I didn't think I'd like card driven combat until I tried Starcraft. Now I think I can't like a game without it :-)

 Based on the information provided in the two preview articles thus far, it's "diceless" in that there are no polyhedrons that are rolled, but you still have a "Fate" deck which has a distribution of outcomes for each type of military unit. It's the functional equivalent of using a deck of 36 cards instead of rolling 2d6 - except with cards, you save on production costs incurred from fabricating uniquely-purposed dice OR having to use normal dice and then look up the results on a table. This solution solves both problems by putting the table results on the actual randomization element and GUARANTEES that the outcomes follow the intended distribution (in case you think dice can be lucky or improperly balanced).

So there are dice, trust me. They're just flatter and have the results presented in a very concise fashion.

Big Head Zach said:

The people who believe in lucky dice are also probably the people who believe in lucky cards.  The whole thing about luck is it can't be proven or disproven, so the method of randomization is largely irrelevant.  If you're the sort of person who's worried about loaded dice, well, I think it would be easier to stack a deck of cards than to modify a set of dice and I'm not nearly jaded enough to accept the claim that FFG would intentionally send out unfair dice.

I'm not arguing against card-based combat systems, mind you.  I don't really care either way, I'm just saying cards aren't inherently better than dice.  It's a matter of personal taste.  Some people in this thread are saying they won't support a product without dice, that's fine.  They have a right to choose and if that's their choice, so be it.

I could not care less about the randomization method. As some people stated in this thread, if the cards allow for a more streamlined combat resolution as we don't have to rely on resolution tables or memorize "to hit" values, all the better.
It's more the randomization itself that kinda displeases me. I much prefer the control and double guessing A Game of Thrones provides for instance.

Big Head Zach said:

Well, yes and no. It depends on if the combat cards are shuffled back into the deck or if they are discarded. If they are immediately shuffled back into the deck, then they are functionally identical to a dice with an equal number of sides as there are cards in the deck. However, if you discard the card then this all changes because whatever result was on the card is taken out of play. It's the equivalent of rolling a six on a chart, and then saying that you can no longer roll sixes on the chart. It has a memory, which isn't something that dice support.

So far we have seen 1 card and no rules. I wonder if each card will be unique or their will be duplicates. You could have cards that will have more hits or can have more  type of units hitting. I'm not fond  of having to reshuffle the pack everytime but I can see it better resembles the randomness of dice. I'd rather see some cards saying when to reshuffle.

SamVimes said:

And that's where the line between Euro-style and Ameri-style tends to be drawn, as far as randomness goes. Best illustrated in the classic "Settlers of Catan", which eventually included a dice deck to replace the actual dice, because some people thought they were getting screwed picking the 2 and 12 spots, which never came in many a dice-rolling game, but were sure to appear once every 36 turns if each combination of dice was eventually "flipped over". This gets slightly altered by burning the bottom few cards and reshuffling (to avoid predictability once the deck runs low), which is what I'd expect Runewars to do as well. Cosmic Encounter does this with its Destiny Deck too.

Since each Fate card contains outcomes for each class of unit (infantry, elite infantry, mounted, heavy), plus some unknown-use number at the bottom, it'll be much harder to predict that any given unit will get good or bad results, even with the deck running low - because you're not sure how many cards will be flipped before your chosen units' initiative will come round.

I guess cards make it easier to prove the reliability/unreliability of outcomes whereas dice would take more trials than a typical game might have to come to the same conclusion, empirically.

Damn this is making my head hurt..I just wanna move all those plastic bits about

OD

SamVimes said:

The problem is that the dice are used for completely different events, so saying you can no longer roll 6 is pointless: it will happen because anyone else has rolled a 6 for any action, and not just because you already rolled a 6 in this situation. So it feels pretty out of place there.

Galdred said:

I think that the deck may get reshuffled prior to it being all used up, so it's not going to be an absolute. The above assessment is also rooted in the 1d6 scenario, which is a bit limited in scope. The deck is a more of a pressure-release valve instead of an airtight seal...instead of 1d6 and saying you can't reroll a number until all of them have been rolled, it's saying, as an example, that you can't roll a number more than 6 times until all of them have been rolled 6 times - which would balance out the situation that an "unfair" die was appearing to favor a result; it gets reined back in a bit if it's looking bizarre, but once the bizarrity has been balanced out, it can happen again, if it's going to.