Sort of a mini-rant involving something I noticed from Rogueland. Usage fucking dice. This was pioneered in The Black Hack, which is a turd that's almost as good as playing Microlite20. One of the reasons it isn't? Usage dice.
So Usage dice as presented in Rogueland: say that if you roll a 2 or less on a die the usage die diminishes to the next die down. The dice ladder is the following: d20 - d12 - d10 - d8 - d6 - d4 - nada
Which means the mechanic should just use the 1 and make the die ladder d10 - d6 - d4 - d3 - d2 - nada but that is too simple, we should instead use bigger dice and stupider numbers. But that's really a digression, the inception of the usage die is fucking stupid, so lets go there:
Part of D&D that's been murdered by WotC is the idea of resource management. Usage dice are a shortcut which adds blind luck to resource management which inevitably means you aren't managing shit, just rolling dice like an idiot and hoping not to get "craps". There's a part of that game where luck belongs and it's not in fucking planning. You cannot tell me that rolling a goddamn die every time you use a resource is less intensive than checking off a box, or adding a mark to a tally of "used". knowing you have 2 left of something is so much more useful and powerful than knowing you have 3-4 in d4 left of something. It looks wrong, it sounds wrong, it is wrong.
Usage dice are useless.
