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View Full Version : Juggling Modifiers: Best way to Handle Bonuses and Penalties?



Mr. Mask
2015-11-20, 11:26 PM
One thing that worries me about running a game or designing a system, is that penalties and bonuses will get out of hand. I worry that they'll bog down a game, that we'll forget to track them and they'll cause problems, etc..


What are your methods for keeping track of modifiers?

What are good methods you've heard of or seen in other RPGs?

Have you seen any clever mechanics that make modifiers simple to track?


Personally, I like anything with small numbers for penalties, where you can use physical objects to track their level. Dice pool systems where you add and remove die tend to be good for this. The issue is that such systems don't really allow for smaller, more nuanced modifiers. Those are mostly what I'm wondering about, as they're the hardest to keep track of.

kieza
2015-11-21, 01:34 AM
When homebrewing or designing a system, I have some general rules for when to use a bonus or penalty:

--Bonuses or penalties that are "always on", like a flat bonus to defenses or attacks, are fine.
--Situational bonuses and penalties are fine, if they only affect the person handing them out, like a bonus that a character gets when flanking.
--If a situational bonus affects people other than the person handing it out, then it should either be really common, so that everyone else gets used to it, or it should be really big, so that they sit up and pay attention when it comes into play.
--Common, universal conditions and effects, like being prone or having cover, can have small, fiddly bonuses, because the conditions crop up frequently and they can all be put on a big table in a sourcebook.

Other than that, I try to avoid small, fiddly, situational bonuses and penalties, because people will forget about them when adding up die rolls, or they forget when they apply and have to look it up.

I also like effects that have qualitative results instead of quantitative modifiers. Rather than "Opportunity attacks against the target gain a +5 bonus," I prefer "The target provokes opportunity attacks when shifting."

5e's advantage and disadvantage mechanics are great, because you don't have to remember a numeric bonus--just roll again and take the better/worse result. It's one of the few things I like about 5e.

goto124
2015-11-21, 03:03 AM
Don't play 3.5e?

Cluedrew
2015-11-22, 08:34 AM
For designing a system:
Decide on a threshold for how important something has to be for it to create a modifier.
Give things above that threshold a modifier, ignore things below it.
Play test.
If the numbers are too fiddly raise the threshold and goto 2.
If you don't feel that characters can effect their outcomes well enough, lower the threshold and goto 2.
If you made it this far: Celebrate.

I've played systems that... are like 3.5e and I have played games where the only way to get a +/-1 was to have another character deliberately try to help or hinder your action, which required a check in its own right. Actually there were two ways to get a plus one, but you get the idea, otherwise you just rolled your stat.

As for running a game, if there are too many modifiers for you then you might be playing the wrong game. But if you are just forgetting some make tokens out of bits of cardboard (raid the recycling bin for materials) and pass them out for the types of modifiers that cause problems. Which I find are often the unusual ongoing modifiers.

Mr. Mask
2015-11-23, 06:48 AM
Kieza and Cluedrew, these are excellent points. Thank you.


One idea I've gotten to like which I'd like to run by you. The idea is to have a chart of numbers, say 1 to 20. If you have a +10 bonus, you put a marker on 10. If you get another +2 bonus, you move the marker up to 12. There's probably a device that handles this better, like say a calculator. Still, this concept I like for being a simple way to track, add and subtract modifiers.

AceOfFools
2015-11-23, 09:37 AM
I've done some hangouts based games where my character sheet was a spreadsheet, so I used simple formulas to calculate atrack and damage buffs and only had to worry about dice.

Its simple to set up and easy to use, but does have a host of problems relating to aces sing and editing a spreadsheet while playing.

Telok
2015-11-23, 03:50 PM
I would suggest capping your modifiers. Cap both how many modifiers and how high they can go. This is an attempt to avoid the D&D issue of people chaining lots of little bonus things to render the character's stats irrelevant. It also attempts to avoid a similar issue with dice pools that kicks the number of dice rolled over ~100÷pips.

My rather personal metric for game numbers is as follows:
The biggest numbers can hit about 100.
Multiplication and division by 2 or 10.
Up to 20 dice to roll if they're common (6, 10, 20).
Up to five dice if they're uncommon.
If I need accessories (tokens, status markers, counters) there should be no more than three or four, both types and number for the player to track.

Zombimode
2015-11-23, 04:52 PM
This is an attempt to avoid the D&D issue of people chaining lots of little bonus things to render the character's stats irrelevant.

Uhm, those ARE the characters stats. If you try to limit the accumulation of boni in D&D 3.5 (outside the built in limitation in form of non-stacking bonus types) then you have not understand the math of the system.

AceOfFools
2015-11-24, 01:25 AM
Uhm, those ARE the characters stats. If you try to limit the accumulation of boni in D&D 3.5 (outside the built in limitation in form of non-stacking bonus types) then you have not understand the math of the system.

For the character where I was using a spreadsheet to calculate bonuses, I would, very often, have sacred, luck, moral, profane multiple, unnamed, and multiple situational (e.g. flanking) bonuses to my attack in addition to size and variable enhancement bonuses to my strength score.

Trying to keep track of all that in my head would have significantly slowed the game down.

Avoiding making that kind of math a core element of a system is certainly good design goal.