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jjordan
2020-12-02, 04:24 PM
What's your favorite dice mechanic? 1d20? 2d10? 3d6? 1d100? Dice pool?
Why is it your favorite?

I find I tend to prefer a dice mechanic which produces a bell-curve. When players are able to use bonuses to increase their probability of success this allows them to actually execute plans with some sense that they will actually be able to carry out the plan and not be 1 5% die roll away from failure at any given time. It does come with the need to constantly be doing addition, both of the dice and of the bonuses, and it does make exceptional successes harder to achieve. I think I'd prefer a 3d12 mechanic because it would give decent range, would make it fairly easy to add the dice, and would produce a decent bell-curve. But I also think most people would hate it in comparison to the other systems.

Jason
2020-12-02, 05:27 PM
The big problem with bell-curve systems is that modifiers matter more in the middle than they do on the ends. If I'm rolling 2d6 and my target is 8 or more, a +2 modifier to my roll gives me about a 30% boost in my odds (from 41.67% to 72.22%). Pretty significant.
But if I'm rolling 2d6 and my target is 10, a +2 only gives me about a 25% boost in my odds (from 16.67% to 41.67%) .
And if my target is a 12 or more, a +2 only gives me about a 14% boost (from 2.78% to 16.67%). Not nearly as big a boost. You get diminishing returns from your modifiers as you reach the ends of the dice curve.

I still play Traveller, which uses this basic mechanic (2d6 + skill and attribute modifier, beat an average target of 8), but it is important to remember how the modifiers scale when you're running it or you'll end up thinking your odds are a lot better than they actually are. GURPS has the same problem but as it uses 3d6 instead of 2d6 the curve is wider and the effect is a little less prominent.

For D&D's flat d20 rolls, a +1 is always a 5% increase in the odds, until you get to the point where you'll only succeed on a 20 or fail on a 1 anyway.

Favorite dice mechanics?

I like the "roll and keep" system of the AEG versions of Legend of the Five Rings. It's an interesting mechanic. It lets you raise the target numbers in order to give yourself more spectacular results as well.
I liked the old Earthdawn rules where you rolled different dice based on your modified step number. That was fun, although you had to recalculate and look at a table for pretty much every roll. The exploding dice also meant that you had at least a small chance of succeeding at anything you could roll for.
I like The One Ring with it's quirky d12 + skill level times d6 mechanics. Basically you'll always have a 1 in 12 chance of success in that game, and the designers were very careful in choosing the target numbers for what happens when you don't roll the Gandalf rune on the d12 or worse, roll the Eye of Sauron.
I liked FASA's Doctor Who system, where you compared skill to resisting skill on a table and then rolled 3d6 against a target number. Everything in the universe fell into one of seven categories of skill or difficulty.

I find the old d% methods like in Call of Cthulhu or the Warhammer RPGs to be adequate, if unexciting. d20 works fine in the same way, though D&D3 got a little out of control with the difficulty numbers. D&D5 works much better that way.

The Shadowrun mechanic of "roll all of your d6s and then re-roll everything that rolled a 6, throw away the rest; rinse and repeat" was a little too time-intensive for my tastes.

I don't much care for systems where every die roll requires a table to decipher, like Rolemaster. FASA's Doctor Who does that too, but at least it's always the same table.

I don't generally like custom dice where no actual numbers involved, like FFG's Star Wars. They take entirely too much time to find the result and often come up with self-contradictory results.

OldTrees1
2020-12-02, 05:44 PM
I really like:
Take 10. The ability to swap out a roll for a known quantity. Usually it is right below average, but even a Take 5 on a 1d20 would have merit.

While I generally use 1d20, I do like bell curves and inverse bell curves (nat 1s and nat 20s be the most common). Although bell curves can prevent mastery.

I also like exploding dice.

I wish I intuited the math behind dice pools better. Recently played a game with rolls like 14d{0,0,1,1,1,2}.

Saint-Just
2020-12-02, 05:46 PM
I like bell curves very much too. The worst problem with GURPS 3d6 is that it's too low-resolution. But adding more dice makes the curve too curvy and they had "no unusual dice" in their mission statement. I wish GURPS was 3d12 or 3d20.

There are also systems which I like for no good reasons. Dice pools for example (oWoD or even weird poker of Cthulhutech). Though exploding dice are very bad IMO.

Democratus
2020-12-03, 12:14 PM
I like bell-curve systems with a "twist".

Force Dice in WEG Star Wars. Stunt dice in Dragon Age RPG.

HumanFighter
2020-12-03, 12:54 PM
d20 FTW
There's always something exciting about rolling a natural 20

Ajustusdaniel
2020-12-03, 01:25 PM
Having spent most of my tabletop RPG career immersed in d20 systems, I find that the icosahedron has a certain totemic appeal that's completely unassociated with it's actual mechanical advantages or lack thereof.

For what it does, I greatly admire PbtA's fairly straightforward system of Roll 2d6 with minimal modifiers, with set ranges of numbers corresponding to a failure, a mitigated success and an outright success.

Xervous
2020-12-03, 01:47 PM
SR4e dicepools. It’s a left leaning curve that stretches rather than shifts. Extra dice are always relevant but not always the most efficient investment to pursue. Degrees of success are pretty easy to handle and the Take 4 option (guarantee 1 hit for each whole 4 dice) gives you a decent mechanical cutoff for hand waving away trivial tasks.

Guizonde
2020-12-03, 01:55 PM
d100's, no questions asked. i like the way it's so easy to read your percentage chance at a glance rather than multiplying by 5 on a d20. i like it combined with degrees of success or failure to see how badly or how well you did. when i came across the ffg warhammer rpg mechanics, i was in love. i learned the entire system in about 20 minutes, contrary to dnd 3.5 which took me over 2 years to really understand properly.

exploding dice are very fun too. i like making dm's cry in frustration with my stupid luck and rolling 5-6 times in a row. when i'm a dm, i like seeing the joy on the faces of my players when they do just that.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-03, 01:56 PM
Percentile dice, roll under, matches are special, higher is more extreme. It's arguably easier to grasp than any other system, even 1d[whatever]+modifiers, and most people have a good knowledge of their chances no matter if you start at 00 or 01 (which gives the system a couple of quirks but is not bad). Matches are easier to identify as criticals or advantages or whatever you're using them to trigger, and degrees of success become much easier to calculate.

Plus you can use the fact that both your tens and units range from 0-9 to fold effects calculations into the die roll, which my favourite system (Unknown Armies) uses to make attacks and damage a single roll. Sure you can fold that stuff in with other systems, but percentile dice gives you a little bit more variation on how.

EDIT: another reason higher is extreme is the superior way to do percentiles is that it makes cheating less rewarding. 'lowest first' or your trick dice will still get you more successes against the odds, but they're more likely to be bad successes. And I've seen people roll continually critical successes in Deathwatch before, no wonder Carnifex went down so fast there.

Laserlight
2020-12-03, 05:00 PM
I like exploding dice. They're risky (when the villains get them) but when your player says "He's going to kill me when he gets an action anyway, so I'll make a reckless attack. I hit and do 2d6+2 damage for...explodes...again...another one...okay...keep going...heh....okay, that's 41 points of damage" and cleaves him in twain.

Yora
2020-12-03, 05:30 PM
I really like the "dice pool with no counting" mechanic from Blades in the Dark.

Your rank in an ability determines the number of d6s that you roll. The die with the highest number is your result. All other dice are discarded.

I like the idea of your ability rank determining the number of d6 that you roll, but always found dice pools annoying because you quickly have to add together half a dozen or more dive for every single roll you make. In this system, you just have to sweep over your dice to see if you spot a 6. If not you sweep to see if you spot a 5. And so on. This actually works better with dice with dots instead of numbers, as most people have practiced recognizing the patterns of dots instantly as children for years.

For further simplification, the numbers mean the same thing for every action roll. 1-3 on your best dice means failure and you suffer a negative consequence. 4-5 means a partial success and you accomplish what you tried to do and also suffer a negative consequence. 6 means full success and you accomplish what you tried to do with no negative consequence. (The simplicity is a bit broken by getting a greater success if you have two or more 6s, but it's still really simple.)

Duff
2020-12-03, 07:18 PM
I have fond memories of; d% roll under, with crits for really low numbers, and botches for really high numbers.
roll 1 d 10 twice. Once for your 10s and then your 1s.
and you roll "Oh" [pause with baited breath while you pick up the dice] "dear" as the 2nd 0 appears plunging your hopes of a crit into the despair of a botch

Quertus
2020-12-03, 07:21 PM
Hmmm… I'll second "take 10" (and most anything else that obviates the need to roll dice at all).

I like exploding dice - they give players memorable moments / stories to tell.

I pretty well hate the WoD dice pool mechanics (although its own variant on exploding dice can be OK). However, take the same basic concept (attribute + ability, roll that many dice) and instead *sum them* against a target number, and allow the player to determine the effect of degrees of success (and, presumably, degrees of failure), and I love the idea.

Speaking of hating WoD, I have a love-hate relationship with systems which make it easy to tell that your GM is incompetent, like WoD or 5e D&D.

I like the simplicity of the math of d20 (no temporary modifiers, please - Persistence or go home), but dislike 2e THAC0 (and hatred early D&D attack roll table lookups). I like rolling on the pretty table on the back of the Marvel facerip books, but I hate the table for H&H (it feels dumb, like it should have just had "d20" level of "simple math" instead).

I think I've hated every 2d6 and 3d6 game I've ever played, *except* Battletech. I think it's because the mantra of "short range is 4, I ran is 6, your defense makes 8, one woods makes 9, pulse lasers makes 7, targeting computer makes 6" is part of the fun. (Or do war games not count? If they don't, Battletech *technically* has an RPG…)

Speaking of the Battletech RPG, I enjoy anything that manipulates probability / dice rolls: Battletech specialties (roll 3d6, drop one), Marvel facerip Probability Manipulation, Marvel facerip karma, ShadowRun good karma, M&M hero points, 2e D&D Moment, Warhammer Fate Points, etc etc etc.

I don't much care what die I'm rolling - I care what kind of stories I'm going to walk away with, and whether it feels like wasted effort getting there.

zarionofarabel
2020-12-04, 03:03 AM
D100 roll under. Blackjack or Price is Right for opposed rolls. Crit at super low rolls and fumble at super high.

In other words, the system used in Mythras. Just sings for me, best roll mechanic ever IMHO!

If one combines say, hit roll, location roll, and damage roll, all in one go, making an attack roll a die pool of sorts. It makes for some quick and easily resolved combats.

Mastikator
2020-12-04, 03:31 AM
TBH I feel like this is asking "what is your favorite tool, hammer or screwdriver?". Kinda depends on if we're using nails or screws.
For skill checks I like 2d10, but for initiative I like 1d20, for weapon damage, it should vary based on the weapon.

Saintheart
2020-12-04, 03:37 AM
I like WEG's d6 system for no more highbrow reason than that there's nothing quite like being able to rack up about 10d6 and throw them all at once to determine how awesome you are at doing something.

Khedrac
2020-12-04, 03:47 AM
TSR's Top Secret SI had a nice twist on the d100 percentage-based system.

Two of the main problems with the standard d% roll low system are:
1) Calculating criticals (10% of skill is easy, but many people have problems with 5% or 20%).
2) Opposed rolls - how to tell who does better (and although I have no issues, I know a lot of people who cannot understand Chaosium's Resistance table).

So, Top Secret SI used:
1. Skill/success chance is a percentage - roll under to succeed.
2. The higher the roll the better the result (unless other roll is a crit - then higher crit roll wins).
3. Crits are doubles (11, 22, 33, 44 etc.) that as successes - so a 55 is a very good crit for a skill of 56 and a failure for a skill of 54.

All the simplicity and elegance of the basic percentage system, but with critical and opposed rules that were trivial to apply.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-04, 05:42 AM
TSR's Top Secret SI had a nice twist on the d100 percentage-based system.

Two of the main problems with the standard d% roll low system are:
1) Calculating criticals (10% of skill is easy, but many people have problems with 5% or 20%).
2) Opposed rolls - how to tell who does better (and although I have no issues, I know a lot of people who cannot understand Chaosium's Resistance table).

So, Top Secret SI used:
1. Skill/success chance is a percentage - roll under to succeed.
2. The higher the roll the better the result (unless other roll is a crit - then higher crit roll wins).
3. Crits are doubles (11, 22, 33, 44 etc.) that as successes - so a 55 is a very good crit for a skill of 56 and a failure for a skill of 54.

All the simplicity and elegance of the basic percentage system, but with critical and opposed rules that were trivial to apply.

Yep, as I said higher up the thread this is my favourite system. I first encountered it in Unknown Armies and loved it (although UA separates critical results and matched results) and also love it when it's used in Eclipse Phase. It's so much easier to use in practice.

Going further into mechanics, I also love flip flops. This is where in a d% system certain abilities allow you to swap the digits on your side after you roll. Turning 62s into 26s (or other beneficial flip flops) has saved my character's life on more than one occasion.

MoiMagnus
2020-12-04, 09:21 AM
I really like the "dice pool with no counting" mechanic from Blades in the Dark.

Your rank in an ability determines the number of d6s that you roll. The die with the highest number is your result. All other dice are discarded.

Systems that allow for multiple kind of dice and "roll all of them and take the highest" works quite well too.
(I only know obscure homebrews doing so, no official games)

Ajustusdaniel
2020-12-04, 09:29 AM
Perhaps the most complicated dice system I've come across is Dogs in the Vinyard, in which the two sides of a conflict (usually, but not always, a player and the GM) roll a bunch of different dice (I think d4s through d10s) and then use the pools generated in a sort of push and pull poker game, possibly rolling more dice along the way.

Jason
2020-12-04, 11:21 AM
TSR's Top Secret SI had a nice twist on the d100 percentage-based system.

Two of the main problems with the standard d% roll low system are:
1) Calculating criticals (10% of skill is easy, but many people have problems with 5% or 20%).
2) Opposed rolls - how to tell who does better (and although I have no issues, I know a lot of people who cannot understand Chaosium's Resistance table).

So, Top Secret SI used:
1. Skill/success chance is a percentage - roll under to succeed.
2. The higher the roll the better the result (unless other roll is a crit - then higher crit roll wins).
3. Crits are doubles (11, 22, 33, 44 etc.) that as successes - so a 55 is a very good crit for a skill of 56 and a failure for a skill of 54.

All the simplicity and elegance of the basic percentage system, but with critical and opposed rules that were trivial to apply.
Hand-to-hand combat was really very slick in Top Secret/S.I. You would make one percentage roll, trying to go under your skill rating. If you succeeded, the 10s digit told you how much damage you did, and the 1s digit told you the hit location. You could "bump" the hit location to another location by a number equal to your skill level (normally 0-5), so a hit to the right arm (4) could be moved to the chest (1) with a Brawling skill of 3, but not to the head (0). If you succeeded and rolled doubles then you had a crit and the hit location of your target was entirely filled in. Knock our their head or chest areas and they needed to make a Con check or fall unconscious.

One die roll was all you needed. Skilled hand-to-hand fighters could both do more damage and select a more damaging hit location, and they had more chance of scoring a crit - all in one roll.

Khedrac
2020-12-04, 04:11 PM
Yep, as I said higher up the thread this is my favourite system. I first encountered it in Unknown Armies and loved it (although UA separates critical results and matched results) and also love it when it's used in Eclipse Phase. It's so much easier to use in practice.

Going further into mechanics, I also love flip flops. This is where in a d% system certain abilities allow you to swap the digits on your side after you roll. Turning 62s into 26s (or other beneficial flip flops) has saved my character's life on more than one occasion.
Apologies for missing your post. I like the flip-flops ideas - coudl be veryneat.

