Lets cut right to the chase. These two images give us the best glimpse at the dice we are going to get. What are they, how are they used, and how do we make sure they can’t completely ruin this game.

First off, what dice do we have? In the images above we can see every different denomination of dice that you can find in a regular D&D campaign. It does however seem like there are a lot more d6s in the Prototype then the Published game. If we look at the rules, then we are told there are three types of dice: small, large, and special. I would take a gander that “small” and “large” are not size determiners but face count. d6 should be small (as it is hard to get a lot of d4s, even if they do look more like cones), while d20s should be large. The “special dice” would be all the other kinds; d4, d8, d10, d12.

How are these dice used? We know that you first have to roll to see how many dice you roll, which is IN-SANE. We’re going to have to write some new rules to work around that randomness, but no matter what we must include it as it is seen happening in both episodes.

If we were to take the most straightforward approach, you would follow the rule’s suggestion of having a “Pre-Roll Sum” of 3 small dice and one large di, which would determine how many dice you roll. You can then pick a number of dice to roll for your “Roll Sum”, but of that only 10 can be small dice and 6 can be special. What? That makes no sense! Why would you be limited to small dice while not limited by large dice? Isn’t the goal to have the largest “Ross Sum” possible? Unless that isn’t the goal of your roll. Perhaps rolling well isn’t important at all, but rolling a bunch of different numbers is. Lets look at just the “Roll Sum” for a moment. You roll a variable number of dice, but you can choose which dice you roll? In what scenarios would you ever differ from one specific set of dice? When you want to roll specific numbers. Perhaps we assign each number (1-20) an action, so that if a player wants a better chance at rolling a 2, they’d use a d4, or if they wanted a 9, they’d use a d10. We can also add the ability to “Roll Sum” dice, adding their values together. If you want an 8 but didn’t roll one you can use a 1 and a 7. Problem one solved. Well, minimized.

Now we need to tackle the “Pre-Roll Sum”. Having a minimum of four dice as opposed to a maximum of 38 is quite the difference. So much so that it takes out any strategy from the rest of the game. The action economy is wildly important to creating a fun game, and this throws it all out of whack. So how do we fix it? We could have only one Pre-Roll sum, which every player used. The Ledgerman would roll it, and every player would personally roll that many dice.

Lastly, as we are on the subject of actions, I would like to propose a rule change from the Rulebook. Having seven phases is fun and all, but I would prefer to have it move from player to player quicker, with less downtime. With that in mind, I think having all players take turns making actions would be preferable. The problem with that is a maximum of 38 dice for a maximum of 12 players is IN-SANE. That’s a total of 456 dice, which the cheapest I could find for that many dice is $100. I don’t need that many dice, I don’t want that many dice. So how can we solve this dilemma? Both having quicker turns and having less dice? My initial idea was to have the entire game share a pool of dice, but when you get down to the smaller numbers that becomes impossible, and would remove the choice mechanic from the game. My second idea was to have a draft of sorts, where each player would choose a dice from the total pool, but that would be plagued by problems of not having enough dice to have a reasonable pool. I had hoped that my third try would be the charm, but I just couldn’t figure out a way to have both a tactile action economy and a reasonable amount of components.

So I took a step back, let it ruminate, and thought back to some earlier concessions made. If I were to have every player with their own set of dice to make actions from, and wanted that pool to be large enough that players could basically make any action they wanted to, they’d need to be rolling at least eight dice each. 8 * 12 is 96 dice, which is fairly close to the 90 said in the rulebook. That’s not bad, that’s not bad at all. But how could I get them into that sweet spot of 8 while still “rolling to see how many dice you roll”? What if you rolled to see how many dice you roll, in all its insanity, but after that there is some way to even the playing field? Perhaps we could redistribute the dice after dice have been rolled? That way everyone has an equal number of actions, but those who rolled well get to keep exactly what they were looking for. This is still quite random, but Cones isn’t a Eurogame. It’s pure insanity.

So what’s our average number of dice on the board. Math isn’t my strong suit, but we’re gonna need to bust out those calculators.

Pre-Roll Range: 4-38 average number rolled on a d6: 3.5 average number rolled on a d20: 10.5 average number rolled on 3d6: 3.5 * 3 = 10.5 average number rolled on 3d6 1d20: 10.5 + 10.5 = 21

So we have a minimum roll of 4, a maximum roll of 38, and an average roll of 21. This isn’t great, but it’s not even what we are really looking for. Not only do we want a small average, but we want a small standard deviation. We want the number to rarely vary wildly from our sweet spot of 8 per player. We wan. How do we achieve this? I think we need to bite the bullet and change what dice you roll in the Pre-Roll. Instead of 3d6 1d20, we need a number of dice that add up to an average of 8, with a low SD. Having a low SD can be achieved by rolling a lot of dice, as when you increase the number of dice you decrease the entropy of the situation. So let’s look at the average number rolled for each of our kinds of dice:

average number rolled on a d4: 2.5 average number rolled on a d6: 3.5 average number rolled on a d8: 4.5 average number rolled on a d10: 5.5 average number rolled on a d12: 6.5 average number rolled on a d20: 10.5

Obviously, d4s would let us roll the most dice for our pre-roll.

