Your Favorite Resolution Systems

[Black Jester]

I'd actually love to see a system where there were 2 parallel resolutions systems.

One simple one for combat and other situations where success is measured as the combination of many actions each with its own resolution check, basically either d20 or d100 plus simple and not often changing mods vs fairly straightforward TN.

One complex system, preferably bell curve based, that strongly reflected character(s) skill and lots of fiddly modifiers, for times when a whole host of player decisions is ending up being abstracted into a single roll for success. Also with degrees of failure and degrees of success.

The German RPG The Dark Eye handles things that way - combat actions are solved with a realtively simple, D20-roll under system, while skill tests are used with 3 d20, compared to three stats. However, last time I checked, that was a big, very cumbersome system with a lot of moving parts, options and modifiers.

Players can understand larger and smaller pools without being able to quote the curve distributions, but can you pick the better roll out of 5d10TN7 and 7d10TN8 without a calculator?

The much more important question is: do players need to know? If transparancy of success rate is relevant, anything but a percentage-based system is going to be opaque to someone. Does it matter, for the actual fun in the game to know the absolute chance, or is it sufficient, to get a rough impression of a) how good your character is supposed to be) and b) how difficult a task is?