Hand-to-hand combat was really very slick in Top Secret/S.I. You would make one percentage roll, trying to go under your skill rating. If you succeeded, the 10s digit told you how much damage you did, and the 1s digit told you the hit location. You could "bump" the hit location to another location by a number equal to your skill level (normally 0-5), so a hit to the right arm (4) could be moved to the chest (1) with a Brawling skill of 3, but not to the head (0). If you succeeded and rolled doubles then you had a crit and the hit location of your target was entirely filled in. Knock our their head or chest areas and they needed to make a Con check or fall unconscious.

One die roll was all you needed. Skilled hand-to-hand fighters could both do more damage and select a more damaging hit location, and they had more chance of scoring a crit - all in one roll.
It has been so many years sicne I saw my copy of the rules (probably 30?) I had forgotten that until you mentioned it - yes - a really neat idea to speed gameplay.

OldTrees1
2020-12-04, 04:46 PM
Going further into mechanics, I also love flip flops. This is where in a d% system certain abilities allow you to swap the digits on your side after you roll. Turning 62s into 26s (or other beneficial flip flops) has saved my character's life on more than one occasion.

Huh, flip flops. What if we assume bigger is always better. There are 55 results with this distribution (multiple of 11 are half as frequent because it can't flipflop):

Unique results
10,11,20,21,22,30,31,32,33,40,41,
42,43,44,50,51,52,53,54,55,60,61,
62,63,64,65,66,70,71,72,73,74,75,
76,77,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,
90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,00

All results
10,10,11,20,20,21,21,22,30,30,
31,31,32,32,33,40,40,41,41,42,
42,43,43,44,50,50,51,51,52,52,
53,53,54,54,55,60,60,61,61,62,
62,63,63,64,64,65,65,66,70,70,
71,71,72,72,73,73,74,74,75,75,
76,76,77,80,80,81,81,82,82,83,
83,84,84,85,85,86,86,87,87,88,
90,90,91,91,92,92,93,93,94,94,
95,95,96,96,97,97,98,98,99,00

Comparing to d%,
Overall there is an increase. If it were not an increase, you would not swap.
The increase ranges from +0 (highest result is 00) to 25 (25th lowest result is 50).
As expected these increases are strongest in the low range, but they are not immediately strongest. The lowest result (10) only has an increase of +9.

Minty
2020-12-04, 06:34 PM
Personally, I tend to prefer extremely simple linear dice mechanics with easily calculable odds. The current system I'm using is a home brew D10 + skill vs target number system, which is pretty much optimal in my opinion. No critical success or failure, no margin of success, just pass or fail. I also quite like D10 roll-under systems. D20 and D100 roll-under systems are OK as well, as is D20 + skill vs target, but I find D10 simpler and nicer. I find target number systems preferable to roll-under-skill type systems, as they handle contested rolls and difficulty modifiers better and scale well.

I've almost always played rules lite home-brew systems, but my favourite off-the-shelf systems are Warhammer 2e, Dark Conspiracy/Twilight 2000, and Cyberpunk 2020. In my experience, systems with dice adding (GURPS), dice counting (WoD), or excessive modifiers (D&D) just drag too much because at least half the players in my group are mathematically challenged.

I detest gimmicky systems.

Pex
2020-12-04, 10:54 PM
My favorite is for a boardgame not an RPG. For RPGs I guess Take 10/Take 20 for when it's appropraite to tell the dice to stop interfering, but the boardgame Kingsburg uses my favorite dice mechanic. You roll the dice to give you worker placement options which in turn provide resources you use to do stuff. I find it an appealing method.

Telok
2020-12-04, 11:10 PM
I prefer 3d6 vs. target numbers and dice pools mostly because those systems seem to have (usually) put more consideration into how often you should get particular results.

I detest single die / flat probability systems with two exceptions, the Call of Cthulhu d% with it's doubling/halving skill to represent hard/easy tasks, and one of the Paranoia editions that runs on a d20 using a blackjack & margin of success method that reduces anything you need to one roll.

I enjoy the Lt5R / DtD40k7e roll & keep but I had to write my own dice roller app to be willing to use it.

lightningcat
2020-12-04, 11:52 PM
One addition to the Take 10/Take 20 idea I ran across for a high level game was the Take 1 rule. The action took less time than normal, but was 1 higher than your skill bonus. For character with +20 to +50 bonuses, this just made them look cool as they did small things with no effort.

Tanarii
2020-12-04, 11:58 PM
Unless rolls are extremely infrequent, as simple as possible to execute. Generally speaking that means one die over multiple dice, and addition if a single number over multiple, and no subtraction, multiplication or division.

A complicated system is fine if you only make a check once an hour for a crucial action. It sucks if you're doing it them every 30 seconds for combat results, or worse multiple of them for a single action in combat.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-04, 11:59 PM
Honestly, the only thing I care about with my dice mechanics is that they're simple and fast. NO TABLE LOOKUPS (at least for things that aren't once in a blue moon rolls). I want actually rolling the dice and interpreting the results to be basically brainless. Everything else pales in comparison. I don't look to my dice to provide entertainment--they're just there to help the "action" move along and resolve uncertainty. Flat vs bell? Meh. Statistics really don't matter in practice, not with the number of rolls you're making. What you roll (or don't roll) for is more important than what you roll IMO.

Although anything that lets you roll a big fistfull of dice occasionally is its own kind of fun. But only occasionally.


Unless rolls are extremely infrequent, as simple as possible to execute. Generally speaking that means one die over multiple dice, and addition if a single number over multiple, and no subtraction, multiplication or division.

A complicated system is fine if you only make a check once an hour for a crucial action. It sucks if you're doing it them every 30 seconds for combat results, or worse multiple of them for a single action in combat.

:smallbiggrin: I see we had the same thought at almost the same time. I'm just more prolix than you are, so you won.

OldTrees1
2020-12-05, 03:38 AM
One addition to the Take 10/Take 20 idea I ran across for a high level game was the Take 1 rule. The action took less time than normal, but was 1 higher than your skill bonus. For character with +20 to +50 bonuses, this just made them look cool as they did small things with no effort.

Oh, that is a nice new spin on "Take 1". I had seen it before without the speed up as merely skipping the roll by presuming a 1. However an in game increase in speed makes some sense. I will need to remember that.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-05, 05:27 AM
Huh, flip flops. What if we assume bigger is always better. There are 55 results with this distribution (multiple of 11 are half as frequent because it can't flipflop):

Unique results
10,11,20,21,22,30,31,32,33,40,41,
42,43,44,50,51,52,53,54,55,60,61,
62,63,64,65,66,70,71,72,73,74,75,
76,77,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,
90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,00

All results
10,10,11,20,20,21,21,22,30,30,
31,31,32,32,33,40,40,41,41,42,
42,43,43,44,50,50,51,51,52,52,
53,53,54,54,55,60,60,61,61,62,
62,63,63,64,64,65,65,66,70,70,
71,71,72,72,73,73,74,74,75,75,
76,76,77,80,80,81,81,82,82,83,
83,84,84,85,85,86,86,87,87,88,
90,90,91,91,92,92,93,93,94,94,
95,95,96,96,97,97,98,98,99,00

Comparing to d%,
Overall there is an increase. If it were not an increase, you would not swap.
The increase ranges from +0 (highest result is 00) to 25 (25th lowest result is 50).
As expected these increases are strongest in the low range, but they are not immediately strongest. The lowest result (10) only has an increase of +9.

Flip Flopping is more akin to 5e's advantage than d%. I've only ever seen it in d% systems, and it tends to represent focus or sitting of metagame currency but works for just about any big advantage. It's mostly useful for flipping a high roll into a lower one, if I have a skill of 36% and roll a 42 I can flip flop it to a 24 and pass the check out turn a 75 into a 57 to have a better failure, but I've also used it to boost minor successes into substantial ones.


Here's another one for flat probability roll under systems: critical success on skill rating. Stops those people with the five that consistently roll six or less from eternally critting.

OldTrees1
2020-12-05, 12:03 PM
Flip Flopping is more akin to 5e's advantage than d%. I've only ever seen it in d% systems, and it tends to represent focus or sitting of metagame currency but works for just about any big advantage. It's mostly useful for flipping a high roll into a lower one, if I have a skill of 36% and roll a 42 I can flip flop it to a 24 and pass the check out turn a 75 into a 57 to have a better failure, but I've also used it to boost minor successes into substantial ones.


I was comparing to d% to see how the mechanic changes the curve. As you can see it has a biased curve (like advantage) but it is a more complex curve. However then I graphed (chance to get at least a N) for FlipFlop d% against d% advantage, it turned out to be roughly the same curve.

It is a bit disappointing that you can use advantage as an approximation for flip flopping. I had hoped the curves would be more divergent. Flip Flopping had some fun math and Flip Flopping might have a fun mechanical texture, but my excitement has been tempered now that I realize Advantage does the "same" curve faster and simpler.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-05, 06:43 PM
I have irrational attachment to using full set of Platonic solids (d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20), plus two d10s for percentile rolls. This pure Basic D&D nostalgia, it came with that set of dice.

Beyond that, I like mechanics which can easily be converted to or expressed in % probability, for ease of calculation. D6, d8 and d12 are sort of annoying for these purposes, but as long as the number of dice stays low enough the fractions are manageable.

I also like mechanics based on color of dice, which are annoyingly rare, but generally do not like dice with special symbols.

Also, roll under for skill checks etc. character facing rolls is often preferable to roll over or dice pools, because with roll under the number on your character sheet is often more informative about your actual chance of success.

Quertus
2020-12-05, 10:09 PM
All the talk about "roll under" made me remember something: one of the most hated mechanics when I was having kids try out systems was roll under: "what do you mean, rolling high is *bad*?!". They definitely wanted those mechanics flipped to where high rolls were good.

… actually, iirc, I did the same thing in the homebrew Paradox, where I converted the elegant percentile skills to "I need to roll [101-x] or higher". Probably would have done the same thing to CoC had I played it long enough.

Ignimortis
2020-12-05, 11:15 PM
Dicepools over bell curves over single dice. The reason is consistency.

Dicepools, when done well (in regard to target numbers on the dice, target numbers in the game, and available dice), allow characters to feel actually competent. There isn't a significant chance of horribly missing a shot once in 10 or 20 or 100 rolls if you roll 20 Shadowrun-like dice (d6, one success per 5/6) against 2 successes needed, and there is still a reasonable chance of success if you roll 8 dice, but you feel the difference strongly.

Still, some systems don't understand that advantage or don't really math it out, and we have things like "only 6s count as successes, max dicepool is 10" in something like Coriolis (IIRC), or the asinine "anything from 6 to 10 counts as a success, but 1s remove successes, so increasing your dicepool is potentially opening you up to ridiculously unlucky rolls where you get three 1s" of oWoD (you could've just used 7 as the base TN and left 1s alone, dang).

Bell curve dice promote consistency, and make it easier to get off RNG for things you care about, while also making stupid things less likely. Rolling a 3 on 3d6 is only 1/216 instead of 1/20 as per typical d20. Rolling something in the range of 8-14, which should be enough to pass tests for things you're good at, is far more likely, and in fact, most of the time it will be something like that.

Single dice are horrible for consistency. The only way to feel competent with single dice, for me, is to get as close to getting off the RNG as possible. A d20 has a 5% chance of falling on a 1, and even if it's not an automatic failure (imagine auto-failing 5% of somewhat important actions in your life?), most systems that use a d20 make it unlikely that you'll still succeed on a 1 (the exception being mostly d20 systems of the 00s, like D&D 3.5 and various variants of that same base). Same goes for d10s or d100s - I just feel like they're unsuitable for any game where your character isn't designed to be an expendable mostly-nobody.

Oh, and roll over absolutely tops roll under. Big number good, low number bad, makes sense. I have no idea how somebody even came to the idea of rolling under being a reasonable divergence.

Telok
2020-12-06, 03:26 AM
Oh, and roll over absolutely tops roll under. Big number good, low number bad, makes sense. I have no idea how somebody even came to the idea of rolling under being a reasonable divergence.

It came from Gygax.

That sounds like a old b-movie title. Basically one of the original D&D checks was 3d6 or 1d20 under attribute. No math, just roll and look. It was enshrined in the AD&D non-weapon proficiency system.

The 2009 anniversary edition of Paranoia did both roll under and higher is better. All rolls were a d20 against some skill or attribute on the character sheet, you wanted to roll equal or under the number but as high as possible. Opposed checks were who rolled higher but still under their number. Damage was factored into the attack rolls by a margin of success thing. Fast system, basically no math outside of weapon damage vs. armor, the entire table could play with a single die. There was a pretty simple armor & weapon hack to kill off the last of the math in it too.

Flat probability systems like d20 are good for humor games to encourage silly results.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-06, 05:05 AM
To elaborate a bit further:

Game designers know real, physical dice are not perfectly balanced, so to cancel out potential bias in dice, it makes some amount of sense to vary whether you're rolling under or over. This is one reason why old games do both.

Also, as noted, roll under is often more informative to the player. Reason being, in roll over systems the target number is often hidden, where as in roll under the number on your sheet is the target number. How much utility this has depends on how the surrounding system is built.

Personally, I never had problems understanding "low roll is good", and I learned to play when I was 10. I've not had much trouble teaching this to kids either.

Ignimortis
2020-12-06, 05:28 AM
Personally, I never had problems understanding "low roll is good", and I learned to play when I was 10. I've not had much trouble teaching this to kids either.

It should be either over or under, but not both in the same system. Uniform systems are just good design, there's no way around it.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-06, 06:58 AM
I already pointed out a reason to use both in the same system. :smallconfused: Uniformity has its boon, but not enough to say mixed systems are automatically inferior.

Ignimortis
2020-12-06, 08:06 AM
I already pointed out a reason to use both in the same system. :smallconfused: Uniformity has its boon, but not enough to say mixed systems are automatically inferior.

And it's a pretty poor reason. How much can that physical bias influence rolls, and does it really justify using mechanics that don't function on the same base, especially if the most common rolls still use only one of those, and roll-under or roll-over are relegated to rare occasional rolls anyway?

Vahnavoi
2020-12-06, 08:24 AM
And it's a pretty poor reason. How much can that physical bias influence rolls?

Enough to be statistically significant. The people who don't pay attention to this often don't know or care about probability or physical attributes of dice. The dice in common use are often not particularly well made.


Does it really justify using mechanics that don't function on the same base?

You can invoke a version if Occam's razor here: between two models that do the same thing, the simpler one is better. If you have reasonably unbiased dice, the two systems function equally, but uniform is simpler, so you use that. If you're using common cheap hobby dice, the two systems don't function equally, so there's grounds to using a mixed system.


Especially if the most common rolls still use only one of those, and roll-under or roll-over are relegated to rare occasional rolls anyway?

Now you're just talking about poor implementation. In plenty of mixed systems, both types of rolls are common. Of course it's possible to botch balance in a mixed system, but so it is in uniform systems.

Tanarii
2020-12-06, 10:16 AM
All the talk about "roll under" made me remember something: one of the most hated mechanics when I was having kids try out systems was roll under: "what do you mean, rolling high is *bad*?!". They definitely wanted those mechanics flipped to where high rolls were good.
I've never had this problem with kids who are old enough to understand percentages. "Your STAT is your % chance of succeeding, the blue die is the tens and the red the 1s" always communicates roll under without fail. (Edit; note though, when I hear roll under I assume % based. Otherwise yup it's silly.)

I also never had a problem with folks understanding AC went down is better, or how to use a To Hit table (even though it was slow to use). Using Thac0 otoh was an unmitigated disaster. At least a lookup table got people to an answer with enough time. :smallamused:

MoiMagnus
2020-12-06, 10:24 AM
And it's a pretty poor reason. How much can that physical bias influence rolls, and does it really justify using mechanics that don't function on the same base, especially if the most common rolls still use only one of those, and roll-under or roll-over are relegated to rare occasional rolls anyway?

