Mythic battles with dice

Exploring the combat dice system in Mythic Battles: Pantheon and how it uses discarding dice and re-rolls to create a push-your-luck mechanism.

Medusa

MÖRKTOBER continues this week with more prompts and more dark and weird creations. Even if you aren’t participating, I’d encourage you to check out the #MÖRKTOBER tag on social media to see what others are making. You can also check out the featured art posts I’ve been sharing via Exeunt Omnes.

In fact, last week’s exploration of the roll three, pick two system in Rumble Nation was the inspiration for my Day 2 - Maw creation.

This week we are looking at another dice system. This time it’s the combat dice in Mythic Battles: Pantheon from Monolith.

Mythic Battles: Pantheon

Mythic Battles: Pantheon (Vogt, 2017) is a card-driven skirmish game with units loosely based on gods, monsters, and heroes from Greek mythology. In it’s simplest form, players draft a god and some monsters/heroes to form teams and then battle each other on a map. The basic goal is to claim and absorb special omphalos stones scatted across the areas.¹

In a recent play, I drafted Pan (and his satyrs), Bellerophon, Marsyas, and Tityos for my team.² The opposing team was led by Persephone and included a hydra. It’s definitely not constrained by adherence to the historical myths.

Players have decks of cards that are constructed based on their chosen units. They alternate taking turns back and forth. On a turn they activate one or two of their units and perform actions until one side wins.

There’s a lot more to this game, but I want to focus on just one tiny part of it: the combat dice system.

The combat dice system

As one of a unit’s actions they can attack. Of course there’s line of sight to consider, various terrain effects, combat and defense ratings, and a list of other considerations. Eventually, however, it all comes down to rolling a bunch of dice.

The dice have the following six faces: Blank, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Attacks are resolved as follows:

1. Determine number of dice to roll based on the attackers offence value.

2. Roll the dice.

3. Remove any blanks.

4. Use any remaining dice to boost other dice. Any non-blank die can be removed to add +1 to the result of a different die. Multiple dice can be discarded in this way to provide multiple +1 bonuses.

5. Any dice that now equal or exceed the defenders defense value score a hit.

That’s pretty interesting as a mechanism by itself, but there’s more. The attack continues with a “second assault” using any dice now showing a value of 5:

1. The attacker may roll as many of the dice that now have a value of 5.

2. Any new blank results are removed and the previous result is lost. It does not score a hit.

3. Any other result (1…5) is added to the previous value of five, boosting the die result. For example, a re-roll of 3 would make the final result 8 (5+3).

4. Any results equal to or greater than the defender’s defense value score a hit.

That can be a little confusing, so let’s look at an example.

Bellerophon (Offense Value: 8) attacks Medusa (Defense Value: 7). To score a hit, Bellerophon needs to have dice results of 7 or higher. He rolls 8 dice and gets Blank, Blank, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5. The two blanks are immediately discarded. He can then discard the 1 and 2 to give each of the 4 values a +1, making them each a 5.

With the results now 3, 5, 5, 5, he re-rolls the three 5s because you can always re-roll 5s as part of the “second assault.” The new values are Blank, 1, and 4. The blank is discarded as a miss. The 1 and 4 are added to the previous values of 5. This makes them 6 (5+1) and 9 (5+4). Needing a 7, he discards the remaining 3 die and gives a +1 to the 6. The final results are a 7 and 9, scoring two hits on Medusa.

Interesting choices with fistfuls of dice

It’s pretty common to throw a lot of dice in miniature skirmish games like Mythic Battles: Pantheon. Quite often, they rely on output randomness — choose an action, roll the dice, and the game state is updated based on the result. The player’s decision comes before the random event.³

In this case, there is still player agency and decisions to be made after the dice are rolled. This is due to a few key factors:

• Blanks: There is always a chance that rolled die will come up as a blank. Blanks are always immediately discarded and never score a hit. That’s bad during the initial roll of dice (i.e. “first assault”) but far worse when re-rolling a five. That five immediately becomes a miss and is discarded if a blank is rolled.

• Push your luck: Dice can be discarded to add +1 bonuses to other dice. Given enough dice, you could just discard a bunch of them to guarantee a hit. The temptation is there, however, to just boost some dice to 5s and then re-roll them hoping that the second roll (added to the 5) will hit the target value. That will score more hits! But comes with the risk of rolling a blank and getting nothing.

Less hits with less risk, or the chance for more hits with more risk. That’s the tough decision that often comes up when conducting combat with this system.

Associated complexity

Part of the explanation and examples in the rulebook.

Of course, this system isn’t without it’s downsides.

One problem is the associated complexity of this dice system and the potential challenges in teaching it to new players. Remember that combat isn’t just this dice rolling, there is a lot more to it. The “attack action” explanation begins on page 14 of the rulebook and continues to page 18 — about 13% of the 39 page rulebook.

It’s a really interesting mechanism, but takes a little while for new players to understand it. I’m guessing some players will not like it at all.

Conclusion

Some things to think about:

• All hail the six-sided die: I love throwing shiny math rocks on the table. Systems that use six-sided dice in novel ways are particularly interesting to me because they immediately seem more accessible. Even this system could be replicated using standard 1…6 dice vs. the custom dice with blank sides. No matter how many dice system I see, there always seems to be a new one to be discovered.

• Greek myths never die: If you are looking for a theme, you could do worse than using ancient Greek myths as inspiration. As a bonus side-effect, there’s a ton of public domain art using it as the subject.

• Watch for complexity: It’s OK to make complicated dice systems as many people enjoy them. But be careful that you don’t assume that because you are familiar with dice systems that all players will be too. What seems obvious and easy to the design may seem complicated and burdensome to some players.

What do you think? Have you seen a dice system like this one in other games? What are you favorite re-roll systems that include a push-your-luck element?

— E.P. 💀

P.S. “A beautiful, straight-forward, and inspiring book.” Get ADVENTURE! Make Your Own TTRPG Adventure, the latest guide from Skeleton Code Machine, now at the Exeunt Press Shop! 🧙

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1. An omphalos is a sacred stone artifact from the ancient Greek world. The word literally means “navel” and it’s tied to the idea that Delphi was the center of the world. The Latin term for it is umbilicus mundi meaning navel of the world. The word was used to name Philip Henry Gosse’s omphalos hypothesis and the related Ted Chiang short story also called Omphalos.

2. In Greek mythology Tityos is a giant, but for some reason in the game he is a rock monster that can cause earthquakes.

3. See the two-part series on input-output randomness for a full explanation of the differences between pure, input, and output randomness in games.