Seeing as I'm part of the "not everyone" demographic anyone care to explain why 3dX appeals? I picture adding or removing dice depending on situations/skill level/unique aspects but perhaps that'd break everything.
It makes critical failures and critical successes less likely.
It's easier to roll one ten on a d10 than three tens.
So when you roll those three tens, it means you did something super awesome and it paid off big.
There's pros and cons to this approach, naturally.
Naturally. And that's another thing, we haven't really decided how criticals work, or if they're even there...
Now we've got too many dang combinations of mechanics to try out. Should attributes/specialities be additional dice, a numerical bonus, or a flat value to beat, for a start?
Crit success(rolling the maximum possible result) gets you an auto-success/hit on your next roll using the same specialty/attribute/whatever.
Critical failure(lowest possible result) gets you an auto-failure/miss on your next roll using the same specialty/attribute/whatever.
That way, if you critically fail using your most powerful attack, then you're going to waste a turn if you try to use it again, so you have to switch to something else(representing an unbalancing sword swing, so you have to punch to recover, or your gun jams for a moment, so you launch a quick spell)
Crit success(rolling the maximum possible result) gets you an auto-success/hit on your next roll using the same specialty/attribute/whatever.
Critical failure(lowest possible result) gets you an auto-failure/miss on your next roll using the same specialty/attribute/whatever.
That way, if you critically fail using your most powerful attack, then you're going to waste a turn if you try to use it again, so you have to switch to something else(representing an unbalancing sword swing, so you have to punch to recover, or your gun jams for a moment, so you launch a quick spell)
Also, for added simplicity I think we should shy away from dicepool rolls.
One nifty mechanic from Edge of Midnight was that it was an attribute+ability system, but rather than rolling a dicepool, you rolled one die for your attribute, and one die for your ability, hoping to beat some target number, with different levels of failure/success for one, the other, or both.
However, I think we should use d12s because nobody uses d12s.
I think that's a little harsh though. critical failures in any system fucking blow.
and it's an annoying thing to keep track of something like that. how about whenever you get a perfect or whatever, you get a Super Awesome Point that can be spent on Dramatic Awesome? kind of like destiny points in the Saga ruleset.
Not particularly harsh, and no bookkeeping at all. All you need to do is remember that if you roll the same skill the next turn, you'll fail. It forces you to do something ELSE if you critfail.
I certainly didn't mean it to be a sword of damocles, waiting for you to use that skill again to make you fail.
true, but it's essentially punishment for getting a ridiculously rare statistical outlier.
I mean imagine if you roll a 1 on a d20 attack roll, and not only do you fail the attack... but hey you can't attack someone again because that will fail too.
and then someone will appear and kick you in the balls
the thing with game design is to implement any mechanic, you have to ask: does this enable player fun?
I already hate it when i miss in RPGs. if the system also said I'd miss again next turn... shit man, we're playing something else.
i know, I'm just coming at it from the player perspective. if you're going to make a system that is designed for narrative flow, you don't want to add on pointless mechanics that add no value beyond 'lol its tactical'. that's what that is, you're creating a false sense of depth.
My aim in the previous post is to tackle the mathematical aspect of the PbP game. Here's my basic premise:
Multiple dice are preferrable to a single die as the extremity of actions is reduced. 1d20 and 3d6 both have the same average result (10.5); however, on 1d20 you are just as likely to critically hit or critically miss as you are to get a "normal" hit. On 3d6, the chance of a roll in the 8-13 range is much higher than that of a maximum or minimum result. This leads to more consistent play, so that the mediocre fighter will hit about half the time, the incompetent fighter will usually miss, and the competent fighter will usually hit.
In other words, your character "rolls a 1" significantly less often, but so too will "rolling a 20" become much more uncommon.
Edit: example - on 3d10, 76% of all rolls will fall between 10 and 23, whereas rolls of 28+ or 5- have a mere 1% each.
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I think degrees of success/failure would be preferrable to critical success or failure, so that if you exceed the TN you might do extra damage or disarm your target or whatever, similar to the raise system of Deadlands or L5R, but if you fail a roll, you might lose part of or suffer penalties to your next action (or in extreme cases hurt yourself and/or your allies).
delroland on
EVE: Online - the most fun you will ever have not playing a game.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
Although I do like the idea of momentum-based criticals- i.e., ruin your attack string if you fail, guarantee a successful attack if you succeed- I also quite like the idea of gaining or losing a dice for your next move. That way there's still incentive to switch abilities after a C-fail (I like the imagery of stubbing your toe with a kick and then having to fumble for your knife), but you're not forced to do so.