I mostly agree, though I don't consider occasional rolls to count when we consider uniform vs mixed.
E.g., I don't consider the fact that D&D5e wild magic use a d100 table as relevant when talking about what dice system is used by D&D5e.

A mixed system is when multiple different dice systems are used with similar frequency. For example D&D5e use three different systems "proponent roll d20+bonus vs opponent DC" for checks and attacks, "opponent rolls d20+bonus vs proponent DC" for saves, and "proponent roll a lot of dice and sum" for damages, and is a mixed system to that regard.

I personally find that the system would be simpler if the saves system did not exist and you had defences (like D&D4e). But the fact that damages are not d20 based is not a problem: replacing damages dice by d20 just for the sake of universality is not a good argument. It's not impossible, and not necessarily a bad idea (M&M is a d20 system that got rid of damage dice), but universality is not enough of an argument.

Max_Killjoy
2020-12-06, 10:58 AM
3d6 from HERO.

I like the curve pushing the results towards the middle, with the extremes fairly rare. And I like the way TN is determined by the relevant characteristic with skills improving it.

Tanarii
2020-12-06, 11:17 AM
I personally find that the system would be simpler if the saves system did not exist and you had defences (like D&D4e). But the fact that damages are not d20 based is not a problem: replacing damages dice by d20 just for the sake of universality is not a good argument. It's not impossible, and not necessarily a bad idea (M&M is a d20 system that got rid of damage dice), but universality is not enough of an argument.
I mean, if hit points were adjusted accordingly there wouldn't be a problem with d20 damage, other than the game having to take into account swinginess if damage.

I was a fan of damage in the Mutant Zero Engine as used in Forbidden Lands. The system is roll multiple d6 (based on stat, skill, and gear) system, with TN 6 for success. First 6 is base weapon damage (usually 1) and each 6 after is +1 damage. Putting damage directly into the attack roll like that was cool.

Unfortunately rolling typically 4 to 7 d6 for every attack roll and defense roll and checking for 6s was incredibly cumbersome.

This was made worse because each and every roll, you could reroll ("push") all non-(1,6) once, but if you did all 1s did damage to yourself, but gaining a magic point for each 1. This made checking for 1s a normal part of the process if you missed, along with having to stop and think if you wanted to push the roll for MP even showing 1s, then re-rolling and going through the whole process again.

-----------

Great game, terrible dice mechanic in terms of combat pacing. It worked fine for occasional out of combat rolls though. Which takes me back to my original point: complicated systems are fine when there's time. Even good if they build up tension. They're terrible for combat or other QuickTime events.

I guess I'm basically arguing against universal resolution systems, and in favor of sub-systems. :smallamused: :smallyuk:

Max_Killjoy
2020-12-06, 11:50 AM
That whole mechanic of "high TN on a pool of dice, but you can reroll the failed dice at a price" is showing up more and more, and frankly, I'm finding it tiresome.

Cluedrew
2020-12-06, 12:14 PM
If you don't have a reason roll high might be preferable but I think there are good reasons to have a roll under system. I once made a "roll between" system where you had to roll over difficulty but under your skill. That is complex and I am simplifying. Of course one of the things I am simplifying is that the game also had expendable resources to change dice results and the way that worked different results being better at different times worked really well. So although it might not be a general solution in that game I wouldn't change it.


I guess I'm basically arguing against universal resolution systems, and in favor of sub-systems. :smallamused: :smallyuk:I feel the need to point out you could also make combat take less rolls. I think this is how Don't Rest Your Head handled it in that combats could usually be decided in a single roll but it uses a Xd6 system (dice pool with summation) where the dice come from three different sources and the highest die in each sub-pool decides what sort of additional cost you experience. I never played it but they people I talked to who had seemed to enjoy it.

Tanarii
2020-12-06, 12:59 PM
That whole mechanic of "high TN on a pool of dice, but you can reroll the failed dice at a price" is showing up more and more, and frankly, I'm finding it tiresome.Other than the Mutant Zero engine, I don't think I've run into it elsewhere. What are some other examples?

(Unless I've mis-remembering and Exalted has it. But I've only read that not played, so my memory is spotty there.)


I feel the need to point out you could also make combat take less rolls. I think this is how Don't Rest Your Head handled it in that combats could usually be decided in a single roll but it uses a Xd6 system (dice pool with summation) where the dice come from three different sources and the highest die in each sub-pool decides what sort of additional cost you experience. I never played it but they people I talked to who had seemed to enjoy it.
I'd still rather have roll one die per action, add a number that you know before combat, compare to a defense number that's static for the enemy type. Maybe 2 defense numbers if you really need to vary between different kinds of attack, like physical and magical. I like a single action in combat in RPGs to take less than 30 seconds to resolve, especially if it's a simple one like "hit them with your sword / arrow / basic magic attack". Preferably far less than 30 seconds. Once a combat big show stoppers are different of course, be they physical or magical.

OTOH I do have fond memories of the Centurion board game, which had a tag line something like: the average life expectancy on the battle field is less than 3 minutes! Each round of combat was one minute of in-universe time, and the game was over in three rounds. Hovertanks zipped in shedding drop troops and mines and smoke and blasting away, and it still felt fast paced despite each round taking up to an hour to resolve. :smallamused:

Jason
2020-12-06, 01:45 PM
Single dice are horrible for consistency. The only way to feel competent with single dice, for me, is to get as close to getting off the RNG as possible. A d20 has a 5% chance of falling on a 1, and even if it's not an automatic failure (imagine auto-failing 5% of somewhat important actions in your life?), most systems that use a d20 make it unlikely that you'll still succeed on a 1 (the exception being mostly d20 systems of the 00s, like D&D 3.5 and various variants of that same base). Same goes for d10s or d100s - I just feel like they're unsuitable for any game where your character isn't designed to be an expendable mostly-nobody. You think a 5% failure rate is enough to make a character an "expendable mostly-nobody"? Die rolls are not used for routine tasks with no chance of failure. They are only used when there should be a significant chance of failure.



Oh, and roll over absolutely tops roll under. Big number good, low number bad, makes sense. I have no idea how somebody even came to the idea of rolling under being a reasonable divergence.
I see no reason to prefer one to the other. Rolling under is used as the primary mechanic in many, many games with no problems, and they can be mathematically identical to rolling over.

MoiMagnus
2020-12-06, 01:52 PM
I feel the need to point out you could also make combat take less rolls. I think this is how Don't Rest Your Head handled it in that combats could usually be decided in a single roll but it uses a Xd6 system (dice pool with summation) where the dice come from three different sources and the highest die in each sub-pool decides what sort of additional cost you experience. I never played it but they people I talked to who had seemed to enjoy it.

I've not played with that exact system, but I've played with a similar system where it was "everybody describe how they plan to fight, roll dice, and the ones that roll the highest narrate how the fight resolve, taking in account by how much they are higher than their opponents" (with for boss battle 2 or 3 rounds instead of just one)

That was fun, and it works well when you want combat to not be a subsystem (meaning it doesn't happen often enough compared to discussions, investigations & co to be worth its own specific rules).

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-06, 02:51 PM
If you don't have a reason roll high might be preferable but I think there are good reasons to have a roll under system. I once made a "roll between" system where you had to roll over difficulty but under your skill.

That's actually pretty standard for 'high is good' roll under systems. Easy tasks give you bonuses to your skill, hard tasks require you to have a certain margin of success (number of dice). It's how the GM of my first Unknown Armies game ran it (which I believe is by the book, I don't own 2e), and it's how I now run all roll under systems.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-06, 02:59 PM
You think a 5% failure rate is enough to make a character an "expendable mostly-nobody"? Die rolls are not used for routine tasks with no chance of failure. They are only used when there should be a significant chance of failure.


For me personally, the largest leap in understanding and fun for TTRPGs came when I realized that the best use of dice (for me) wasn't to resolve actions. Dice (in my view) exist to resolve uncertainty about actions made under pressure, and most actions don't have any associated uncertainty (or not enough to bother with the dice) or are made in situations where the pressure is minimal. So dice only come up in contested situations between people of close enough skill/capability[1] and for things where you don't really have a second chance and it's balanced on a razor's edge.

It's why I'm fine with "flat" probability curves--I'm only using dice for things near the peak of the curve, where it's basically flat anyway (the derivative of any normal probability curve near the peak is approximately 0). Things very far off to either side don't need rolls at all. Dice exist to prevent the child-make-believe problem of "I shot you! No you didn't (etc)". They're not actually modeling the underlying universe, which isn't nearly so random[2]. So having a complex "realistic" dice mechanic just gets in the way (for me) of what the dice should be doing. Resolving uncertainty in a way that's fast, reasonably fair, and accessible to everyone.

[1] No need to roll if a (presumed physically-competent) adult arm-wrestles a baby. If Superman boxes a regular joe, Superman wins outright, no roll needed. The exact contours of this are left up to the GM to decide, with assistance from the rest of the system.
[2] Real-world physics is stochastic at the micro-level, but deterministic at the macro scale. Most actions people take succeed with greater than 99.9% success rates. Even a d% roll-under with a skill of 99 is an order of magnitude off here. And the times they fail aren't random, they're caused by underlying failures. No dice mechanic is enough to even approach reality in a sane way, so it's better to not even have that as a factor. Seen from the viewpoint of reality, 1d20+mods is just as good as the most complicated system. Because they're all horrible, and the differences between them aren't anywhere close to the differences between any of them and reality.

Cluedrew
2020-12-06, 04:12 PM
I'd still rather have roll one die per action, add a number that you know before combat, compare to a defense number that's static for the enemy type. [...] I like a single action in combat in RPGs to take less than 30 seconds to resolve, [...] OTOH I do have fond memories of the Centurion board game, [...] and it still felt fast paced despite each round taking up to an hour to resolve. :smallamused:
That was fun, and it works well when you want combat to not be a subsystem (meaning it doesn't happen often enough compared to discussions, investigations & co to be worth its own specific rules).You know this is why I'm glad this thread said "favorite" and not "best" because what mechanics work are so dependent on what you are using it for and the other mechanics that interlock with them. The best/worst system threads are a bit better because it is a bit easier to generalize. And suddenly I realize I am not talking about the main topic but how entertainment is inherently subjective and "objective" discussions on them are kind of silly.

On the actual topic I don't have much to say that hasn't been said, but have a few. I could comment that the advantage of 1dX systems being easy to judge odds doesn't feel like a big deal because the exact odds really only matter in optimization and design. For play, low, even, high, almost guarantied are close enough in my experience. I like systems that use d6s because they are easy to get (but I accept other dice) and I like degrees of success.


That's actually pretty standard for 'high is good' roll under systems. Easy tasks give you bonuses to your skill, hard tasks require you to have a certain margin of success (number of dice).I don't think I have ever actually seen a system where that is how it worked (even my example was a board game and not a role-playing game).

Telok
2020-12-06, 06:05 PM
For me personally, the largest leap in understanding and fun for TTRPGs came when I realized that the best use of dice (for me) wasn't to resolve actions...

...It's why I'm fine with "flat" probability curves--I'm only using dice for things near the peak of the curve, where it's basically flat anyway (the derivative of any normal probability curve near the peak is approximately 0). Things very far off to either side don't need rolls at all.

Ah, interesting take on it. So you like the flat systems for your own use because you aren't rolling for anything but the most uncertain outcomes. You're basing "favorite" on you being the DM or having a DM who uses the system like you do.

I've been basing "favorite" on my experiences of how other DMs, especially less experienced DMs who aren't on the 'net and intentionally trying to improve their DMing, use the systems. Most game books don't seem to explain very well to those DMs how their mechanics should be used and what that looks like.

Most books don't tell them, clearly and explicitly, that when it's wizard vs. barbarian or halfling vs. orge, you shouldn't roll for wrestling or chess games you just declare the winner. That lack of clariy, I think, is pretty common across the industry. It's not a message I get when reading the books, I only hear it on forums like this one.

Jason
2020-12-06, 06:14 PM
The steps I use to adjudicate actions - adapted in part from the Angry GM:

1. The Player Declares an Action
Without referring to game mechanics in any way, the player declares what they want to do. The player must declare an (A) intent and (B) an approach. "I'm trying to (A) get the guard to let us pass by (B) offering him a bribe." If a specific spell is involved the player will have to name it, but otherwise players don't refer to game mechanics while stating an approach. The idea is to have them put themselves in the scene and act as if they are present.

2. The GM Determines if the Action can Succeed or Fail and if Risk is involved.
If the GM decides there is no way the player can succeed or fail, then no roll is needed and they automatically succeed or fail. If the GM judges that the player's approach can succeed and there is no real cost involved in a possible failure, then the GM should just let the player succeed without a die roll. A roll should only be required when a potential failure has real consequences. If the only consequence of failure is "I'll have to try again," then you might as well just let them succeed without a roll - assume they try it until they get it right.

3. The GM decides what Game Mechanics will be used, Sets the difficulty and TELLS the player both.The GM gets to decide what skills or other game mechanics fit the approach being used. The player generally gets to know the difficulty of an action they are about to attempt before they roll. There are some exceptions, but part of being skilled is being able to judge how difficult a task will be and what the best method to accomplish it is. Any skilled wall climber, for instance, should have some idea of how difficult it is going to be to scale a particular wall, once he's had a chance to have a look at it.

4. The Player may adjust the approach
Once he knows the difficulty, the player can ask the GM to consider character abilities, gear, feats, skills, etc. that the GM didn't already consider that might make the approach easier or more difficult. If the GM agrees, the difficulty gets adjusted appropriately. Or the Player can choose to abandon this approach entirely as too risky and try something else.

5. The Player makes the roll. The GM describes the result
Some systems have hard mechanics for levels of success, for others the GM has to come up with what a success or a failure mean in the world. Usually success means "the player's intent from step 1 is what happens." Failure usually means that the cost the GM determined would be present for a failure during step 2 is what happens.

Lapak
2020-12-06, 06:47 PM
I'm pretty fond of Sanguine's dice system. It's a spin on dice pools (roll relevant dice vs. target, highest single die determines success) but:

- dice size in the pool varies (training in a skill starts by giving you 1d4, each upgrade increases the die size until you hit 1d12, the next skill increase gives you another 1d4 which can then grow)
- rolls are skill + attribute + racial die (where applicable.)
- botching only on 'every die rolls a one' means that any training at all in a skill makes a botch much less likely and you never hit the 'expert rolls so often he is more likely to crit-fail than a novice' business, but gives diminishing returns on hyper-specialization
- opposed rolls are pretty straightforward (the highest side showing on any die wins, degree of success = how many dice you rolled higher than your opponent's highest.)

Quertus
2020-12-06, 06:56 PM
On "roll low and roll high in the same system"… it certainly matters, or it did in older editions of D&D.

However, it also *didn't* matter, because I would just roll *a different die* when I needed to roll low.

So ya just can't win.


I've never had this problem with kids who are old enough to understand percentages. "Your STAT is your % chance of succeeding, the blue die is the tens and the red the 1s" always communicates roll under without fail. (Edit; note though, when I hear roll under I assume % based. Otherwise yup it's silly.)

Champions / Hero system, 3d6. Kids *hated* it. I flipped the math on the fly to "high is good".

I agree that "X% chance" is elegant, but I, personally, still prefer to flip the math and roll high.

Max_Killjoy
2020-12-06, 07:08 PM
Other than the Mutant Zero engine, I don't think I've run into it elsewhere. What are some other examples?

(Unless I've mis-remembering and Exalted has it. But I've only read that not played, so my memory is spotty there.)


The Year Zero Engine is the basis of several I've seen (including Tales from the Loop / Things from the Flood, Vaesen, etc) that include this sort of mechanic, but it's not the only one. It's probably the most extreme version I've seen.

The 2d20 based Conan game includes a mechanism to put "Doom" in the GM's pool in order to add more dice to the player's roll.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-06, 10:08 PM
Ah, interesting take on it. So you like the flat systems for your own use because you aren't rolling for anything but the most uncertain outcomes. You're basing "favorite" on you being the DM or having a DM who uses the system like you do.

