Whaddaya think of this resolution system?

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Edgewise

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It can't be just me, but when it comes to game design, the thing that really gets my head spinning is thinking of different kinds of resolution systems. You know, the generic dice mechanics for determining success or failure. Questions of simplicity, scaling and opposition are always forcing me to refine my ideas until I come up with The Perfect System...until I realize the glaring shortcomings. Like I said, it can't be just me.

Anyway, I have a new dice resolution mechanic that I'd like to get some opinions on. I'm shooting for a super rules-light system and this would be the core of it. If anyone also wants to use this thread to talk about their own resolution mechanics, I wouldn't be opposed to that as long as it's part of the conversation.

The core of this system are two D6 rolls. In the base case of an average person performing a challenging task, you roll 1d6 for resolution, and to the side you roll 1d6 as a "critical die." The latter comes into play only if the resolution die comes up a 1 or 6.

The results of the resolution die roll are very straightforward:
  1. Major Failure
  2. Failure
  3. Marginal Failure
  4. Marginal Success
  5. Success
  6. Major Success
It's really 1-3 = failure and 4-6 = success, with different grades for when you care.

Anyway, the effect of the critical die is that if you roll 1 on the resolution die and 1 on the critical die, it's a critical failure, and if you roll 6 on the resolution die and 6 on the critical die, you get a critical success. These mean the usual thing: truly exceptional results.

Simple so far?

The last step is to account for, well, everything else, like skill, difficulty, opposition, etc. These come in the form of simple +/- modifiers. A character may have +2 Sword-Fighting, meaning that he's quite good at that. Tasks apply such modifiers based on difficulty, of course. And opposed tests are handled by rolling for one character, using the other character's traits as negative modifiers. Add up all relevant modifiers and you have an integer, usually within +/-3. This is the die modifier.

Whatever the absolute value of the modifier is, you roll that many more resolution dice. If the modifier was positive, you take the highest resolution die roll, and if it was negative, take the lowest.

There's one more detail. If a character has a positive mod, then a critical success happens if two or more of the dice come up 6, including the critical die. A critical failure only happens if all the dice (including the critical die) come up 1. The reverse is true for negative mods (i.e. two 1s is a critical failure, all 6's is a critical success).

That's it! I have a few ideas about where these mechanics are strong and where they are weak, but I'd like to hear feedback before putting a finger on the scale. Any suggested improvements will be given due consideration...thanks in advance!
 
whats the difference between a major success and a critical success?
 
Chivalry and Sorcery 3rd edition used a similar "crit die" system but you rolled a d10. It wasn't activated by results on the success roll though.
 
whats the difference between a major success and a critical success?

It's hard to say generically, but a critical success is one where you do significantly better than expected and a major success would signify doing slightly better than average. Of course, depending on the task, you may only care about success or failure.

For instance, when attempting to research information about a demon, a major success might reveal background information about its personality that could be useful, while critical success might reveal that it is vulnerable to blessed wooden weapons. Meanwhile, a critical success to avoid a pit trap would probably be the same as a major success or plain success (maybe a marginal success would have the PC jump back but accidentally drop his torch into the abyss).
 
Well, I guess my question then is, is there a specific role it plays in the game's mechanics, or could you drop it entirely aand just have the base mechanic of rolling dice, keeping the highest (or lowest) and have 3 degrees of success and failure. That would remove the need to have a special dice separate from the others.
 
Well, I guess my question then is, is there a specific role it plays in the game's mechanics, or could you drop it entirely aand just have the base mechanic of rolling dice, keeping the highest (or lowest) and have 3 degrees of success and failure. That would remove the need to have a special dice separate from the others.

I would agree with this as at the moment you have 8 degrees of success counting the crit die. If you made the resolution die be fail-neutral-succeed, then with the ctrit die you get 5 degrees of success. I say at the moment because there may be a lot you want to do with 8 degrees of success.
 
