I am excited to become a part of this community. Just a little info about myself, I'm a mid 20's newly wed who, like many of you, love games in all their forms. My original intention with college was to go into video game development. I ended up in Economics and now I'm an MPA student but I still love game design in all its forms.
I've been working on a particular game off and on for about 4 years now. Unlike my previous efforts, I am much more serious about this attempt. Let me tell you a brief story to summarize the event that made me want to create this game and hopefully it will show you a little how I think:
It all started with a simple game of RISK. I was playing the LOTR version with a group of friends and it was coming to a close. To make a long (and quite possibly epic) story short, I came back from having only one unit in one territory to owning about 75% of the board with a single opponent boxed in. This was due more to my opponents' inept rather than my skill but still, it happened. What followed my final expansionary turn where I conquered a large continent was quite literally the worst rolling possible in the history of RISK. My opponent placed a good number of units gained from trading in cards, and proceeded to win every. single. roll.
I am not exaggerating one bit. Anyways, I had decided RISK was broken and I needed to fix it.
Thus began my yet un-named game that was intended to fix the problems I had with RISK by incorporating three things:
1. Qualitative differences in opposing armies.
2. Strategic maneuvering outside of battle.
3. Greater variety for replay-ability.
The main things I want to preserve are simplicity and a degree of randomness (to allow for the underdog luck that paradoxically started this endeavor).
I've come through several iterations since my first attempts (which were far too complicated) to something I'm much more confident in. Rather than rehash the entire game in this post (don't worry, it will come eventually), I'd like to ask a question relevant to a problem that may need fixing: If I'm already using custom dice, how much will it affect my game to use 8-sided dice instead of 6-sided dice?
My concerns are twofold: will it increase production costs and will 8-sided dice scare off non-hobby gamers?
Currently, I'm using D6's to represent 3-tiered attacks. Effectively tier 1 has a 1/3 chance of scoring a 'hit' (2/6); Tier two has a 1/2 chance (3/6), and tier 3 has a 2/3 chance (4/6).
The problem is that the increase from 0 to 1/3 is larger than the other 2 steps, which add roughly 17% instead of the 33% by using an additional tier 1 die. If I were to use a d8 then it could be 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4, which are even steps.