Crits at a Cost

One great thing about output randomness is getting better-than-average results. Who doesn't love rolling a natural 20 or seeing their dice explode? But in a competitive game, one player's gain is another player's loss, and a string of lucky rolls can be disheartening. To combat this, you can give critical hits a downside to serve as a silver lining for the rest of the table.

In Oath, attack dice have three possible results: half a sword, one sword, and two swords. Though two swords is the best result for winning the battle, it also causes one of your own troops to die. This matters because combats in Oath are designed to be large and almost always impactful. It is important that players see the outcome as reasonably fair. Attaching a cost to very lucky rolls gives the other party something to be happy about and prevents the loss from feeling absolute.

I took inspiration from Oath when designing my tactical combat game, Junkernauts. In it, you build bots out of household junk that attack your opponent's bots, rolling dice to determine damage. You can roll zero, one, or two damage on each die, but if you roll a two, you overheat and add fire to your own bot. The fire is a fire-shaped plastic piece you physically attach to your bot. If you roll a bunch of crits in a row, your bot is literally on fire, which is visually fun to see as the attacker, even though it is clearly bad. The flames are a testament to your own success.

In general, output randomness can feel one-sided when one result is strictly better than another. Introducing downsides to lucky rolls makes random outcomes more nuanced than simply succeeding spectacularly or whiffing. More importantly, it gives other players a story to tell themselves to comfort them while they are getting steamrolled by the dice.