It actually started when I played with a DM who had a (probably unfairly labeled) "Old-School" mentality. We rolled for everything. And it was miserable, and we all felt like chumps. Because seriously, no dice system can handle rolling bunches of repeated rolls where one failure is enough to trigger "bad things". That also soured me tremendously on 'realism'. Because it was neither realistic nor fun. And it was a slog. Note: that was using 5e D&D, which is very clear about the philosophy I espoused. It's just that most people don't actually read the DMG.

My attitude was then reinforced when I played a short game of PF1e. This was using an Adventure Path (Rise of the Runelords) and it felt like the system's default assumption was that adventurers were incompetent outside their specialty. And the constant rolling for inconsequential things slowed everything down and produced all sorts of absurd results.



I've been basing "favorite" on my experiences of how other DMs, especially less experienced DMs who aren't on the 'net and intentionally trying to improve their DMing, use the systems. Most game books don't seem to explain very well to those DMs how their mechanics should be used and what that looks like.

Most books don't tell them, clearly and explicitly, that when it's wizard vs. barbarian or halfling vs. orge, you shouldn't roll for wrestling or chess games you just declare the winner. That lack of clariy, I think, is pretty common across the industry. It's not a message I get when reading the books, I only hear it on forums like this one.

I mostly agree. Too often, books assume that you understand the underlying philosophy of play and so don't make it clear. I wish they would. I'd rather have a good, interesting philosophy of play than fancy dice mechanics.

I will say that the 5e DMG has pretty clear wording that you shouldn't be rolling unless all of the following are true:
a) there is a substantial chance of failure. For instance, it says that generally a DC 5 (or anything < 10) check isn't usually worth rolling.
b) success is not impossible. You can't do the impossible by rolling--the DC isn't some fixed number. It's a flat NO.
c) failure has meaningful consequences that are fun and move the action along. Not necessarily forward, but just not block it. This means that if the only consequence is time, and time isn't all that important, don't roll. Just succeed (or at most have them roll for how long it takes if time means something). This also, to me, means that rolling for plot advancement is a bad idea. If a bad roll can derail finding the clues they need, you need to either have other clues planted or not roll.

Examining the math, it seems like the presumed sweet spot is near 50% failure/success. Actually a little higher--hit rates are ~60-65%, as are saving throw failure rates. That's because it feels good to succeed; whiff-fests are boring. Which means that specialized people should succeed a bit more (75% maybe) and unspecialized/poor actors (ie negative modifiers) should succeed a bit less (ie down near 50%).

Of course, this means that I am not a fan of super-specialization. I'd be much happier if rogues put their Expertise (double proficiency bonus) into skills tied to things they're not naturally good at. Ie I find Expertise (Stealth) to be boring. Sure, you now have a +17 to stealth, so nothing with a passive perception less than that of a dragon can find you without actively looking for you. Great. And since you have Reliable Talent by those levels, your lowest Dexterity (Stealth) check is a 27. You can sneak past gods (not really, but...). But for the 99% of things you'll sneak past, a 15 would have been plenty. Those extra points didn't really give you much benefit, while taking something you have a +0 at to a +12--that's amazing. Now you can sneak well (proficiency means you're hitting +11) and do <other thing> well. I'm a fan of broad rather than deep power. But that's my own biases.

Tanarii
2020-12-06, 10:15 PM
It actually started when I played with a DM who had a (probably unfairly labeled) "Old-School" mentality. We rolled for everything. And it was miserable, and we all felt like chumps. Because seriously, no dice system can handle rolling bunches of repeated rolls where one failure is enough to trigger "bad things". That also soured me tremendously on 'realism'. Because it was neither realistic nor fun. And it was a slog. Note: that was using 5e D&D, which is very clear about the philosophy I espoused. It's just that most people don't actually read the DMG.

My attitude was then reinforced when I played a short game of PF1e. This was using an Adventure Path (Rise of the Runelords) and it felt like the system's default assumption was that adventurers were incompetent outside their specialty. And the constant rolling for inconsequential things slowed everything down and produced all sorts of absurd results.
It is a mentality that really came into force with 3e. So about twenty years old. Pretty new school.
(Edit: it had been around before that of course, nwps had been around forever, and BECMI had general skills. From what I've read, a lot of people hated the Thief when it was introduced because it took things "anyone could do" and locked them into one class ... as a spectacularly low success rate. But 3e skills are when it really took off.)

PF1 is intentionally modeled on 3e and was designed to capture the 3e players, so of course the mentality that skill checks were some kind of physics engine for any task in the world followed over to it as players migrated.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-06, 10:35 PM
It is a mentality that really came into force with 3e. So about twenty years old. Pretty new school.
(Edit: it had been around before that of course, nwps had been around forever, and BECMI had general skills. From what I've read, a lot of people hated the Thief when it was introduced because it took things "anyone could do" and locked them into one class ... as a spectacularly low success rate. But 3e skills are when it really took off.)

PF1 is intentionally modeled on 3e and was designed to capture the 3e players, so of course the mentality that skill checks were some kind of physics engine for any task in the world followed over to it as players migrated.

This DM said he was hearkening to the AD&D era mentality. I never played then (other than the CRPG versions which don't surface this problem directly), so I just said meh. But everything took some form of check, even if the outcome was (based on the established fiction) crystal clear. It always felt like he was fishing for failure so he could punish the characters. And it wasn't so great. If you weren't a specialist at something, you shouldn't try. Because you'll fail and bring the party down with you.

That was my feeling about PF--only the designated (and specialized) face could talk--everyone else was doomed to fail. Only the designated <X> could do things in their speciality. I much prefer letting everyone try and narrating the results accordingly. Especially for ability checks. Sure, the Barbarian's player rolled the dice that succeeded at that INT check. But in universe, that was him asking a question that prompted the smart guy character to put together the pieces. Or something like that. Or just feeding auto-successes through people with the appropriate background (either formal background or backstory). The guy who grew up in a church is going to just know about religious stuff relating to his religion, even if he's dumb as a post (ok, 8 INT). The guy who grew up at court is going to know the background of the nobles. The woodland hunter is going to know what animals in that region are like. Etc.

Ignimortis
2020-12-07, 01:10 AM
You think a 5% failure rate is enough to make a character an "expendable mostly-nobody"? Die rolls are not used for routine tasks with no chance of failure. They are only used when there should be a significant chance of failure.

Every single combat action other than moving generally involves some sort of roll. And the issue is that most single-dice systems outside of 00's d20 systems don't let you off the RNG, which means you don't have a 5% chance of failure, you have 30% or so. 5e is perhaps the single biggest example - even a level -1 INT mod barbarian can beat a +5 INT mod, proficient in Arcana archmage in an Arcana skill contest, and it's not only on a nat 1+nat 20 (as long as the barbarian rolls a 14 or above, he has a chance of winning, and as long as the archmage rolls a 7 or less, he has a chance of losing).

And for some reason, a goblin still has a 5% chance of hitting a level 20 Fighter, and a Fighter has a 5% chance of missing a goblin. If you think "the goblin isn't important enough to warrant rolling", replace it with a giant, which is still insanely less skilled, but would take several strikes to bring down.

Both of those things can be fixed with certain rules, but I've never seen any single-dice system that doesn't gleefully proclaim "at one end of the scale, you have a super-bad roll, and the other is a super-nice roll, not because it's just the lowest/highest value you can get, but because we attached additional value to it, and that value is generally enough to make you succeed or fail regardless of your own capabilties".

And here's where we come to expendable mostly-nobodies - something like Dark Heresy doesn't grate as much, because you're playing someone in WH40k, so it's just...expected that things can go horribly wrong and you all can die very, very quickly. Same for CP2020, where even the best Solo can die in a single burst of autofire.



I see no reason to prefer one to the other. Rolling under is used as the primary mechanic in many, many games with no problems, and they can be mathematically identical to rolling over.

Somewhat later in the thread I conceded that it's fine, as long as they're not mixed. But in general, I just see roll-over as more logical.

Telok
2020-12-07, 01:54 AM
I mostly agree. Too often, books assume that you understand the underlying philosophy of play and so don't make it clear. I wish they would. I'd rather have a good, interesting philosophy of play than fancy dice mechanics.

I will say that the 5e DMG has pretty clear wording that you shouldn't be rolling unless all of the following are true:

Yeah the AD&D books didn't make it clear that the thief skills were supposed to be abilities that were above and beyond what everyone could do. Basically the thief was supposed to have semi-superpowers and at low levels stuff like shoddy cheap locks and drunk guards should have given bonuses to them. But people started thinking that only the thief class could be stealthy, find traps, etc.

3e was a reaction to that and attempted to address it by moving the range of the rng as the pcs leveled up. As they leveled up the low level stuff fell off the bottom of the rng because pc bonuses pushed their rolls so high. Of course unintended consequences and ineffective explanation and you got crippling over specialization. 4e was a reaction to that, 5e was a reaction to PF and 4e, 6e will be a reaction to 5e.

I can't say that the 5e DMG particularly explains best practices. It wasn't the message I got from reading it and I've never yet seen a DM that actually ran it as you describe. I keep seeing 5e be people having to roll against everything (well, at least lots of stuff) because the bounded bonuses let anyone fail and there's always some consequence for failing a roll even it's just wasting an action in combat.

I actually prefer, rather than a die mechanic that depends on people properly interpreting and divining developer intent, one that either doesn't dosen't break when people try to use it or works well even when people don't perfectly understand it. And to that end I'm willing to put up with a bit more complexity or fiddly bits. Mostly it seems to me that the various bell curves and dice pools manage that and the flat probability systems don't.

Could be just my experiences though, seeing 5e DMs make the old AD&D style thief misreadings.

Tanarii
2020-12-07, 09:52 AM
I can't say that the 5e DMG particularly explains best practices. It wasn't the message I got from reading it and I've never yet seen a DM that actually ran it as you describe.The 5e DMG describes it very well.

It just does it in Chaoter 8 instead of Page 1. Classic DMG terrible layout. Plus from what I can tell, most people never read the DMG anyway. Be they new DMs or experienced ones. After all we've all played in games with other DMs, or been running games for years, right?

Jason
2020-12-07, 10:22 AM
Every single combat action other than moving generally involves some sort of roll. And the issue is that most single-dice systems outside of 00's d20 systems don't let you off the RNG, which means you don't have a 5% chance of failure, you have 30% or so. 5e is perhaps the single biggest example - even a level -1 INT mod barbarian can beat a +5 INT mod, proficient in Arcana archmage in an Arcana skill contest, and it's not only on a nat 1+nat 20 (as long as the barbarian rolls a 14 or above, he has a chance of winning, and as long as the archmage rolls a 7 or less, he has a chance of losing).
Technically correct; if the Archmage rolled a 7 or less and the Barbarian rolled above a 14 the Barbarian could win.
Unless the DM says "if you're not proficient you can't possibly win at an Arcana contest. They use so much technical jargon that you would have no idea what they're talking about," and denies the Barbarian a roll at all.
Alternately he can make the contest a series of rolls (like combat), which without a streak of fantastic luck will result in a barbarian loss. And 20s are not automatic successes with attribute rolls.


And for some reason, a goblin still has a 5% chance of hitting a level 20 Fighter, and a Fighter has a 5% chance of missing a goblin. If you think "the goblin isn't important enough to warrant rolling", replace it with a giant, which is still insanely less skilled, but would take several strikes to bring down.When it comes to combat it's a feature, not a bug. Combat is supposed to always have a little risk. Even a goblin can get lucky. But the high-level fighter has enough hit points that it won't matter much unless all the goblins get very lucky and the fighter is very unlucky in return.
Also, there's nothing preventing the DM from saying "okay, you killed the evil priest. All of his goblin minions either die in the next few rounds, surrender, or run off. We won't bother rolling all of that out. You win."

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-07, 10:49 AM
Plus from what I can tell, most people never read the DMG anyway. Be they new DMs or experienced ones.

Guilty as charged.

Although that's because 1) I'd really rather run something else than D&D, 2) nobody has bought me the book yet, and 3) I'd really much rather run something other than D&D. But I have legitimately played enough that I could suss out most of 5e's rolling philosophy from the rules (although I thought they wanted 'only roll if both success and failure are interesting').

5e could stand to have a little bit more structure, but it's less bad than I like to pretend it is. If you stick to what it's good at (going someplace and fighting something) then it works, if you don't than at least it tries not to get in the way of you playing freeform. But there are people who never get around to understanding how the system is supposed to work even if my last 'roll to see if you remembered to breathe' moment was back in 3.X*.

* and it was a bunch of university students having a laugh.

Ignimortis
2020-12-07, 11:02 AM
Technically correct; if the Archmage rolled a 7 or less and the Barbarian rolled above a 14 the Barbarian could win.
Unless the DM says "if you're not proficient you can't possibly win at an Arcana contest. They use so much technical jargon that you would have no idea what they're talking about," and denies the Barbarian a roll at all.
Alternately he can make the contest a series of rolls (like combat), which without a streak of fantastic luck will result in a barbarian loss. And 20s are not automatic successes with attribute rolls.

When it comes to combat it's a feature, not a bug. Combat is supposed to always have a little risk. Even a goblin can get lucky. But the high-level fighter has enough hit points that it won't matter much unless all the goblins get very lucky and the fighter is very unlucky in return.
Also, there's nothing preventing the DM from saying "okay, you killed the evil priest. All of his goblin minions either die in the next few rounds, surrender, or run off. We won't bother rolling all of that out. You win."

The DM having to fix how the mechanics work, or having to set up a specific way of rolling, or inventing excuses just to avoid the pitfalls of the base dice system should be a sign of those mechanics being poorly designed or implemented. Frankly, I don't see any advantage for D&D from 3e onwards to keep 1d20 as the base die instead of, say, 3d6 (outside of memetic value), which should preclude such things from being common occurences. Missing/hitting something you shouldn't miss/hit once in 200+ strikes due to a significant stroke of luck/unluck is much more plausible than missing/hitting once in 20.

jjordan
2020-12-07, 11:06 AM
Alternately he can make the contest a series of rolls (like combat), which without a streak of fantastic luck will result in a barbarian loss.
Effectively turning the linear probability system into a bell-curve system. Interesting.

Telok
2020-12-07, 11:06 AM
The 5e DMG describes it very well.

It just does it in Chaoter 8 instead of Page 1. Classic DMG terrible layout. Plus from what I can tell, most people never read the DMG anyway. Be they new DMs or experienced ones. After all we've all played in games with other DMs, or been running games for years, right?

Yeah, people here keep chanting it like a mantra but that's not what I see happening in games. Thats why I compare it to the AD&D thief skills, read and implemented in the one true way they work great but that's not what a lot of people got. Hence my preference for a mechanic that works well even when people don't memorize or analyze in detail a chapter 8 of a secondary book.

I wonder if the exception based design and adventures hsve something to do with it. The PH is the primary rule source in people's minds because it has all the rules everyone uses to play the game. Then they see the DMG as exceptions and add-ons because it's presented as more of an advice book they you may only need sometimes. Then when the DM sits down to run a game what's in front of them is the adventure with a check DC. So the thought process goes: PH (climb at half speed, no check) -> DMG (exception to PH = roll if uncertain & failure matters + failing = falling = damage, and damage matters) -> adventure (exception to DMG = has a climb DC for a wall = this wall is exceptional = roll to climb).

Edit:

Effectively turning the linear probability system into a bell-curve system. Interesting. That's what most social combat systems do. Add social/mental hit points, ac, and effects. D&D does combat ok/good and could implement non-combat stuff in the same framework, even if only as an optional rule. But it hasn't happened in the 2 or 3 decades since the idea of social combat appeared so don't hold your breath.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-07, 11:37 AM
Hence my preference for a mechanic that works well even when people don't memorize or analyze in detail a chapter 8 of a secondary book.


