I am just wondering how many people use scatter dice for their games.

For those who don't know what they are, basically they are a six sided die that have an arrow on each face, when you roll it it shows a direction, this can be used on a diagram or from the persons perspective.

Use of such dice make scattering grenades and whatnot have more than the 8 possible directions (it is 8 right? shows how long since I've used those rules).

Anyway, I digress. Who among you uses them and do you find them useful?

-Strobe

Most scatter dice I have used have 4 arrows, a hit, and a misfire on them. I admit, I use the ones from Warhammer 40K when I use them. The arrows can land in all sorts of directions, so you do not need the 8. The hit usually means that it landed perfect, with just the right amount of bounce, and the misfire I have often used as a fun thing to throw in. "Well, the grenade detonates early/late/in your hand(Damn those 1's)/in your friends lap."

Actually the scatter dice have 4 sides with arrows, and 2 sides with "Hit" inside a target which has an arrow as well. If you use the hit result as a hit, I think you make grenades a bit too powerful as they will always have a 1/3 chance of hitting the target. The trick is to roll the scatter dice (taking the arrow direction if the hit is rolled) along with the appropriate amount of scatter.

Hmm... The W40K scatter dice used to be two dice. The first was the one with the arrows and hit numbers and the second had a series of numbers (I think it was 2, 4, 6, 8, 10) and "misfire". Or maybe it was 2, 4, 6, 8, misfire, misfire.

Bah, it's been a long time since I've seen those and longer since I've used them. I know the later edition of W40k took out the misfire option and the whole second die (I think).

Yep. The misfire result is on the artillery die. You can get a direction from every result on the Scatter die, if you need one; the Beastmen do.

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Well, I've been using them for the past eleven years. They have received more use as Shadowrun dice than as WH40K dice. Ha!

They are more random IMHO.