Degrees make good sense, especially if they're carefully determined. It'd be nice if every challenge, combat or otherwise, had a few levels of success to determine how much damage/information/trust the PCs got out of the situation.
Okay, so, I kind of like the idea of using d12s as a basic dice, if only because as Rainfall says no one else does. Also, I'm going to hell for double posting again.
Invisible Castle has a max allowance of 50 rolls at a time and editing out all the fluff takes a while, so this is only a 400-roll sample:
So a roll of 10 must be the effort required to complete an average task, while 30 would be virtually superhuman (and get 36, and all resistance crumbles).
I was also thinking that PCs might have two or three basic attributes after all, but rather than being additions or determiners for specialised stats, they're used instead of them. So they represent a kind of basic, low-level competency in the field the player is trying their hand at.
If attributes were dice rather than bonus values (not saying they should be, no one seems sure just yet), their distributing would still help create the player's preferred skill archetype.
So you could theoretically put all your dice in a single stat, so that you're rolling [large number]d12 at dancing but 1d12 in everything else, while an average build would have 3d12 in all their core specialities. Maybe you always roll at least one d12 for effort, others are bonuses. And, as mentioned, critical successes and critical failures could add or subtract dice for the next check. Here, because it's so unlikely to get so many 1s or 12s, I think the definition of a critical should maybe also be extended to include values well in excess or well under a particular value.
Very true, but it's useful to know that you can make an average task... well, average, being passed in most if not all situations.
Anyway, I'm inclined to agree with Rainfall when it comes to combat/challenge resolution- everything coming down to a single roll with modifiers, or at least as few rolls as possible.
What I forsee is enemy NPC sheets consisting of, for the most part, HP, resistance, and their attack value: HP is self explanatory, their attack value is used to challenge the PCs' defensive attempts, and resistance is subtracted from incoming attacks.
This guy is probably a ninja, or a well-armoured commando, or a barbarian with the pain threshold of a tree. It would be possible to take them down with a single attack, but you'd have to roll 25 or more. They're clearly made with resilience as their strong point, because 10 is an easy attack value to shrug off.
Right, and for Social or Noncombat encounters we can just apply a resistance equivalent to their rank in that skill, or something similar, with HP being a rolled stat of some kind?
Exactly. And as long as the PCs always have a good idea of what the particular degrees of success result in, it still allows nice detailed in-character posts if you take the Wushu angle of them assuming competency and declaring intent.
I mean at some point it might be necessary to differentiate between Resistance as in reduced visibility, or cover, or armour, or evasive action, but for the most part they all come down to the same thing: taking a chunk out of the user's attempt to deal damage.
If we determine exactly how this all works I'd happily host a small playtest campaign, I'm not just an ideasman dang it!
I was thinking apocalypse based off Zombie Master, action/espionage based off Team Fortress or maybe I'll just chicken out and use an offshoot setting from Exigency.
Edcrab on
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GumpyThere is alwaysa greater powerRegistered Userregular
edited December 2008
So I seem to have been recruited for this adventure
Man I know you were busy shooting me in the face but the basic gist was if you'd be interested when and if we playtest- although if you mean you're thinking up your own ideas on how it'd all work then by all means feel free to contribute
Okay, another thought. Despite all that crap I spewed regarding rejecting attributes outright in favour of specialities (aka skills) only, I was just thinking how they could be featured.
Attributes are dice, skills are bonus values… or possibly vice versa?
So you might have 2d12 Strength with +4 in your Swordplay, or whatever. No idea what they’d equate to as far as cost and levelling up and character creation goes, but it would mean there’s a distinct difference between the two, beyond one being general and the other being specialised. And, theoretically, any attribute could be used in conjunction with any skill if the outcome was relevant.
Although we’re maybe getting ahead of ourselves here (or to be more accurate I’m rambling off on a tangent), it’d be nice if skills were easier to level up than dice. That way decisions made at the outset would really mean something.