I wouldn't call the DMG a "secondary book" for DMs. It's the primary book for them. And it's not memorizing or analyzing in detail--it's stated in plain terms. Repeatedly, actually.

I see lots of people trying to make rulesets that work for people who don't read the rules. That's rather quixotic IMO. If they're not reading the rules, changing the rules won't help. The majority of questions and complaints that I see from DMs on the 5e forums come from people who don't read what's already there. Including the PHB itself.

I also don't see any dice mechanic helping here--you can nudge things, subtly. But unless you've got a heck of a curve there (which comes with all sorts of additional issues) all you're doing is trading off one pain point for other ones. With a standard distribution, now it's harder to be exceptional--only specialists can even hope to attempt harder things. Which leads to hard niches and people sitting around a lot.

It all goes back to what I call the "law of conservation of annoyance." There's a fixed amount of annoyance (pain points, etc) in every mechanic. All you can do is shuffle it around to places you don't care about right now. And that's case-by-case and subjective. For me, the pain points of the flat distribution don't really bug me, because they hit things I don't care about anyway. While the extra work and obfuscation of (say) a 3d6 roll or even worse a dice pool mechanic do hit things I care about (mainly action-resolution speed). So there are tradeoffs everywhere.


The DM having to fix how the mechanics work, or having to set up a specific way of rolling, or inventing excuses just to avoid the pitfalls of the base dice system should be a sign of those mechanics being poorly designed or implemented. Frankly, I don't see any advantage for D&D from 3e onwards to keep 1d20 as the base die instead of, say, 3d6 (outside of memetic value), which should preclude such things from being common occurences. Missing/hitting something you shouldn't miss/hit once in 200+ strikes due to a significant stroke of luck/unluck is much more plausible than missing/hitting once in 20.

Here's the thing. Critical failures and successes don't really have to do with the person acting as they do with the surroundings. In fact, I'd extend that to all successes and failures. Your skill is already taken into account with the modifier, which is static. The roll represents things out of your control. So a nat 1 is not you whiffing badly. It's the opponent being in just the right place to deflect the blow. Or (say on an range attack) something falling in the way that couldn't have been predicted. Same with a nat 20, just the inverse. And if you're only using the rolls when you should, this doesn't cause any issues. If it really can't be hurt by you, it has immunity. Not an arbitrarily high AC. And everyone can miss, if external factors conspire against them.

And there aren't critical failures or successes for non-attacks in 5e, so there's no "I succeed even though I couldn't possibly do so" or "I failed even though my skill was above the DC" danger there.

Jason
2020-12-07, 12:07 PM
The DM having to fix how the mechanics work, or having to set up a specific way of rolling, or inventing excuses just to avoid the pitfalls of the base dice system should be a sign of those mechanics being poorly designed or implemented.

Well the Barbarian vs. Archmage is a deliberately extreme example. For a more routine Arcane knowledge contest between two mages the basic die mechanic works just fine. For extreme examples the DM often has to use judgement on how best to approach the situation. That applies in any system, not just D&D.

As the DMG says:

Remember that dice don't run your game - you do. Dice are like rules. They're tools to help keep the action moving. At any time, you can decide that a player's action is automatically successful...When a player wants to do something, it's often appropriate to let the attempt succeed without a die roll or a reference to the character's ability scores...
...When deciding whether to use a roll, ask yourself two questions:

Is a task so easy and so free of conflict and stress that there should be no chance of failure?
Is a task so inappropriate or impossible - such as hitting the moon with an arrow - that it can't work?

If the answer to both of these questions is no, some kind of roll is appropriate.
In other words, if the answer to one of those questions is "yes" then no die roll is needed. If it should be impossible for the barbarian to defeat the Archmage in an arcane knowledge test then the Archmage wins without a die roll.


Frankly, I don't see any advantage for D&D from 3e onwards to keep 1d20 as the base die instead of, say, 3d6 (outside of memetic value), which should preclude such things from being common occurences. Missing/hitting something you shouldn't miss/hit once in 200+ strikes due to a significant stroke of luck/unluck is much more plausible than missing/hitting once in 20.

It seems to me that it was a deliberate design choice to keep the linear progression and the 1 in 20 hit/miss chance. Things are just more exciting that way.
The system is targeted at 1st level characters being able to succeed at a "Medium" DC15 check roughly 55% of the time for something they are good at (+2 proficiency bonus and +3 attribute bonus = success on a 10 or higher). On an Easy DC10 check they have an 80% chance of success (5 or higher). A maxed-out 20th level, 20 attribute character gets an 85% success chance on the DC15 check (+5 attribute, +6 proficiency bonus = 4 or higher) and can't fail the Easy check.
It looks to me like the authors did the math.

Xervous
2020-12-07, 12:23 PM
It looks to me like the authors did the math.

Half the math. Bounded accuracy works for combat because the success metric (damage and health) can be scaled to demonstrate the difference between a L1 and L11 fighter. Meeting DC 15 to do X is a binary pass/fail regardless of level and allows for very little growth in capabilities. Sure you can fiat around it based on what is appropriate for the scene and narrative, but that doesn’t make the rule structure any good in this instance.

If it did scale you’d have something like DC 15: L1 fighter lifts a gate, L11 fighter lifts 3 gates simultaneously. The progression as is mostly captures what was expected of levels 1 to X<10 for most D&D editions, but is stretched to fit the range from plucky farmer to punches-gods.

Jason
2020-12-07, 12:56 PM
Half the math. Bounded accuracy works for combat because the success metric (damage and health) can be scaled to demonstrate the difference between a L1 and L11 fighter. Meeting DC 15 to do X is a binary pass/fail regardless of level and allows for very little growth in capabilities. Sure you can fiat around it based on what is appropriate for the scene and narrative, but that doesn’t make the rule structure any good in this instance.

If it did scale you’d have something like DC 15: L1 fighter lifts a gate, L11 fighter lifts 3 gates simultaneously. The progression as is mostly captures what was expected of levels 1 to X<10 for most D&D editions, but is stretched to fit the range from plucky farmer to punches-gods.

Part of the bounded accuracy revision was to make the gap between 1st and 20th level smaller, and they succeeded. The level 20 fighter will be substantially better (on the order of 30% better) at lifting gates than the level 1 fighter, assuming he put his proficiencies and attribute bonuses into things that will help him lift gates.

No it's not like the gap between the 1st and 20th levels in 3rd or 4th edition, but for stuff that is covered by skill checks in 3rd and later there was no gap in 1st edition. Bending bars and lifting gates was completely uneffected by your level. It was dependent only on your Strength score, and there were no attribute bonuses for gaining levels. A 1st level fighter was equal to a 20th level fighter if they had the same Strength score.
In 2nd Edition level had a little bit more of an effect on non-combat actions. You could spend multiple non-weapon proficiency slots to get better at things like blacksmithing, but you usually only got one proficiency slot that could give a +1 if you spent it on a proficiency you already had every 3 levels. A 20th-level fighter might have a +6 to his Strength for blacksmithing where a 1st level fighter has only his Strength score, but that's only if the 20th-level fighter spent all of his non-weapon proficiencies on blacksmithing.

Ignimortis
2020-12-07, 01:18 PM
Well the Barbarian vs. Archmage is a deliberately extreme example. For a more routine Arcane knowledge contest between two mages the basic die mechanic works just fine. For extreme examples the DM often has to use judgement on how best to approach the situation. That applies in any system, not just D&D.

It doesn't really apply to some other systems. Shadowrun dicepools work in a way that someone non-proficient in a skill might be literally unable to make the check (by the rules, not by DM's rulings in each particular case), and if they do, they're rolling their attribute-1 dice versus their opponent. Generally, that means that even the smartest man in the world with 7 LOG will generally fail a contest with someone who's somewhat smart and knows their stuff rather well (so a LOG of 4 and, say, a skill of 6 (out of 13 possible) with a specialization) - it's 6 dice vs 12 dice. If we take an average person from the street with 3 LOG, it's 2 dice vs 12. Much less ridiculous and doesn't hedge on DM taking the time to approve or deny the roll.



It seems to me that it was a deliberate design choice to keep the linear progression and the 1 in 20 hit/miss chance. Things are just more exciting that way.
The system is targeted at 1st level characters being able to succeed at a "Medium" DC15 check roughly 55% of the time for something they are good at (+2 proficiency bonus and +3 attribute bonus = success on a 10 or higher). On an Easy DC10 check they have an 80% chance of success (5 or higher). A maxed-out 20th level, 20 attribute character gets an 85% success chance on the DC15 check (+5 attribute, +6 proficiency bonus = 4 or higher) and can't fail the Easy check.
It looks to me like the authors did the math.

This is getting away from dice mechanics per se, but 5e skill progression is absolutely busted. Unless you're a Rogue or get Expertise from somewhere (which is getting more common in the latter releases, almost as if the designers realized that skills without Expertise feel terrible), you can still fail a check you succeeded on back at 1st level, because the dice decide more than your character does. And with dice being an incredibly swingy single d20, getting a 1 or a 20 is just as likely as getting a 10.

It's part of the reason why I maintain that 5e is a terribly designed game which would've been better served by keeping about 10 levels, and cutting off the latter 10, because the designers clearly don't know how higher levels should function and why they shouldn't be the same as the first 10, only with marginally better numbers.



It all goes back to what I call the "law of conservation of annoyance." There's a fixed amount of annoyance (pain points, etc) in every mechanic. All you can do is shuffle it around to places you don't care about right now. And that's case-by-case and subjective. For me, the pain points of the flat distribution don't really bug me, because they hit things I don't care about anyway. While the extra work and obfuscation of (say) a 3d6 roll or even worse a dice pool mechanic do hit things I care about (mainly action-resolution speed). So there are tradeoffs everywhere.

I feel like this is relevant, even though it's addressed to another poster. I play exclusively through dice-rollers, so conservation of annoyance doesn't come up with any dice mechanics - dice rollers automatically add things up, point out hits on dicepools, and so on. If I had to roll dice physically, perhaps I would dislike dicepools more, but 3d6 wouldn't be a problem either way.



Here's the thing. Critical failures and successes don't really have to do with the person acting as they do with the surroundings. In fact, I'd extend that to all successes and failures. Your skill is already taken into account with the modifier, which is static. The roll represents things out of your control. So a nat 1 is not you whiffing badly. It's the opponent being in just the right place to deflect the blow. Or (say on an range attack) something falling in the way that couldn't have been predicted. Same with a nat 20, just the inverse. And if you're only using the rolls when you should, this doesn't cause any issues. If it really can't be hurt by you, it has immunity. Not an arbitrarily high AC. And everyone can miss, if external factors conspire against them.

And there aren't critical failures or successes for non-attacks in 5e, so there's no "I succeed even though I couldn't possibly do so" or "I failed even though my skill was above the DC" danger there.

Considering your skill is mostly unable to compensate for d20 swingyness (unless, as noted above, you're a double-digit level Rogue or are high level and have Expertise), it's still pretty lame - it means luck and the random-number-generation deity is more in control than you are, and that's never a good feeling for me, because that means you're not actually competent at anything, you're just less inept. At level 9, you have a +9 bonus to certain rolls. That means that a DC15 check, which you had a 55% chance of beating at level 1, now has a 70% chance of success. That, by the way, is the minimal potential boundary for "somewhat competent". You literally become barely reliable for certain skills only by level 9. And you will never have a 100% success rate for DC15 checks, which means that you don't even double your competence over 20 levels.

I had a lot more fun with 5e when I built a character to invalidate any and all Perception checks, for instance, by having 23 passive Perception by level 8 and 32 by level 17.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-07, 01:37 PM
I feel like this is relevant, even though it's addressed to another poster. I play exclusively through dice-rollers, so conservation of annoyance doesn't come up with any dice mechanics - dice rollers automatically add things up, point out hits on dicepools, and so on. If I had to roll dice physically, perhaps I would dislike dicepools more, but 3d6 wouldn't be a problem either way.


Dicepools still have the issue with complexity. And requiring extra tooling and macro support. So it's still annoying, you've just pushed it to somewhere where it doesn't bother you.



Considering your skill is mostly unable to compensate for d20 swingyness (unless, as noted above, you're a double-digit level Rogue or are high level and have Expertise), it's still pretty lame - it means luck and the random-number-generation deity is more in control than you are, and that's never a good feeling for me, because that means you're not actually competent at anything, you're just less inept. At level 9, you have a +9 bonus to certain rolls. That means that a DC15 check, which you had a 55% chance of beating at level 1, now has a 70% chance of success. That, by the way, is the minimal potential boundary for "somewhat competent". You literally become barely reliable for certain skills only by level 9. And you will never have a 100% success rate for DC15 checks, which means that you don't even double your competence over 20 levels.

I had a lot more fun with 5e when I built a character to invalidate any and all Perception checks, for instance, by having 23 passive Perception by level 8 and 32 by level 17.

The whole point of 5e is that if success is assured you shouldn't be rolling at all. Rolls and checks only happen for things that are uncertain--that's literally their only job. So it's a difference of what do you roll for here. Sure, if you're rolling for everything, you feel like a chump. Don't do that--the system tells you not to. Roll for things that are uncertain. Which is only a small fraction of what 3e would have you roll for. You get baseline competence built in to the system by just auto-succeeding on all those mundane tasks. And thus the meaning of the DCs has to change. A DC 15 task is pretty awesome, not something you're doing all the time. It's the sort of thing like picking a lock in 6 seconds, under pressure, while your life depends on it. If there isn't the pressure, you just succeed flat.

Xervous
2020-12-07, 01:39 PM
Part of the bounded accuracy revision was to make the gap between 1st and 20th level smaller, and they succeeded. The level 20 fighter will be substantially better (on the order of 30% better) at lifting gates than the level 1 fighter, assuming he put his proficiencies and attribute bonuses into things that will help him lift gates.


Bounded accuracy was implemented for combat to keep low end creatures relevant longer, it did this by culling the progression on one variable in the “how quickly do I kill you?” equation to render it overall a far more linear scaling that mapped to hit dice.

It checked all the boxes, did its research and cited its sources. Then they blindly slapped it onto skills without considering that skills had no scalable success metric. Two level 1 fighters on the gate, or a level 1 fighter with advantage will rival the potency of a high end fighter here, and a gaggle of lawyers would eventually throw the number that lifts the gate. So of course you don’t let everyone roll, or you hand out arbitrary success because of something in backstory or coincidental words on a character sheet. The only thing bounded accuracy does for skill checks is letting everyone have a chance when they roll regardless of choices they made. So if you don’t want the three stooges upstaging the guy who has a 80% chance for success the only real play is to just not let them roll. A Medium roll might be an Easy roll in so many levels, a grand contrast to the robust combat system that bounded accuracy was developed for.

Sure it lets everyone play, but it’s a case of Syndrome’s Retirement where nobody will shine without GM directed spotlight.

Jason
2020-12-07, 01:39 PM
It doesn't really apply to some other systems. Shadowrun dicepools work in a way that someone non-proficient in a skill might be literally unable to make the check (by the rules, not by DM's rulings in each particular case), and if they do, they're rolling their attribute-1 dice versus their opponent.Doesn't Shadowrun have exploding dice? Meaning that anyone could theoretically succeed at anything they're allowed to roll a die for? I admit I stopped buying it after 3rd edition, so they may have removed the exploding dice in 4th, 5th, 6th, or whatever edition they're up to now.


This is getting away from dice mechanics per se, but 5e skill progression is absolutely busted. Unless you're a Rogue or get Expertise from somewhere (which is getting more common in the latter releases, almost as if the designers realized that skills without Expertise feel terrible), you can still fail a check you succeeded on back at 1st level, because the dice decide more than your character does. And with dice being an incredibly swingy single d20, getting a 1 or a 20 is just as likely as getting a 10.You are basically saying "going from 55% to 85% chance at an average (DC15) task doesn't sound good enough to me for the difference between 1st and 20th level characters. I want 20th level characters to have auto-success on Average difficulty tasks." The designers made a different choice when they put the edition together. They decided that if the DM is asking for a roll there should be a significant chance of failure, even for the most competent characters, and that DC15 should never be an auto-success (except for the skill specialist rogue or bard). It's not "failed design" or "busted" it's just "different design choices than you would have made."

