resource management with in-game skill and luck. I imagine people who are good at Set would be good at this. Plus there’s a lot of good geeky number-crunching to be done.
Problem 1: Since I, at least, would be scared to spend dice hastily on a few Mild Fizzles and miss my chance at a Polyphemus Mono-Laser Ultrablast, I could see this game crawling along like bad Scrabble. How could we push mechanics that wouldn’t bog things down? Would using a chess timer be overkill?
Problem 2: What are the most interesting number sets to use here? “Your Birthday” and “Perfect Square” attacks are good, but is “Mersenne Prime” going too far afield? Or should we not worry about sets at all, including those two examples only as rare bonuses, and make most cards activate on “12 or 52″ or “Multipes of 5?”
Problem 3: And oh yeah, what kind of dice are you allowed to use? Do you spend cards to draw them from a common pool, or do you bring your own set? Hmm… do the dice you bring determine what attacks you’re allowed to bring, too? What are the limits? I think Kevan’s “x sides of dice” metric would work here, but it’d probably need to be closer to 100 sides.
Addendum: Just thought of something that could be cool–maybe in addition to cards and dice, each player has a fixed number of chips that he or she can bid in order to bring more dice into play from the pool. More bidding increases your power, but also increases the risk you take of losing it all at round’s end. The problem here is that one big bet could put you out of the game for good–it’d be hard to avoid victory / loss cycles after the first round. Anyone know a good way to combat that?