Either way, I like the idea of rolling HP for combat. It’d mean people invest points in the relevant skill due to the fear that their 4d12 super-attribute eventually rolls them 4 due to phenomenal bad luck.
So as usual I tested all this out on the lads at the comic store and I'm not sure what the hell to make of the results.
Also, yes, I've triple posted. But it's been nearly a month, damn it!
If the system outlined in the above post was to be used, then the skills represented by additional bonus values would have to be fairly high numbers to be significant. Possibly that's a good thing, as having a couple of points in several (all?) specialities wouldn't (and, from what I saw, didn't) make a PC game-breakingly omnicompetent. That is, characters with skills around the four or five mark didn't really show much of a performance increase over those with no investment in the same skills.
So how's this for yet another alternative: attribute is your dice pool, skill/speciality is the number of dice you can actually use in the relevant challenge. So if your skill is less than the attribute- say, 2 to the attribute's 3- you select the two highest values and discard the remainder. Or, again, vice-versa: not sure which would work best. Pool for the skill or pool for the attribute?
EDIT: And a crit (12) on a thrown dice could perhaps allow you to add one unused dice, if you have it: with the drawback that you have to cast aside a additonal dice if you critically fail.
Posts
It makes critical failures and critical successes less likely.
It's easier to roll one ten on a d10 than three tens.
So when you roll those three tens, it means you did something super awesome and it paid off big.
There's pros and cons to this approach, naturally.
Now we've got too many dang combinations of mechanics to try out. Should attributes/specialities be additional dice, a numerical bonus, or a flat value to beat, for a start?
Crit success(rolling the maximum possible result) gets you an auto-success/hit on your next roll using the same specialty/attribute/whatever.
Critical failure(lowest possible result) gets you an auto-failure/miss on your next roll using the same specialty/attribute/whatever.
That way, if you critically fail using your most powerful attack, then you're going to waste a turn if you try to use it again, so you have to switch to something else(representing an unbalancing sword swing, so you have to punch to recover, or your gun jams for a moment, so you launch a quick spell)
I like this idea.
One nifty mechanic from Edge of Midnight was that it was an attribute+ability system, but rather than rolling a dicepool, you rolled one die for your attribute, and one die for your ability, hoping to beat some target number, with different levels of failure/success for one, the other, or both.
However, I think we should use d12s because nobody uses d12s.
and it's an annoying thing to keep track of something like that. how about whenever you get a perfect or whatever, you get a Super Awesome Point that can be spent on Dramatic Awesome? kind of like destiny points in the Saga ruleset.
I certainly didn't mean it to be a sword of damocles, waiting for you to use that skill again to make you fail.
I mean imagine if you roll a 1 on a d20 attack roll, and not only do you fail the attack... but hey you can't attack someone again because that will fail too.
and then someone will appear and kick you in the balls
the thing with game design is to implement any mechanic, you have to ask: does this enable player fun?
I already hate it when i miss in RPGs. if the system also said I'd miss again next turn... shit man, we're playing something else.
Multiple dice are preferrable to a single die as the extremity of actions is reduced. 1d20 and 3d6 both have the same average result (10.5); however, on 1d20 you are just as likely to critically hit or critically miss as you are to get a "normal" hit. On 3d6, the chance of a roll in the 8-13 range is much higher than that of a maximum or minimum result. This leads to more consistent play, so that the mediocre fighter will hit about half the time, the incompetent fighter will usually miss, and the competent fighter will usually hit.
In other words, your character "rolls a 1" significantly less often, but so too will "rolling a 20" become much more uncommon.
Edit: example - on 3d10, 76% of all rolls will fall between 10 and 23, whereas rolls of 28+ or 5- have a mere 1% each.
---
I think degrees of success/failure would be preferrable to critical success or failure, so that if you exceed the TN you might do extra damage or disarm your target or whatever, similar to the raise system of Deadlands or L5R, but if you fail a roll, you might lose part of or suffer penalties to your next action (or in extreme cases hurt yourself and/or your allies).
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
Degrees make good sense, especially if they're carefully determined. It'd be nice if every challenge, combat or otherwise, had a few levels of success to determine how much damage/information/trust the PCs got out of the situation.
