Dice Conventions

The game uses ordinary 6-sided dice.  Higher rolls are always better.

No result is ever certain.  Sometimes, modifiers may move the target number below 2 or above 6.  In this case, it is still possible to succeed or fail.  If the target number is 1+ or better, re-roll any 1s.  If the re-rolled result is also a 1, the roll fails.  If the target number is 7+, re-roll any sixes.  If the second result is also a six, it succeeds.

The only exception comes when rolling to-wound an armored vehicle.  You cannot harm a buttoned up tank, if you need a 7 or more.

Dice may only ever be re-rolled once.

Geek Notes

I considered using 10-sided dice, so that there could be a greater range of results.  However, a single 10-sided die does not really make the granularity much finer, 10% vs 12.33%. If I want a greater spread of possibility, I realized it is pretty easy to add additional rolls, rather than change the size of the die itself.  Gamers are used to 6-sided dice, and they like the feel of rolling great handfuls of them.  So why mess with success, if you don’t have to?

The double-ones and double-sixes rule opens up the scale of the dice, too.  This game will use a fair number of modifiers, and this allows us to deal with what happens when the modifiers pull the target number off either end of the scale.

I contemplated (but rejected) a more complex system in which it would matter how much more than 6 or how much below 2 your target fell, similar to what Warhammer uses for BS.  So a 7 would require a 6 and a 4+, an 8, a 6 and a 5+, a 9, a 6 and a 6, etc.  I imagine the casual gamer just doesn't want to think that hard.