I can totally see why they did this. 3rd edition mid-level characters wouldn't even try to attempt something they hadn't spent substantial skill points and possibly a few feats on, because they knew that they couldn't compete at all with someone who had done that. I like much better the idea that everyone can have a reasonable chance of trying most adventurer-type things and that even the hyper-competent has a chance of failure on things that require a die roll.

gijoemike
2020-12-07, 02:33 PM
Ok, I will be the weird guy. I don't mind, really.


FFG Star Wars special dice. Success cancels failure, advantage cancels disadvantage. This allows for crit fails, fail, fail with bonus , win with defect, win, crit win. I love mechanics that allow for defects in the win or advantages in a loss. The dice give the players options each round. The difficulty isn't set against a static number. A 5(6) roll against a Difficulty 2 isn't always going to succeed. It will most of the time.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-07, 02:47 PM
Effectively turning the linear probability system into a bell-curve system. Interesting.

This is a natural featute of most "single die roll" systems, because usually any complex endeavor takes more than one check. However, a lot of people don't actually understand that this is happening, leading to some common user errors, especially on the GM's side of the screen.

User error 1: checks untill you die. A GM does not understand aggregate probability and that even with intuitively small (5% to 10%) chance of failure for a single check, over multiple checks the chance of failure increases and keeps increasing. Basically, they don't understand that player success exist on a curve and they put the median result of that curve on the side of player failing.

User error 2: single check does too much. A GM reduces complex tasks to too few rolls and allows a single result to solve more than it has to. This means incompetent players and characters get off easier than they should, while competent players and characters have it harder than they should.

Both errors can be made in the same game - typically so that error 1 happens in combat and error 2 happens with skill checks.

Ignimortis
2020-12-07, 02:59 PM
The whole point of 5e is that if success is assured you shouldn't be rolling at all. Rolls and checks only happen for things that are uncertain--that's literally their only job. So it's a difference of what do you roll for here. Sure, if you're rolling for everything, you feel like a chump. Don't do that--the system tells you not to. Roll for things that are uncertain. Which is only a small fraction of what 3e would have you roll for. You get baseline competence built in to the system by just auto-succeeding on all those mundane tasks. And thus the meaning of the DCs has to change. A DC 15 task is pretty awesome, not something you're doing all the time. It's the sort of thing like picking a lock in 6 seconds, under pressure, while your life depends on it. If there isn't the pressure, you just succeed flat.

In that case, a DC15 task should become a DC10 task, and then a non-rolled task at all, but this robs the player of any reference point to what they're actually capable of. Furthermore, this fails in any case where there's an opposed test - you can have guards with +2 or +3 to Perception, and a stealthy non-Rogue level 20 char with +11 to Stealth, the pinnacle of skill and ability for most classes. There is still a significant failure chance in that case - unless you completely disregard the mechanics and just say that the guards cannot possibly detect you, even though mechanically, they totally can, and actually will, quite often - less often than 19 levels ago, but still quite often.


Doesn't Shadowrun have exploding dice? Meaning that anyone could theoretically succeed at anything they're allowed to roll a die for? I admit I stopped buying it after 3rd edition, so they may have removed the exploding dice in 4th, 5th, 6th, or whatever edition they're up to now.

Not since 4e, yes. You get exploding dice only by spending metacurrency, default rolls are very simple. Therefore, people cannot just succeed on things. Especially in 5e, where there's a mechanic called Limits, which limit the amount of successes you can keep - so one might have a limit of 4, and even if they roll 6s on every dice, they only get to keep four of them.



You are basically saying "going from 55% to 85% chance at an average (DC15) task doesn't sound good enough to me for the difference between 1st and 20th level characters. I want 20th level characters to have auto-success on Average difficulty tasks." The designers made a different choice when they put the edition together. They decided that if the DM is asking for a roll there should be a significant chance of failure, even for the most competent characters, and that DC15 should never be an auto-success (except for the skill specialist rogue or bard). It's not "failed design" or "busted" it's just "different design choices than you would have made."

I can totally see why they did this. 3rd edition mid-level characters wouldn't even try to attempt something they hadn't spent substantial skill points and possibly a few feats on, because they knew that they couldn't compete at all with someone who had done that. I like much better the idea that everyone can have a reasonable chance of trying most adventurer-type things and that even the hyper-competent has a chance of failure on things that require a die roll.

As noted above - then the DCs themselves should be flexible, and any sort of opposed test puts the system's robustness to the test, because it's either GM fiat to circumvent the lacking mechanics, or just a lack of progression.


Bounded accuracy was implemented for combat to keep low end creatures relevant longer, it did this by culling the progression on one variable in the “how quickly do I kill you?” equation to render it overall a far more linear scaling that mapped to hit dice.

It checked all the boxes, did its research and cited its sources. Then they blindly slapped it onto skills without considering that skills had no scalable success metric. Two level 1 fighters on the gate, or a level 1 fighter with advantage will rival the potency of a high end fighter here, and a gaggle of lawyers would eventually throw the number that lifts the gate. So of course you don’t let everyone roll, or you hand out arbitrary success because of something in backstory or coincidental words on a character sheet. The only thing bounded accuracy does for skill checks is letting everyone have a chance when they roll regardless of choices they made. So if you don’t want the three stooges upstaging the guy who has a 80% chance for success the only real play is to just not let them roll. A Medium roll might be an Easy roll in so many levels, a grand contrast to the robust combat system that bounded accuracy was developed for.

Sure it lets everyone play, but it’s a case of Syndrome’s Retirement where nobody will shine without GM directed spotlight.

This, I fully agree with. I dislike Bounded Accuracy, but I can admit that it works for whatever 5e tries to do in combat and combat-related things. But it absolutely fails at doing anything reasonable out of combat.

Telok
2020-12-07, 03:01 PM
I wouldn't call the DMG a "secondary book" for DMs. It's the primary book for them. And it's not memorizing or analyzing in detail--it's stated in plain terms. Repeatedly, actually.

I see lots of people trying to make rulesets that work for people who don't read the rules. That's rather quixotic IMO. If they're not reading the rules, changing the rules won't help. The majority of questions and complaints that I see from DMs on the 5e forums come from people who don't read what's already there. Including the PHB itself.

I also don't see any dice mechanic helping here--

I generally agree on the first bit. For the second, what I see is people taking away the "how to set dcs" and missing or going weird with the "when to roll". Again, the AD&D thief skills were written in a way that worked except that large numbers of people missed or misread it. That's what I see being played in 5e out in the wild, not what is advocated in forum white rooms. I'm not saying it isn't there, I'm saying that I repeatedly see it not making the jump from the page to the DM's brain.

The last bit. The die mechanic does matter. In d20 +4 opposed roll with +11 is 19% to the +4, 77% to the +11, and 3% ties. You can set up other die mechanics to give the same sort of results for similar opposed rolls and still have the +11 auto succeed at stuff the +4 should struggle with. Just going to 2d6 and making the DC 13 would work for that example (although not for the 4/11 opposed bit being equal).

See, "when to roll" isn't the die mechanic. It's advice on how to use the mechanic, and people are terrible at taking advice. When people miss or forget the advice then the D&D 5e method starts returning silly results. Some DMs won't understand why they get the results or why the players go to an all caster party to bypass checks. And yes, I have seen a DM rage quit over that when they blindly followed an official adventure that didn't do the "when to roll" advice.

Thus I am willing to put up with a bit more complexity than 1dX+Y vs. dc Z, in exchange for a dice system that doesn't rely on above average DMing to prevent silly results.

Max_Killjoy
2020-12-07, 03:03 PM
The DM having to fix how the mechanics work, or having to set up a specific way of rolling, or inventing excuses just to avoid the pitfalls of the base dice system should be a sign of those mechanics being poorly designed or implemented.


So true.

How good is a game mechanic, really, if it needs that much fudge?




See, "when to roll" isn't the die mechanic. It's advice on how to use the mechanic, and people are terrible at taking advice. When people miss or forget the advice then the D&D 5e method starts returning silly results. Some DMs won't understand why they get the results or why the players go to an all caster party to bypass checks. And yes, I have seen a DM rage quit over that when they blindly followed an official adventure that didn't do the "when to roll" advice.

Thus I am willing to put up with a bit more complexity than 1dX+Y vs. dc Z, in exchange for a dice system that doesn't rely on above average DMing to prevent silly results.


As above, if a dice system relies heavily on players (GM and otherwise) knowing when not to use the dice system at all... I'm not sure how good it really is.

Xervous
2020-12-07, 03:11 PM
Especially in 5e, where there's a mechanic called Limits, which limit the amount of successes you can keep - so one might have a limit of 4, and even if they roll 6s on every dice, they only get to keep four of them.

Limits and wireless bonuses, what did they do, fire all the competent writers?

Limits in opposed checks effectively overlayed an auto success TN for the more competent character, and did weird things like making a sniper rifle better for hitting the guy in a hallway rather than the SMG. This also produced the dodge adepts that were literally impossible to hit with less accurate weapons, among other auto success stories.

And probably most damningly it stifled the enjoyment of rolling lots of successes because you never got to count more than 5 or 6 generally.

Jason
2020-12-07, 03:31 PM
In that case, a DC15 task should become a DC10 task, and then a non-rolled task at all, but this robs the player of any reference point to what they're actually capable of. Furthermore, this fails in any case where there's an opposed test - you can have guards with +2 or +3 to Perception, and a stealthy non-Rogue level 20 char with +11 to Stealth, the pinnacle of skill and ability for most classes. There is still a significant failure chance in that case - unless you completely disregard the mechanics and just say that the guards cannot possibly detect you, even though mechanically, they totally can, and actually will, quite often - less often than 19 levels ago, but still quite often.
Actually, the guards would use a passive perception score rather than roll an opposed check, so a +11 gives the character only a 5-10% failure depending on what the passive perception score of the guards is (12 or 13 in your example). If he does something to give him advantage on his stealth check then he has an even better chance of getting by.


As noted above - then the DCs themselves should be flexible, and any sort of opposed test puts the system's robustness to the test, because it's either GM fiat to circumvent the lacking mechanics, or just a lack of progression.How does flexible DCs mean better progression? The guards that you had to roll 7 to get past when you were 1st level now only spot you on a 1. That's progression.

If you scale the DCs up then you eliminate progression, and what would be the excuse for scaling them down? "I gained a bunch of levels so suddenly it's easier for anyone who comes along to pick this lock?"

How difficult an opposed test is depends entirely on the bonus the DM assigns the opposition. If it's someone scaled to about the same bonus as the character then yes, it will be iffy. That's because the DM decided to scale the opposition to match the players.

Cluedrew
2020-12-07, 07:35 PM
Dicepools still have the issue with complexity. And requiring extra tooling and macro support. So it's still annoying, you've just pushed it to somewhere where it doesn't bother you.By dice pools do you mean systems where you roll a lot of dice and add them together or where you just count the dice over a certain value? I generally only call the second group dice pools and since counting is simpler then addition I have found them to be around the same complexity. The one thing is keeping the numbers low becomes much more important but even at half a dozen dice I haven't found it to be much of a problem.


FFG Star Wars special dice. Success cancels failure, advantage cancels disadvantage. This allows for crit fails, fail, fail with bonus , win with defect, win, crit win. I love mechanics that allow for defects in the win or advantages in a loss. The dice give the players options each round. The difficulty isn't set against a static number. A 5(6) roll against a Difficulty 2 isn't always going to succeed. It will most of the time.I actually also enjoy special dice. I've never played a role-playing game with them. But the few board games that have made good use of it have been fun. I think role-playing games do have an additional snag in that you don't usually buy the dice with them and have to be bought separately.

And has no one mentioned Fudge dice (used in Fudge and Fate) yet? Fudge dice (dF for short) are rolled in groups of 4 and cover results from -1 to 1 (two blank sides mean zero, two - sides mean -1 and two + sides mean +1) and therefore don't add to a base score but instead "fudge" it a bit. I have never had the chance to play either system but I do have 4dF in my collection. The coolest thing for me is that the average result is zero so the challenges and skill ratings use the same scale.


I dislike Bounded Accuracy, but I can admit that it works for whatever 5e tries to do in combat and combat-related things. But it absolutely fails at doing anything reasonable out of combat.But isn't that D&D in general? OK not quite but that fits the focus of D&D as a whole.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-07, 07:52 PM
By dice pools do you mean systems where you roll a lot of dice and add them together or where you just count the dice over a certain value? I generally only call the second group dice pools and since counting is simpler then addition I have found them to be around the same complexity. The one thing is keeping the numbers low becomes much more important but even at half a dozen dice I haven't found it to be much of a problem.


Dice pools (roll and keep) need tooling or you have to actually track quite a few more things. How many dice do I roll for this test? It's different from that test, and this other one...

3d6 (or 2d10, or whatever) aren't necessarily more complex in rolling, but interpreting the results and figuring out how modifiers work is hellaciously more complex. So you're trading (the phantom of) more accuracy for build-time complexity. I'm not as opposed to those ones as roll-and-keep, but adding 4 numbers (three dice, 1 modifier) is actually quite a bit more of a burden than just adding 1 number (the modifier). Sad, but I've seen it slow things down to a crawl as the dice get larger. Not everyone is quick with mental math. And I'm not convinced the gains are actually real unless you're rolling for everything, which (as I've said) is a horrible horrible design pattern and philosophy anyway.

Any kind of check/mechanical interaction takes table time. And table time is the most limited quantity there. Any second spent doing <not-fun> is a second spent not doing <fun>. And generally, the actual mechanical bits aren't fun in and of themselves. It's what they enable that's fun. So slimming the hot path mechanical interactions down to the bare minimum generally is an improvement. And the best way to do so is to just flat not do mechanical interactions that don't matter. Anything that's a forgone conclusion in either direction[1] should just happen (or not) without mechanical interruption. Yes, that requires the DM to know what's going on. But that's a feature, not a bug. If the DM can't do that, I'd rather have a computer doing the DMing. It could do the mechanics much faster, and prettier too. And with the same amount of interactivity and better writing.

[1] erring on the side of letting PCs try for things with low-but-not-zero probability of success and letting them automatically succeed on things with moderately-low probability of failure. Unless you're playing one of the WH games, in which case it's the opposite, because grimdark.

Cluedrew
2020-12-07, 09:03 PM
Dice pools (roll and keep) need tooling or you have to actually track quite a few more things. How many dice do I roll for this test? It's different from that test, and this other one...Hu... yeah roll and keep is definitely more complicated. I think of dice pools as the ones where you role X dice, count the ones that got over Y and see how that number compares to Z. And considering that Y is usually set its has the same axis of complexity as role a die add a value and check the result.

And of course D&D has its XdY+Z damage system so there is that too.

Illogictree
2020-12-07, 10:31 PM
If we're talking "favorite" dice mechanics, I really like how D&D 5e replaced all those fiddly little modifiers from 3rd Edition with Advantage / Disadvantage. This was the best change from 3.5 / PF. Although there is an appeal to having a really big modifier on your roll, keeping track of all the various conditional modifiers drives me up the wall.

...And yet I still play PF... :smallbiggrin:

Also there was some talk earlier about mixing roll-over and roll-under in the same game, but I don't think anyone has mentioned Lasers & Feelings or its various derivatives. I haven't had the chance to play it yet, but it's a very simple idea. You pick one number between 2 and 5; if you are rolling for Lasers (science, reason, technology, combat, etc) you try to roll under your number, and if you are rolling for Feelings (rapport, diplomacy, intuition, passion, etc) you try to roll over your number. You're rolling a pool of up to 3 d6s depending on the extenuating circumstances and count the number of successes. My favorite part is if you roll exactly your number on any dice, you get LASER FEELINGS and, not only does this count as a success, you also get to ask the DM a question about the game's situation and they have to answer truthfully.

