Original post by Yvanhoe Why approximate things by a dice throw ? If you want to approximate things, use 3.5 as an average result. Why have a 10% hit chance at X meters ? Have 10% the damages. That is how it would work on the real world anyway.
a) In the real world you either get hit by a bullet or your don't. If someone fires at you with a 10% chance to hit you, you don't magically get hit by 10% of a bullet. b) As already mentioned, using fixed values with fractional results requires more bookkeeping.
As said, the dice are an easy way to factor in a massive number of things without needing to factor them in.
Consider simulating this real world event from my Grandfather's military career during the Second World War.
He drove a Sherman tank on the Western Front, and at one point he and the rest of his tank group were attempting to out flank a German gun at extreme range. They had to drive up over a ridge as fast as they can, then throw the tank into neutral on the downward slope (As they apparently could roll faster down the cobbled road than they could drive.) The first two tanks went down and made it safely below the small hill between them and the enemies, and were missed by the German gun. My grandfather in the third tank rolled down the hill, the first two had been more toward the left, he was more on the right. He struck two heavy anti-tank mines, one after the other on different tracks. These mines were designed to take out tanks with the highest probability of setting off their ammo stores.
My grandfather's tank rolled to the bottom of the hill, smoldering and without tracks or transmission. The crew popped hatch to catch some air, but were fine other than a loud ringing in their ears.
Now, explain to me how best to model that the entire group of 5 tank crews survived, with only one tank heavily damaged but recoverable.
Do you want to sit there for 20 minutes calculating angles, plotting courses, tracking positions of mines, and computing structural failures caused by an explosion?
Or would you rather throw a handful of dice, pull a few aside to account for tanks driving through a light mine field, and a few more for the skill of the German gunners?
Even in a computer game, you'll want (have) to pick things on random chance, rather than actually calculate things out fully. The modeling of a tank running over a land mine is likely best simplified a great deal, and assigning damage chances to different parts based on where the contact with the mine was. The difference between my grandfather's tank popping its turret by exploding its own ammunition stores, and the crew walking out of it alive was very slim.
Old Username: Talroth
If your signature on a web forum takes up more space than your average post, then you are doing things wrong.
I should also point out, that the more dice you roll, the more predictable the end result tends to be - roll 10 dice with a half chance of hitting, and you'll generally find a broad spread of results. Roll 1000 dice with half a chance of hitting, and you're probably going to find that somewhere between 45 and 55% of them did hit. Of course, this isn't necessarily the case, since it is indeed random.
Original post by Girsanov I was checking out miniature war games recently, starting with probably the most popular : Warhammer 40k.
There seems to be A LOT of dice rolling and luck factor in these game. Many of the games that I see involve people cursing at their bad luck or winning due to lucky rolls.
Warhammer is popular because it's aimed at children. And as with most games for children, it's more fun if you bias it towards luck rather than skill because then it stops the weaker player from losing all the time and refusing to play again.
Other wargaming systems do not take the 'bucket of dice' approach but they never had the marketing power of Games Workshop and so are now pretty much gone from the market.
