Push Your Luck d6 Mechanic

Okay, so here are two charts showing the percentage chance that you have of hitting and the average damage you will do based on the number of dice you roll and the target number you choose.

Chance of Hitting
                                  Target Number
# Dice      2          3          4          5          6
   1          83%      67%     50%     33%     17%
   2          69%      67%     58%     44%     25%
   3          58%      57%     54%     45%     28%
   4          48%      48%     47%     42%     28%
   5          40%      40%     40%     37%     27%
   6          33%      33%     33%     32%     25%

Expected Damage
                                  Target Number
# Dice      2          3          4          5          6
   1          1.66      2.01     2.00     1.65     1.02
   2          1.38      2.01     2.32     2.20     1.50
   3          1.16      1.71     2.16     2.25     1.68
   4          0.96      1.44     1.88     2.10     1.68
   5          0.80      1.20     1.60     1.85     1.62
   6          0.66      0.99     1.32     1.60     1.50

So we see that for targets of 2 or 3 we want 1 die, for 4 we want 2, and for 5 or 6 we want 3 dice. So it never benefits to have more than 3 dice.

The system does have promise with your intentions. If we compare low, medium, and high targets we see that to do the most damage consistently we would want to roll 2 dice and target 4, dealing 4 damage 58% of the time. If we want to do burst damage, we could instead go for 3 dice and target 6, getting 6 damage 28% of the time. Or we could go low with 1 die at target 2, meaning we'll hit 83% of the time but only do 2 damage. So there can be interesting choices here depending on tactics and enemy types, as well as having the possibility of special abilities that could change this up. I think you've got an interesting idea here.

For anyone who cares, the code I used on anydice.com to generate the data is as follows:

function: no ones in D:s { loop N over {1..#D} { if N@D = 1 { result: 0 } } result: 1 }

function: D:s greater than H:n { loop N over {1..#D} { if N@D >= H { result: [no ones in D] } } result: 0 }

loop D over {1..6} { DI: Dd6 loop N over {2..6} { output [DI greater than N] named "Hits for [N] on [D]" } }

/r/tabletopgamedesign Thread