I know I finished it when it came out in the '70s though I cannot say it was remarkable, nor that it "changed my life" (as claimed by the author). Indeed, apart form the premise I cannot remember any of the contents either . . .

For the uninitiated, here is the synopsis

I think the dice are there for a reason - fast, fair, and let's you focus on the game at hand. Jagged hit it on the head, and while cards would be an interesting alternative to dice in terms of being fairerererer, they would be wholly inadequate for things like Orks shooting where you need to throw 46 dice (to hit 3 times and kill nothing, but still...).

A computer wouldn't be bad... Some sort of cheap tablet about the size of a cell phone where you you just choose the number of dice to roll and it does. Or an app. And since those mechanics merely simulate randomness in the first place, they could be modified to have more even distributions. That's the only thing I see replacing dice.

_________________
author of Syncing Forward and other stories...

It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

Personally i think your situation reflects the dissatisfaction about the assault resolution in EA (ie. hack-down can get skewed horribly on one roll) i brought up in a thread in the EA forum a few months ago (as mentioned by Ulric). Ironically since those three horrible games where we got 4 or 5 ridiculous results (for and against) i haven't seen anything so crazy since. On reflection, i think the simplest solution is simply to average the 2D6 result instead of choosing the best - this still provides the risk factor but mitigates it further.

At the time my play-group discussed getting rid of some of the randomness generally. We mentioned using cards - i think Parintachin's method is as good as any i have seen, though could also be played without holding a deck, or at least a smaller deck.

We also thought about introducing a number of player re-rolls like blood bowl for those horrible results which screw your turn (i have a personal habit of missing 2+ activation's ( i've managed 7 out of 10 in first turn 2 games in a row.) Another friend is notorious for never missing a saving throw - annoying when he also plays "RA spam" nids too.

More radically I also thought about automatically going with the average result when rolling 6 or more dice (useful in the bucket of dice GW games) - divide the number of dice rolled by 6, and only roll for the remainder - ie. 16 dice at a 4+ would give 6 successes automatically and you roll for the last 4... Though to be honest the big rolls seem to throw up "unfair" results less regularly.

But to be honest, in the end i we all sat down and had a chat after a game and realised that at least in our group it was actually our attitude change which was sucking some of the fun out for us. We realised we had been all playing super competitively (mainly trying to get nids to work ) swapping and refining lists, rereading rules, tactics articles, bearding ideas, pre-measuring every follow up move etc, etc. I guess we were trying to go for the "chess like" competition. In the end we all agreed it would be more fun just to go with the flow again. The only change we made is to ban pre-measuring, but otherwise we have all just chilled a lot and it has been much more fun since (though this may be cos my my rolling has also been damn lucky since

I have to say I really like this one. Big dice rolls are better, mostly, but if they do swing the impact is also bigger. Might try it as a house rule.

Let me know how it turns out - i haven't talked anyone into trying it, yet.

Might be a while though - my playgroup is in a bit of a slump atm!

I've thought a lot about removing dice from wargames in various ways.

If you're trying to stick with an existing rule set like E:A, Parintachin's idea of adapting Malifaux's card system to be 1-6 based is probably best, in terms of giving you unpredictability without the sometimes cripplingly unfun extended runs of luck throwing off a game. For E:A, I'd probably go with 60 cards, 10 each numbered 1 through 6. Your hand size is equal to your strategy rating, and only refills during the cleanup phase. Over time you get "perfect" distribution, but you're still subject to the occasional run of high or low cards showing up. Modifying the size of the deck up or down can increase or decrease the size of possible runs.

If you want to go truly diceless, in the sense of not having an arbitrary randomizer like dice or cards, I think you really need to build a rule set around that concept, rather than try and adapt an existing rule set to it. I do think it's perfectly viable to do this, and I think it'd make for a very compelling game if done right. Chess and Go don't require randomizers to produce a wide variety of unpredictable game play, and they're both limited to a very fixed number of pieces with fixed placement rules. With table top miniatures that can move arbitrary distances in arbitrary directions, plus more or less arbitrary compositions of forces within a given army, I think that you've got all the uncertainty you actually need to make the game aspect enjoyable (that psychological reward factor that Ulrik mentioned).

I've got a couple of basic designs for games floating around that use various concepts for diceless resolution.

The general basis for most of them is a point based "friction" system. If you don't like the way a match up is going (say, my squad's shooting against your squad's defenses), you "spend" spend an amount of "friction" to change the result. This represents the classic Clausewitz view of luck, unexpected results, momentary heroism/cowardice, etc. The opponent can then do the same. Overall this works best for fairly coarse resolution. You wouldn't want to be rolling each weapon/melee attack and armor save, but rather you'd set up games like this such that (in Epic terms), one formation's total attack and the resulting defense is an exchange. A typical game exchange might be "This formation shoots at the guys on the hill and generates 4 infantry kills and 2 armor kills. No buy ups." "Okay, 4 infantry die, but for 4 points, your anti-tank guns misfire, cancelling your 2 armor kills".

There's usually a fixed number of these "points" available, so if you spend up all yours for early successes, you now have your opponent's ability to spend all the points later hanging over our head. Alternately instead of a fixed size and shared pool of points, each side could generate points each turn via various means and conditions. Some would be built into the basic army lists, via things like leaders in squads or special wargear. Others might be from battle field conditions, such as holding objectives or taking casualties. There's all sorts of ways you could generate possible points, including points that are conditional based on how they're received ("this unit generate 1 extra point per turn if it's holding an objective") or spent ("this unit generates 2 extra points per turn, but can only be used for this unit's tests").

Further, the process could be static, such that each player only has one time to spend points (possibly secretly, with simultaneous revealing), or a biding based, where each side goes back and forth until no more points are spent.

I've played around with a bunch of variations on the theme. I think there's a lot of room to produce a game that's both interesting and unpredictable, because you never know exactly what your opponent's strategy is, and whether he'll commit all his resources to a fight just because you do.