I also like PbtA's 2d6+MOD rolls with fixed degrees of success. And I also like the idea of that Top Secret dice mechanic mentioned upthread. I guess the takeaway is that I like elegant and clever dice mechanics tied to interesting and straightforward task resolution systems.

pr4wn
2020-12-07, 11:48 PM
Ok, I will be the weird guy. I don't mind, really.


FFG Star Wars special dice. Success cancels failure, advantage cancels disadvantage. This allows for crit fails, fail, fail with bonus , win with defect, win, crit win. I love mechanics that allow for defects in the win or advantages in a loss. The dice give the players options each round. The difficulty isn't set against a static number. A 5(6) roll against a Difficulty 2 isn't always going to succeed. It will most of the time.

I played FFG Star Wars over the weekend for the first time. The group I was in had a blast. We were going to have a few weeks to kill until our normal group was available.

Our DM had mentioned wanting to do a Star Wars game for a change of pace. I was curious about the FFG's version and had picked up a beginners game the same day. I also had a WEG D6 Star Wars character ready to go, as the DM was a LONG time WEG Star Wars player. We decided to give the FFG version a go, grabbed the pregen characters and were off. It didn't take long to get a handle on the dice mechanic and overall the adventure played out very cinematicly and captured the feel of Star Wars for us. Our DM liked it enough that he ordered a set of the dice that night.

I won't say it is my favorite dice mechanic but it worked really well for keeping the game moving and feeling like Star Wars.

-pr4wn

Ignimortis
2020-12-08, 12:19 AM
Actually, the guards would use a passive perception score rather than roll an opposed check, so a +11 gives the character only a 5-10% failure depending on what the passive perception score of the guards is (12 or 13 in your example). If he does something to give him advantage on his stealth check then he has an even better chance of getting by.

I don't think a watchful guard on patrol will only be using his passive Perception. A typical gate guard whose best quality is being able to stand still for hours with an angry face, sure, but people who actually try will be rolling sometimes. And if that's somehow "wrong DMing", then I would refer you to the post I made earlier, about DMs having to fix gameplay by trying to avoid rolling, because the rolls mess up the illusion of competence.



How does flexible DCs mean better progression? The guards that you had to roll 7 to get past when you were 1st level now only spot you on a 1. That's progression.

If you scale the DCs up then you eliminate progression, and what would be the excuse for scaling them down? "I gained a bunch of levels so suddenly it's easier for anyone who comes along to pick this lock?"

How difficult an opposed test is depends entirely on the bonus the DM assigns the opposition. If it's someone scaled to about the same bonus as the character then yes, it will be iffy. That's because the DM decided to scale the opposition to match the players.

In case the DCs for players go only downwards, that would be progression, but a poorly implemented one, as I've already noted and as you've pointed out, it breaks the narrative's bond to mechanics. A DC20 lock should stay a DC20 lock - the problem is, nobody but Rogues ever gets good enough to open it easily, and might have opened the same lock by rolling a 19 back at level 1, while being stuck at it for several attempts at level 20, despite supposedly having improved significantly. That, to me, is ridiculous.

The whole issue is that character combat capabilities have improved at least fivefold (HP and damage output and effectiveness don't scale exactly the same), but their out-of-combat capabilities have, if they're not a Rogue or a spellcaster, barely doubled.

And, going back to the topic of this thread, is why single-dice systems are usually a mess - they either let you get off the RNG for things you care about, or try so hard to keep you on the RNG that your character's skill barely matters, because it still has to get a good roll to do anything remotely challenging. I would prefer the former, with some built-in scaling for things you don't care about - perhaps, half your level to all rolls you're not investing into (you don't survive if you don't pick up at least some tricks), and, of course, a bigger bonus to things you are supposed to be good at. Yes, that means that a level 20 booky wizard might be marginally better at opening locks than a level 1 sneaky rogue and also marginally better at running/jumping than a level 1 musclebound barbarian. I don't care, that's completely fine by me - in a few levels, they should outgrow him in their areas of expertise.

And as for systems with no levels, they generally have more free-form skill development and encourage specialization, so you should be able to just invest into skills and stats you want to be good at, and also to be passable at, and disregard things you don't care about.

Jason
2020-12-08, 12:32 AM
FFG Star Wars special dice. Success cancels failure, advantage cancels disadvantage. This allows for crit fails, fail, fail with bonus , win with defect, win, crit win. I love mechanics that allow for defects in the win or advantages in a loss. The dice give the players options each round. The difficulty isn't set against a static number. A 5(6) roll against a Difficulty 2 isn't always going to succeed. It will most of the time.
Have you played the system for a long-term campaign? We played pretty much every published adventure in one long campaign. It took more than a year. I didn't much care for the dice to start with, but by the end of that campaign I never wanted to pick up those silly dice again.

A few points:

The symbols used are non-intuitive.
The triumph is pretty good, threat looks a little bit like the Imperial symbol, and Dark Side and Light Side are just black and white pips. The rest of the symbols are pretty hard to interpret. It takes a while to remember that explosions are good and caltrops are bad. The worst symbol is the advantage, though. What is it supposed to be? Headphones? I never figured out what it was. And why is despair a triangle-circle thingy? Some of our players never really got the hang of reading those dice, and it got harder later at night.

One dice set is not enough
The dice set is 14 dice: 2 yellow d12s, 1 red d12, 1 white d12, three green d8s, three purple d8s, 2 white d6s and 2 black d6s.
This is not enough dice to play a character with level 3 skills and attributes of 3. It's certainly not enough to play a Jedi who has advanced far enough to have two Force dice. Plus you need a regular set of d10s (not included). You need either multiple sets of dice (at $15 a pop) or the app. Buying the starter sets and a few extras got our group 6 sets and we still had to share them.

It takes a lot of time to put a roll together
You have to find the skill and attribute you're using and decipher how many yellow and green dice that makes (total dice equal to highest of skill or attribute, yellow dice equal to the lower of your skill or attribute, green dice to make up the difference. So skill 3 attribute 3 is 3 yellow d12s, skill 4 attribute 3 is 3 yellow d12s and one green d8, etc.). Then the GM has to tell you how many purple dice to use, and whether any of them should be converted to red dice because you're facing an NPC with the adversary ability. If someone granted boost dice or upgrades to a later player you have to decide if you use those and add the appropriate dice. Then the GM determines if there are any conditions that would add setback dice. Then you have a look at your talents and skills and see if any of them add boost dice or cancel setback dice, sometimes once per session or encounter or costing you strain. Then the GM decides if he's going to spend a destiny point to upgrade the difficulty and you decide if you want to spend one to upgrade your pool. Then some of the other players might have talents that contribute to your pool or remove setback dice or difficulty. Finally you grab all the dice and roll them.
This whole process gets lengthier as your group gets more experienced and gains more dice and talents until your typical combat rolls are upwards of a dozen dice with three or four talents modifying each roll. Force dice get added in there too for anyone with Force powers.

It takes a lot of time to interpret the roll
After you roll you have to match up all the proper symbols to determine which cancelled each other out and what your final net roll is. This takes more time with more dice, of course. Then you decide if you have any talents that alter the results and if you want to use them. Then you determine if you have net success or failure, how much damage that translates to with an attack, and what you want to spend any advantage or triumph on. If you scored a crit you also have to roll d% on the crit table. If you have net threat or a despair or two the GM has to decide what to spend those on.
Again, more experienced characters make this process much longer, and using Force powers mean even more dice and the possibility of conflict.

The results often seem contradictory
After all that effort, you often find that you failed what you were trying to do but have a lot of advantage to spend on something to indirectly benefit yourself or the group (usually advantage cannot be spent to get a success, although some talents allow it for specific rolls). Or you could even have failed but scored a triumph. Or succeeded but have a lot of threat and a despair. Or you could fail, score two triumphs, have five advantage to spend, and two despair (this last possibility happened more and more often as we got more experienced characters). And you might get results like that off of a simple spot or knowledge check. Often our GM just ignored the threat and despair. Or struggled to come up with something more interesting than "take a couple of strain."

Things are balanced so that if you fail you are more likely to have some advantage, and if you succeed you are more likely to have threat. To me it felt like all your successes had to be tainted with threat and all your failures gave you a near-useless consolation prize as a condescending pat on the head.
And this is every roll. You almost never get a result that is just "success" or "failure". And despairs and triumphs don't cancel each other out like the other symbols do, so it's actually fairly common to have both show up on the same roll, especially as the pools get bigger.

Then end result is that a lot of playtime is spent putting rolls together and interpreting them, with less time spent making decisions and, you know, playing the game. It got to the point that I was annoyed every time someone had to pick those silly dice up, because it meant I would spend at least the next 5 minutes and possibly much longer just waiting for the final result.

Cluedrew
2020-12-08, 09:07 AM
The results often seem contradictoryAs someone who designed a system that had a similar quality I don't get this one because it feels natural to me that success with consequences or defeat with consolation feel like pretty natural results. In that they are "close" to the middle result and things don't work perfectly or go completely wrong all the time. The difficulty of actually implementing those results, that is a problem and part of the reason I dropped that in my homebrew system.

Tanarii
2020-12-08, 09:39 AM
Speaking of bad dice mechanics - ones where modifiers to the roll can outstrip the randomness of the roll. Or even approach a significant portion of it. 3.pf was a good example of this flawed paradigm. A simple method to validate this is: if you can stack up enough modifiers that someone cannot win an opposed roll against you, the system is flawed.

This is a more extreme version of bell curve systems, which have to be very careful of how many modifiers they add, because they are so sensitive to them.

Ignimortis
2020-12-08, 09:50 AM
Speaking of bad dice mechanics - ones where modifiers to the roll can outstrip the randomness of the roll. Or even approach a significant portion of it. 3.pf was a good example of this flawed paradigm. A simple method to validate this is: if you can stack up enough modifiers that someone cannot win an opposed roll against you, the system is flawed.

This is a more extreme version of bell curve systems, which have to be very careful of how many modifiers they add, because they are so sensitive to them.

My personal opinion is directly opposite of yours, then. A system where any roll can win against any other roll is extremely flawed, because it means that any influence the character's attributes have on the gameplay is less than sheer luck and random happenstance. Unless it's a very, very, very grounded game (to the extent that even some of the IRL human achievements are impossible to replicate), there should be a point at which one character is just that much better than a random person at doing X.

Xervous
2020-12-08, 09:51 AM
Speaking of bad dice mechanics - ones where modifiers to the roll can outstrip the randomness of the roll. Or even approach a significant portion of it. 3.pf was a good example of this flawed paradigm. A simple method to validate this is: if you can stack up enough modifiers that someone cannot win an opposed roll against you, the system is flawed.

This is a more extreme version of bell curve systems, which have to be very careful of how many modifiers they add, because they are so sensitive to them.

Flawed under what assumptions and by which metrics? You describe a system behavior in absence of what purpose it’s trying to serve.

Jason
2020-12-08, 10:35 AM
I don't think a watchful guard on patrol will only be using his passive Perception. A typical gate guard whose best quality is being able to stand still for hours with an angry face, sure, but people who actually try will be rolling sometimes. And if that's somehow "wrong DMing", then I would refer you to the post I made earlier, about DMs having to fix gameplay by trying to avoid rolling, because the rolls mess up the illusion of competence.There's a sidebar about this in the PHB, but it might not be as clear as it should be. A guard who is on patrol or at a post and is basically trying to be watchful without expecting any specific trouble uses passive perception. It's only in a combat situation or with an active search for an intruder that guards get to make active perception rolls to spot someone hiding. Yes, that makes stealth much easier when the guards aren't expecting you, which is fairly realistic.


As someone who designed a system that had a similar quality I don't get this one because it feels natural to me that success with consequences or defeat with consolation feel like pretty natural results. In that they are "close" to the middle result and things don't work perfectly or go completely wrong all the time. The difficulty of actually implementing those results, that is a problem and part of the reason I dropped that in my homebrew system.
In theory it's not a bad idea. In practice it means that nearly every roll has negative consequences. Either you succeeded but pay a price, or you failed badly but got a mild consolation prize. Even things like knowledge checks and spot checks generate threat ("Oops, looks like I knocked myself out trying to remember how many turbolasers a star destroyer has. Guess I shouldn't have asked my brain a question when I was so close to my strain threshold"). It gets worse as the dice pools get bigger and therefore the chances get higher that you'll roll a lot of success and threat, or a lot of failure and advantage.

It wears on the players to have every roll they make have negative effects on their characters. And you would think Star Wars would generally be upbeat and feel-good. Nope. It can start to feel like every time you pick up the dice you're about to take it in the shorts. The only question is how deeply the dice will drink from the fountain of suck this time.

Xervous
2020-12-08, 10:43 AM
There's a sidebar about this in the PHB, but it might not be as clear as it should be. A guard who is on patrol or at a post and is basically trying to be watchful without expecting any specific trouble uses passive perception. It's only in a combat situation or with an active search for an intruder that guards get to make active perception rolls to spot someone hiding. Yes, that makes stealth much easier when the guards aren't expecting you, which is fairly realistic.


In theory it's not a bad idea. In practice it means that nearly every roll has negative consequences. Either you succeeded but pay a price, or you failed badly but got a mild consolation prize. Even things like knowledge checks and spot checks generate threat ("Oops, looks like I knocked myself out trying to remember how many turbolasers a star destroyer has. Guess I shouldn't have asked my brain a question when I was so close to my strain threshold"). It gets worse as the dice pools get bigger and therefore the chances get higher that you'll roll a lot of success and threat, or a lot of failure and advantage.

It wears on the players to have every roll they make have negative effects on their characters. And you would think Star Wars would generally be upbeat and feel-good. Nope. It can start to feel like every time you pick up the dice you're about to take it in the shorts. The only question is how deeply the dice will drink from the fountain of suck this time.

The first thing that comes to mind with the described dice system is that it would function wonderfully with a structured pacing of scenes and the dice rolls arbitrating what options become available at the cost/gain of meta currency. You succeeded and it cost you so many hero points. You didn’t catch the spy but you’ve built up hero points for the next confrontation.

MoiMagnus
2020-12-08, 11:54 AM
As someone who designed a system that had a similar quality I don't get this one because it feels natural to me that success with consequences or defeat with consolation feel like pretty natural results. In that they are "close" to the middle result and things don't work perfectly or go completely wrong all the time. The difficulty of actually implementing those results, that is a problem and part of the reason I dropped that in my homebrew system.
From memory (but that was a long time ago), I think the core of the problem is that the system pretty much expect you to have a success with advantages to have fun (like trigger the special abilities of your powers), while the advantages in case of failure are not that interesting.

This, plus an ugly anti-correlation : the more successes you have, the less advantages you statistically have. This mean that in average, you get advantages at a moment you don't care about them, and you don't get them when you actually want them.

Jason
2020-12-08, 12:23 PM
From memory (but that was a long time ago),And in a galaxy far, far away...

I think the core of the problem is that the system pretty much expect you to have a success with advantages to have fun (like trigger the special abilities of your powers), while the advantages in case of failure are not that interesting.

This, plus an ugly anti-correlation : the more successes you have, the less advantages you statistically have. This mean that in average, you get advantages at a moment you don't care about them, and you don't get them when you actually want them.
Yes, the way the dice have two axes (thats the plural of "axis", not wood-chopping tools) of success/fail and advantage/threat that are largely independent of each other is a fundamental problem of the system. There are faces of the dice that have both success and advantage (and failure and threat) on them, but you're much more likely to get one or the other. So you'll have loads of advantage but a failure, or a lot of success but net threat rather than advantage.