8 = 2.5 * x 8 / 2.5 = x x = number of d4s needed to have an average result of 8 = 3.2

That’s not great. Rolling only 3 d4s to determine how many dice you roll is kinda lame. Plus, that SD is good, but could be better.What if instead we had the player divide the number by 10 to get the number of dice they roll?

80 = 2.5 * x 80 / 2.5 = x x = 32

32 d4s is a little much, especially if every player has to roll it (hopefully at the same time). Just out of curiosity, what would rolling one of each type of dice look like?

2.5 + 3.5 + 4.5 + 5.5 + 6.5 + 10.5 = 33

33 is an interesting number, but not exactly what we’re looking for. Those d20s are very powerful, but add way too much randomness into the mix…

And then it hit me. I had been too hung up on all of the dice you roll being from the pre-roll. Why not take this excellent opportunity to add some flair to the different playable characters. What if some of the dice you rolled, even their type, were decided by the player you chose? Let’s say the number we actually are looking for is 40. And then each player has 4 personal dice they add to the fold. That’s way more manageable! Let’s go back to rolling d6s and d20s for this Pre-roll. How many of the two would we need to have an average of 40?

40 - (10.5 * 2) = 19 19 = 3.5 * x x = 19 / 3.5 = 5.4

That gives us 2d20, 5d6, divided by ten rounded up. Our perfect pre-roll sum. A minimum number of 1 extra dice, a maximum number of 7. Still random, but how likely is that 1 or that 7? I don’t know the equation for calculating Standard Deviation, but I do know a fair bit of coding, so why not put my computer to task! I wrote a small Java script to run a simulation of the pre-roll a thousand times to see how often each pre-roll sums was rolled.

Here’s the code:

import java.util.*; import java.lang.Math.*; public class DiceAverageTest{ public static void main(String[] args){ //num tests to run int tests = 1000000; //generator Random generator = new Random(); //generated int d6Generated = 5; int d20Generated = 2; double total = 0; //statstics double[] results = new double[tests]; for(int i = 0; i < tests; i++){ //generate the numbers for(int j = 0; j < d6Generated; j++){ total += generator.nextInt(6) + 1; } for(int j = 0; j < d20Generated; j++){ total += generator.nextInt(20) + 1; } //calculate the result total = Math.ceil(total / 10); //store that result results[i] = total; total = 0; } //grab the frequency in which the numbers appear int[] frequency = new int[10]; for(int i = 0; i < tests; i++){ frequency[(int)results[i]]++; } //display the numbers for(int i = 0; i < frequency.length; i++){ System.out.println(i + " extra dice were rolled " + frequency[i] + " times."); } } }

The program ran very fast, so I bumped up the number of tests to 1,000,000 just to make sure we were getting the most statistically probable result.

Here are the results:

1 extra dice were rolled 27 times. 2 extra dice were rolled 19210 times. 3 extra dice were rolled 178451 times. 4 extra dice were rolled 386770 times. 5 extra dice were rolled 318047 times. 6 extra dice were rolled 94122 times. 7 extra dice were rolled 3373 times.

Interesting how 7 was rolled so much more often then 1, even though they are both on the ends of the bell curve. If we are to turn this result into a percentage:

1 extra dice were rolled 0.003% of the time. 2 extra dice were rolled 2% of the time. 3 extra dice were rolled 17% of the time. 4 extra dice were rolled 38% of the time. 5 extra dice were rolled 31% of the time. 6 extra dice were rolled 9% of the time. 7 extra dice were rolled 0.3% of the time.

That’s totally acceptable to me. In a normal round, one of the players’s is likely to roll a 3 while another is likely to roll a 6. 3 extra dice is only 3 more actions then the other player, and 7 actions is still nothing to scoff at. With this system, we don’t need to redistribute dice at all. I did like the idea of that mechanic though, so perhaps we will return to the dice at a later point to come up with a new number with a wider SD but always has x number of dice on the table.

Well, anyways, that’s our dice system. We left a few hanging threads, such as what the numbers 1-20 correspond to, action wise, but we’ll get back to that once we have a better grasp on what you can actually do on your turn. So, next, lets look at the various decks of cards to figure out what each of them are going to do.

BONUS: In the episode Cones of Dunshire, the DVD for The Garfield Movie is extremely visible in quite a few shots. I can’t not see it anymore. Here’s an image so you can suffer with me.

Look to the right of the golden cone.