Thinking about the die rolls

A game system.  For miniatures, often it is centered around tables, which dictate what can happen in the game world, and die rolls, which will determine what will happen at a given time.  Events that are not catered for in the tables will not take place, it's obvious enough.  Also, the choice of what die rolls are performed when will strongly influence what happens in a game.

For SSOM, a lot of the die rolls will have to do with combat.  A roll to determine whether fire has any effect.  Another roll to check versus unit quality.  I'd prefer to have one type of die roll throughout the game.  To know that a high roll is bad, a low roll is good, always.
The die of choice will be the D6.  However, for infantry combat we will be using three methods for rolling: the normal D6, a double D6 where the highest counts, and a D6 where the lowest count.

Here is the normal D6.  Every number has an equal chance of being rolled.

In the case of the double D6, where only the highest or lowest counts, the picture changes.  When the highest roll counts, the 6 has over 30% chance of occuring, but the 1 is very hard to roll (you need double one) with under 3%.  When the lowest roll counts, you have 30% plus of rolling a 1, and under 3% of rolling a 6.  These rolls will be used in case of close range fire (adjacent) where the lowest one counts (so results have a 75% change of being 1-3), as well as long range fire (beyond the normal fire range) where rolling low will become much harder.

One other roll that we will probably adopt is the regular 2D6.  Still speculative at this time, but still we think it will offer a bigger resolution, more possibilities for determining a vehicle and / or artillery hit.

The traditional 2D6 pattern is well known: 7 is the most common result, 6 rolls out of 36.  6 and 8 are rolled 5 out of 36, down to 2 and 12 which will occur once out of 36 each.  It's quite a linear result, with a tendency to favor average results, preferable to the wide spread of the D12.  Plus, we want as little exoticism as possible in the game mechanics.