The “War of the Ring” system is a decent enough example. It could be less boardgame and more RPG if it were used to support persisted characters and surrounding narrative.

So again, as an example to keep minds open, you could say that in place of each such die defined in the original example, you replace it with six cardboard chits with the markings equivalent to whatever was on the die. Now your whole collection of chits goes into a bag, and instead of rolling dice you draw out 1 chit per level, or whatever.

What’s the point here? An examination of tradeoffs. Any fool can see that rolling dice is more visceral and more fun, and probably faster to play. But likewise, any other fool can see that printing out a bunch of chits to put in a bag can be nearly free, and easier to develop and prototype.

The triumph of Euro-games is to find mechanics that hit the sweet spot of easy, intuitive play, which is no mean feat. Maybe neither the pile-of-dice or the bag-of-chits fits the bill, then, but it’s indicative of the sort of territory that needs to be explored in search of a new paradigm.

Another idea out of left field is the use of handheld computers as something more essential than a mere player aid. Let’s say that you worked up a dice idea and it played _wonderfully_, leaving you only with the problem of needing dozens each of dozens of different dice to play it! Well then, maybe the future is to enable that part of the game as a little app that runs on your iPhone, DSi, or other smart phone. Not used to bury the crunching of lots of numbers, but rather to virtualize and streamline the management of an otherwise apparent and intuitive system.

There’s lots of new directions to think about, if you think about it.

Here’s an idea borrowed from a boardgame called “War of the Ring”. We build a relatively simple RPG shell – 4 attributes, fairly basic combat and defense and magic ratings and so forth. Build in some bonuses for level and magic item. Now, design a set of five or six six-sided dice with non-standard faces. One has an axe, one has a shield, one shows a set of feet, one shows a magical fireball, one shows a skull, and one shows a questionmark (wild). When you attempt to do things in combat, you get bonuses for rolling the right kinds of symbols for a given action. Maybe your thief has an evasion ability that gives him an extra “foot” success for every foot that he rolls. This system is more boardgame and less RPG, perhaps, but at least this way you aren’t designing quite so many custom dice.