Invisible Castle has a max allowance of 50 rolls at a time and editing out all the fluff takes a while, so this is only a 400-roll sample:
So a roll of 10 must be the effort required to complete an average task, while 30 would be virtually superhuman (and get 36, and all resistance crumbles).
I was also thinking that PCs might have two or three basic attributes after all, but rather than being additions or determiners for specialised stats, they're used instead of them. So they represent a kind of basic, low-level competency in the field the player is trying their hand at.
If attributes were dice rather than bonus values (not saying they should be, no one seems sure just yet), their distributing would still help create the player's preferred skill archetype.
So you could theoretically put all your dice in a single stat, so that you're rolling [large number]d12 at dancing but 1d12 in everything else, while an average build would have 3d12 in all their core specialities. Maybe you always roll at least one d12 for effort, others are bonuses. And, as mentioned, critical successes and critical failures could add or subtract dice for the next check. Here, because it's so unlikely to get so many 1s or 12s, I think the definition of a critical should maybe also be extended to include values well in excess or well under a particular value.
The higher the die, the distribution of rolls will be "steeper" at the ends and "flatter" in the middle.
The higher the die, the more likely to hit average when rolling three of them. And the less likely to hit an extreme.
0.06% 3d12 max roll (approx.)
0.1% 3d10 max roll (approx.)
0.2% 3d8 max roll (approx.)
0.5% 3d6 max roll (approx.)
1.6% 3d4 max roll (approx.)
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
Anyway, I'm inclined to agree with Rainfall when it comes to combat/challenge resolution- everything coming down to a single roll with modifiers, or at least as few rolls as possible.
What I forsee is enemy NPC sheets consisting of, for the most part, HP, resistance, and their attack value: HP is self explanatory, their attack value is used to challenge the PCs' defensive attempts, and resistance is subtracted from incoming attacks.
Damage points: 15
Resistance: -10
Attack value: 10
This guy is probably a ninja, or a well-armoured commando, or a barbarian with the pain threshold of a tree. It would be possible to take them down with a single attack, but you'd have to roll 25 or more. They're clearly made with resilience as their strong point, because 10 is an easy attack value to shrug off.
I mean at some point it might be necessary to differentiate between Resistance as in reduced visibility, or cover, or armour, or evasive action, but for the most part they all come down to the same thing: taking a chunk out of the user's attempt to deal damage.
Instead of an IRC game with crappy exalted rules.
This isn't a selfish request at all, of course.
I was thinking apocalypse based off Zombie Master, action/espionage based off Team Fortress or maybe I'll just chicken out and use an offshoot setting from Exigency.
Give me some time to read again
Attributes are dice, skills are bonus values… or possibly vice versa?
So you might have 2d12 Strength with +4 in your Swordplay, or whatever. No idea what they’d equate to as far as cost and levelling up and character creation goes, but it would mean there’s a distinct difference between the two, beyond one being general and the other being specialised. And, theoretically, any attribute could be used in conjunction with any skill if the outcome was relevant.
Although we’re maybe getting ahead of ourselves here (or to be more accurate I’m rambling off on a tangent), it’d be nice if skills were easier to level up than dice. That way decisions made at the outset would really mean something.
Either way, I like the idea of rolling HP for combat. It’d mean people invest points in the relevant skill due to the fear that their 4d12 super-attribute eventually rolls them 4 due to phenomenal bad luck.
Also, yes, I've triple posted. But it's been nearly a month, damn it!
If the system outlined in the above post was to be used, then the skills represented by additional bonus values would have to be fairly high numbers to be significant. Possibly that's a good thing, as having a couple of points in several (all?) specialities wouldn't (and, from what I saw, didn't) make a PC game-breakingly omnicompetent. That is, characters with skills around the four or five mark didn't really show much of a performance increase over those with no investment in the same skills.
So how's this for yet another alternative: attribute is your dice pool, skill/speciality is the number of dice you can actually use in the relevant challenge. So if your skill is less than the attribute- say, 2 to the attribute's 3- you select the two highest values and discard the remainder. Or, again, vice-versa: not sure which would work best. Pool for the skill or pool for the attribute?
EDIT: And a crit (12) on a thrown dice could perhaps allow you to add one unused dice, if you have it: with the drawback that you have to cast aside a additonal dice if you critically fail.