If I were inclined to patch the system it would probably involve some standing rule to allow you to exchange some quantity of advantage for success and vice versa, possibly at 2 for 1. Maybe a similar rule for converting failure to threat. That would probably throw off the success/fail probabilities, though. There are a few talents in the game for doing this sort of thing with specific skill or combat roles on a 1-for1 basis.

Really, I would just rather use some other dice mechanic.

Telok
2020-12-08, 12:32 PM
Oh, I've got one that's completely system agnostic. The BOOM! die.

I did it for a supers game but I've used it ever since in other games. I took a wooden cube a bit over 2cm on each side (bought from a hobby store) and drew a comics style explosion on one side, you know, the spikey red & yellow bubble with the word "BOOM!" in it. It's used to determine if a random piece of machinery, automobile, or barrel explodes.

Boom!

jjordan
2020-12-08, 02:17 PM
Speaking of bad dice mechanics - ones where modifiers to the roll can outstrip the randomness of the roll. Or even approach a significant portion of it. 3.pf was a good example of this flawed paradigm. A simple method to validate this is: if you can stack up enough modifiers that someone cannot win an opposed roll against you, the system is flawed.

This is a more extreme version of bell curve systems, which have to be very careful of how many modifiers they add, because they are so sensitive to them.
I really feel like this is a feature, not a flaw. Careful planning and preparation accrue advantages which enable the character to have a relatively predictable chance of success. Good plans should work. People should be able to reliably execute skills they have learned. I'm not seeing the downside (other than having to track a bunch of modifiers and players constantly consulting rules as they hunt for an extra +1).

Oh, and I'm very much enjoying the contributions to this discussion. A lot of good points have been presented.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-08, 02:22 PM
I really feel like this is a feature, not a flaw. Careful planning and preparation accrue advantages which enable the character to have a relatively predictable chance of success. Good plans should work. People should be able to reliably execute skills they have learned. I'm not seeing the downside (other than having to track a bunch of modifiers and players constantly consulting rules as they hunt for an extra +1).

Why are we invoking a randomizer if the randomizer can't change the outcome? It's a massive waste of table time. And table time is sacred.

Especially if going off the randomizer becomes the norm (ie people don't try anything unless they can guarantee success). Then you just have binary auto-succeed/auto-fail. Randomizers need to be useful if they're going to get included.

Plus the whole hunt/accounting for small stacking modifiers ends up wasting tons of time and effort and becomes a huge source of "wait! XYZ doesn't apply here, but PDQ does, so really...) error.

Basically, I strongly dislike stacking circumstantial modifiers. 5e's non-stacking Advantage/Disadvantage solves so much for me.

jjordan
2020-12-08, 02:32 PM
Why are we invoking a randomizer if the randomizer can't change the outcome?
I don't mean to be combative but I'm going to reply to your question with one of your answers: If the outcome of an action is already determined then we shouldn't be invoking a randomizer for that particular action.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-08, 02:42 PM
I don't mean to be combative but I'm going to reply to your question with one of your answers: If the outcome of an action is already determined then we shouldn't be invoking a randomizer for that particular action.

But the whole issue is that the system (3e and PF) demand rolls for everything and have specific mechanics to override that. So you don't have the flexibility to just say "hey, you'll succeed with no significant issue here, so yeah. No roll." And for a bunch of tasks, a 1 is an automatic failure. So you have to roll. Even though that's absurd.

5e's process keeps the randomizer meaningful without the incessant modifier hunt. So it gives you (if you actually follow the guidelines) the best of both worlds. You get to go "off the randomizer" by your actions[1], but you don't have to track a billion little circumstantial modifiers to do so and don't have to actually invoke mechanics (with all the waste of time that involves) for things that are obvious.

In addition, you don't need to set fixed DCs that can be gamed to produce all forms of absurd outcomes (diplomancing among them). And those fixed DCs also mean that every universe is exactly the same (something I abhor).

[1] Lots of times, social things don't need rolls. Because the things they're asking for and the methods they've employed have turned that into a foregone conclusion. Without having to set fixed DCs.

Xervous
2020-12-08, 02:46 PM
Why are we invoking a randomizer if the randomizer can't change the outcome? It's a massive waste of table time. And table time is sacred.

Especially if going off the randomizer becomes the norm (ie people don't try anything unless they can guarantee success). Then you just have binary auto-succeed/auto-fail. Randomizers need to be useful if they're going to get included.

Plus the whole hunt/accounting for small stacking modifiers ends up wasting tons of time and effort and becomes a huge source of "wait! XYZ doesn't apply here, but PDQ does, so really...) error.

Basically, I strongly dislike stacking circumstantial modifiers. 5e's non-stacking Advantage/Disadvantage solves so much for me.

The main case I’m not seeing addressed is that of as-built numbers. There’s no additional burden on table time. Assuming a pattern of Player Action -> GM narration (which includes the subset of prompting for a roll) a GM may simply observe that a task is trivial for this character and not prompt a roll. If the rules can’t inform this then the characters are limited to whatever competency the GM assumes is appropriate at the time. If this is consistent with how the rest of the system functions, great. If it’s not then you have discontinuous subsystems that may lead to friction. This might be a problem depending on your heat tolerance and need for speed.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-08, 02:56 PM
The main case I’m not seeing addressed is that of as-built numbers. There’s no additional burden on table time. Assuming a pattern of Player Action -> GM narration (which includes the subset of prompting for a roll) a GM may simply observe that a task is trivial for this character and not prompt a roll. If the rules can’t inform this then the characters are limited to whatever competency the GM assumes is appropriate at the time. If this is consistent with how the rest of the system functions, great. If it’s not then you have discontinuous subsystems that may lead to friction. This might be a problem depending on your heat tolerance and need for speed.

I guess I don't understand what you're saying.

With circumstantial modifiers stacking, no one knows what your values are until push comes to shove. And it's pretty high-optimization to be able to have your static numbers off the d20. The issue comes in with the fixed DC targets that these systems also employ. Which (fixed system-set DCs) are things I find abhorrent from a worldbuilding perspective. If every door is identical to every other door, or if I have to wade through a bunch of tables that don't necessarily have what I need and still have to set my own DC, that's a huge amount of waste, plus friction.

Whereas with Bounded Accuracy, the "going off the randomizer" happens at the point of use. Instead of turning every task into either "I don't try" or "I automatically succeed", there's still a role for the randomizer and everyone can try, but by changing the fiction you can avoid the check entirely. Turning a contested social check into an automatic success by making the right arguments or providing a correct bribe. Bypassing that door lock by pulling apart the hinges. Etc. All of these things are much more flexible while still providing the same basic benefit (of being able to avoid a check where it doesn't make sense). Basically, it ends up in the same place with a lot less overhead for everyone. No more need to have a spreadsheet to track your bonuses. No more auditing where they got all those bonuses. Or justifying why this <X> isn't the same as the ones in the table.

Xervous
2020-12-08, 03:13 PM
I guess I don't understand what you're saying.

With circumstantial modifiers stacking, no one knows what your values are until push comes to shove. And it's pretty high-optimization to be able to have your static numbers off the d20. The issue comes in with the fixed DC targets that these systems also employ. Which (fixed system-set DCs) are things I find abhorrent from a worldbuilding perspective. If every door is identical to every other door, or if I have to wade through a bunch of tables that don't necessarily have what I need and still have to set my own DC, that's a huge amount of waste, plus friction.

Whereas with Bounded Accuracy, the "going off the randomizer" happens at the point of use. Instead of turning every task into either "I don't try" or "I automatically succeed", there's still a role for the randomizer and everyone can try, but by changing the fiction you can avoid the check entirely. Turning a contested social check into an automatic success by making the right arguments or providing a correct bribe. Bypassing that door lock by pulling apart the hinges. Etc. All of these things are much more flexible while still providing the same basic benefit (of being able to avoid a check where it doesn't make sense). Basically, it ends up in the same place with a lot less overhead for everyone. No more need to have a spreadsheet to track your bonuses. No more auditing where they got all those bonuses. Or justifying why this <X> isn't the same as the ones in the table.

I agree that circumstantial modifiers grow quite painful when they can accumulate, being a time wasting checklist in the worst of cases. I should have made this clearer with my initial query.

Is it just getting off the range that is frustrating, or explicitly the game time consumed in cases where off-ranging is determined as part of play that makes the circumstantial off-ranging frustrating?

Telok
2020-12-08, 03:16 PM
So I think it's like this for the d20s

One way has DCs 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 and the pc skills go from 0 to 40+. When the pc has 30 skill the dm knows that dcs 1 to 31 are trivial and doesn't have to ask for a roll, but if they forget then it's ok because the skill is high enough its still trivial. Likewise if an opponent opposes with only +10 that's a trivial opponent even if the dm forgot what the pcs skill was.

Other way has DCs 10, 20, 30 and the pc skills go from 0 to 10. You never get off the rng (good: rolls always matter) but if the dm forgets the pc is supposed to be an expert at something and has them roll then the expert can fail trivial tasks (bad: rolls matter more than player decisions & character stats). Likewise if the dm is busy and forgets that one person is an ogre and the other a halfling they may call for opposed rolls and the halfing wins a weight lifting contest or something.

More numbers is more granular and can emulate expert>novice on the dice but the less numbers way is faster for many people. It doesn't matter which way with a good dm and prepared players. With unprepared players less numbers is the better way because its faster & easier. With a inexperienced or below average dm the more numbers way at least prevents the dice from making bad novice>expert results. Both ways really do the same stuff it's just people's preference as to which set of pitfalls and trade offs they like.

BRC
2020-12-08, 03:32 PM
Played in a Deadlands Classic campaign for a while, and I'm a big fan of it's system (While not purely dice)

1) Dice types (from d4 for below average to D12 for maximum human) are determined by your attributes, the number of dice are determined by your Skill.

2) You roll your dice and take the highest for most skill checks. Results 5 over the target number are a "raise"

3) All dice explode

4) Damage you add the dice collectively, instead of just taking highest.

5) You have "Chips", meta-resources that come in different flavors which can be spent after a skill roll to roll additional dice, or to roll again and add to your highest. These chips are also your XP, and are spent to negate damage.


Things can get pretty complicated, especially since the system is fond of throwing a lot of pluses and minuses into things, but this system does a few things

1) Any roll, even a single d4, can theoretically succeed on any test, since you keep rerolling explosions.
2) Any roll, even 8d12, can theoretically fail a basic TN 5 test
3) The ability to spend valuable metaresources, not to guarantee success, but to give a CHANCE of success, is key. It gives a way for players to try "Extra Hard" on the rolls they really care about (like jumping out of the way of a moving train, or stabilizing a wounded ally), so the Important Rolls get more weight than the unimportant ones, while still having a cost.


One awkward thing is that a critical failure happens when the majority of your dice come up 1. So there's an awkward thing where somebody with a skill of 2 (both dice need to come up as 1s) has a lower chance to critically fail than somebody with a skill of 3 (any two dice out of 3).

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-08, 03:40 PM
I agree that circumstantial modifiers grow quite painful when they can accumulate, being a time wasting checklist in the worst of cases. I should have made this clearer with my initial query.

Is it just getting off the range that is frustrating, or explicitly the game time consumed in cases where off-ranging is determined as part of play that makes the circumstantial off-ranging frustrating?

Getting off range is frustrating if and only if it becomes the norm. When the entire game boils down to "I only do things I can do without any risk of failure; anything else I never try", that's a design failure.

Stacking circumstantial modifiers are always frustrating because they're always time-consuming AND error prone. More than that, they often come down to playing the mechanics (ie gaming the system to maximize all your bonuses, regardless of the fiction) rather than playing the game. They don't necessarily, so no Stormwind. Just that's the attitude that frequently comes up. Like all metrics, they get gamed. If that's your jam, sure. I just don't like that number-chase game.

Max_Killjoy
2020-12-08, 03:41 PM
From memory (but that was a long time ago), I think the core of the problem is that the system pretty much expect you to have a success with advantages to have fun (like trigger the special abilities of your powers), while the advantages in case of failure are not that interesting.

This, plus an ugly anti-correlation : the more successes you have, the less advantages you statistically have. This mean that in average, you get advantages at a moment you don't care about them, and you don't get them when you actually want them.


And in a galaxy far, far away...

Yes, the way the dice have two axes (thats the plural of "axis", not wood-chopping tools) of success/fail and advantage/threat that are largely independent of each other is a fundamental problem of the system. There are faces of the dice that have both success and advantage (and failure and threat) on them, but you're much more likely to get one or the other. So you'll have loads of advantage but a failure, or a lot of success but net threat rather than advantage.

If I were inclined to patch the system it would probably involve some standing rule to allow you to exchange some quantity of advantage for success and vice versa, possibly at 2 for 1. Maybe a similar rule for converting failure to threat. That would probably throw off the success/fail probabilities, though. There are a few talents in the game for doing this sort of thing with specific skill or combat roles on a 1-for1 basis.

Really, I would just rather use some other dice mechanic.

That pretty much sums up my view of the system.

It's trying to turn the approach of "yes, but" and "no, but" into a die mechanic, rather than a way to avoid die rolls (particularly failures) bringing the game to a grinding halt... and failing miserably because it makes the "buts" into an entirely separate axis of result.

Tanarii
2020-12-08, 10:00 PM
But the whole issue is that the system (3e and PF) demand rolls for everything and have specific mechanics to override that. So you don't have the flexibility to just say "hey, you'll succeed with no significant issue here, so yeah. No roll." And for a bunch of tasks, a 1 is an automatic failure. So you have to roll. Even though that's absurd.
I'm not a hundred percent sure that's the case. It's been awhile, but I thought that roll for everything wasnt explicit in 3e

What it did have is a lot of tasks that are automatic success in 5e that instead had a DC on the 3e example tables.

Even so I recall overuse of the dice still being a 3e problem, not a 3e expectation. Its even possible the 3e DMG had an an explicit statement you should not roll when success was guaranteed, just like 5e.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-09, 06:42 AM
The actual way d20 handles this is by the Take 10 and Take 20 rules: if nothing is threatening characters, they can Take 10 to automatically succeed in routine tasks, and if failure has no adverse consequences, they can use 20 times the normal time for the check to Take 20.

Not only is it an explicit rule for when not to roll, it makes even fairly small skill modifiers important. If you have a negative skill modifier, you cannot hit DC 10 automatically with Take 10 and cannot hit DC 20 with Take 20, meaning a relevant difference in character performance is created by just ability scores. When you add in skills, a total modifier of +5 is enough to give a dramatic edge over an untrained person.

Cluedrew
2020-12-09, 09:28 PM
From memory (but that was a long time ago), I think the core of the problem is that the system pretty much expect you to have a success with advantages to have fun (like trigger the special abilities of your powers), while the advantages in case of failure are not that interesting.Honestly everything everyone else (I did real every post) that has mentioned, frequency, feel mismatch and even the anti-correlation feel secondary to "oh so you mean it doesn't do the thing it seems to be geared for?" Not that couldn't done on purpose but everything else I have seen about the system suggests that... well that there is supposed to be a duality to it.

Not that doing only one side is bad. Powered by the Apocalypse has "miss", "weak hit" and "strong hit" and does quite well with it. Blades in the Dark even goes to three degrees of success and one of failure but I haven't had the chance to play that. But with all those symbols and matching pairs the Star Wars game feels like it is supposed to have both sides, in fact I here that pitched a lot, so it is a real shame if it doesn't pull it off.

Now I am tempted to see if I can cook up a nice quick way to do the two sided thing, success with consequences and failure with... ok anyone know a word that means consequences but has positive connotations?

Jason
2020-12-10, 01:48 AM
Now I am tempted to see if I can cook up a nice quick way to do the two sided thing, success with consequences and failure with... ok anyone know a word that means consequences but has positive connotations?
Benefits.
Gains.
Profits.
Perks.
Boons.
Extras.
Blessings.