I must be hard on dice, then. How much use are we talking about?

Maybe you have some kind of special acidic paint-eating personal chemistry.

Hey, you gotta take what superpowers you can get.

--K

#2 is what? Pay off the Old Ones for use of their geometry in designing the 3-sided die?

Sounds familiar.

Hey, it's cool. It lends further credibility to the idea, and just goes to prove once again the old adage that 'Great minds think alike'.

I have three d3s.

They are from I.C.E.'s board game "The Hobbit". They are six-sided, and each die has faces labelled with 1 to 3 in digits and 1 to 3 in pips, so the die result will always be in the range of 1 to 3.

The system used is to roll all three d3's, sum the pips and the digits, and the difference between the digits sum and the pips sum is the roll result. You may reroll any of the 3 dice. Then you may again choose again to reroll any of the dice. At the end of the two rerolls, the difference between pips-sum and digits-sum is the final result of the die roll.

It's a strange yet entertaining little mechanic, although it has absolutely nothing to do with SR.

First off, if you have a layer of paint thick enough to throw off the die's center of gravity, that's just too damn thick. A layer of paint on a die would, except for extreme cases, have less of an effect on the center of gravity, then the drilled-out pips on any standard "board game" dice would.

Secondly, if you're worried about paint adding weight to some sides, then you paint each side a appropriate color, instead of just painting your 5 and 6.

That'd be called a prism. Ideally, you'd want the ends of the prism rounded off, so that while rolling, it'd come to a stop on one of the three faces instead of the end. Oh, and the rolling/tumbling characteristics of such a die would be about as crappy, if not more so, than your standard regular-tetrahedron d4. Faces that meet at acute angles make it much harder for the die's momentum to cause the die to tip over to the next face. A hexagonal prism with pairs of sides numbered 1-3 would make for a better rolling d3.

Oh, no. No, botches still exist. And I've made some doozies with the new system in testing. Oi vey....

Ahh very true I was mainly trying to be pithy with the alt dice suggestion but the fact that you could tweak the botch system does tend to allow a greater degree of control over critical failures.

If you really want to get something unusual you could do something like exalted mechanics where 12s count of 2 successes. That would go a long way towards restoring people's faith in a more random system.

Of course in general I would say that it's best to base it around d6s are they are by far the most common dice available to novice gamers. However a d12 system would be quite interesting as a homebrew alternative

Yeah they are a lot more rare on d12s like that especially for high skill people but with them being alot more rare you can make critical failures alot more cinematic. Instead of a botch on shooting a gun being a jam it's like the gunner tripping over his own feet and shooting himself in the leg

I'll be sure to use my powers for good, and not evil. Such great responsibility...

But seriously, I actually kind of like the colored-face idea. It'd make it easy for the GM to quickly assess everyone's rolls.

Can we take it from this that there is a different mechanic involved (other than all 1's) in Botching in SR4?

Much obliged. Another tidbit of knowledge to add to the small but growing pile.

Eek, my instincts tell me that could happen with startling frequency. Even with a large number of dice.

I'd tend to think all 1s or some variation of that. Otherwise like you said it's just too probable of an event.

If it was something like three more 1's than successes, hmmm. That would actually eliminate the probability when only rolling 1 or 2 dice. That isn't going to happen often now anyway i would think, unless Defaulting uses Attribute only, or penalties take away a lot of dice. 3 dice would be the same chance as before. 4 dice the occurance would actually be higher than before, maybe even higher than for 3 dice. Likely somewhere in the same range as 3 dice instead of 6x less likely than before. Not sure about that, I still need to pull out those old probabilties calcualitons. It's been a long time since I've done stuff like that so i can't just whip it out off the top of my head.

The problem with a system like that is that really unskilled and untalented characters have less chance or no chance to fumble.

IMHO that's not a particularly good system.

While it might hurt for low skill low attribute characters to have a system in which all 1s cause a critical failure that's more far than having them fumble less than mid range characters.

Well you could say at least 3 more 1's than successes, or all 1's when rolling 1 or 2 dice. Depending on how they work penalties and defaulting it might be rare to roll than few of dice anyway.

I always cringed when a player took 1 in a skill, and then insisted on rolling it in a critical situation. I had a player roll/crash the vehicle they were driving on two separate situations. Then get mad at me. They even tried to argue that you couldn't roll a pickup truck on flat, dry pavement just going around a corner in town. I explained that IRL my brother had managed to do exactly that.