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Simple so far?
Fairly simple so far, but see my above post.

The last step is to account for, well, everything else, like skill, difficulty, opposition, etc. These come in the form of simple +/- modifiers. A character may have +2 Sword-Fighting, meaning that he's quite good at that. Tasks apply such modifiers based on difficulty, of course. And opposed tests are handled by rolling for one character, using the other character's traits as negative modifiers. Add up all relevant modifiers and you have an integer, usually within +/-3. This is the die modifier.

Whatever the absolute value of the modifier is, you roll that many more resolution dice. If the modifier was positive, you take the highest resolution die roll, and if it was negative, take the lowest.
...
Have you considered which die you apply a modifier to? For example, I might apply the character/skill modifier to the resolution die, and apply gear (e.g. +2 Magical Sword) modifiers only to the critical die. This makes gear an add on to skill, that is, if you are a horrible swordsman a magic sword isn't going to help you hit, but when you do it will be better. You could of course play with this, there may be gear that provide benefit to both die.

On the multiple die thing, take the highest/lowest, the odds are very non-linear. That is, take the highest on 2d6 (d6 being a die with low variance compared to a d20)

As with most things die statistic wise, maybe spoke too soon. Realize I already have the odds for 1D6, 2D6, 3D6, 4D6, etc. take highest. If only a 6 is a success the odds are (rounding) 17%, 31%, 42%, 52%, 60%, 66%, 72%...

If a 5 or 6 is a success, they are 33%, 56%, 70%, 80%, 87%, 91%...

(Deleted this: dramatically increases the odds while taking the lowest dramatically decreases them. When you do this with 3D6 take highest/lowest you are pretty much guaranteed a success or failure. I believe that the calculator on anydice.com can do these statistics for you.)
 
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Another way to fine tune it is to add more critical dice, like two crit die take low/high.

(Note: deleted most of this after realizing had the odds wrong in my head on the post above)
 
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When I do this stuff myself (which I've done a lot of) I usually make an odds table. Then the only way to truly know the feel is to test it. Set up simple scenarios and roll the dice. Repeat them and see how it goes. If you have players willing to help you all the better.
 
One thing I do like is how the crit die being activated by the resolution roll downplays criticals and ties them to whatever modifies the resolution die.

Have you considered just rolling two die together and the player chooses which is the crit and which is the resolution?
 
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One last things as realized when editing post #7 that statistically your proposed dice mechanic is equivalent to mine in many ways. That is, I can apply the odds tables I've created to your situation.

I use a system where you roll a certain number of d6 equal to a base value (e.g. Combat Talent, analogous to level in certain ways) and you have modifiers (typically a skill) that can be used to raise the die roll, for e.g., if I had a base of 2 and skill +2, I roll 2d6 and 2 points to modify the die, I could add 2 to one die, or 1 to each die. A success happens on a 5 or 6, a failure on a 1. You count your success and either subtract failures or account for the failures other ways. The number of success you have I use for my degree of success; difficulty comes in two flavors, require extra successes or a negative modifier.
 
Looks like I have some catching up to do...
Well, I guess my question then is, is there a specific role it plays in the game's mechanics, or could you drop it entirely aand just have the base mechanic of rolling dice, keeping the highest (or lowest) and have 3 degrees of success and failure. That would remove the need to have a special dice separate from the others.
I would agree with this as at the moment you have 8 degrees of success counting the crit die. If you made the resolution die be fail-neutral-succeed, then with the ctrit die you get 5 degrees of success. I say at the moment because there may be a lot you want to do with 8 degrees of success.

To clarify, most of the degrees of success are there only if you want them. The GM isn't obligated to treat them any differently, but they are available if it's useful. The critical states are a little different; when feasible, the GM should be treating them like superlative/disastrous results.

The critical die is the most convoluted aspect of the mechanics, I admit. The reason for doing things that way was because, among other things, I wanted critical results to be very unusual. On an unmodified roll, either critical should happen 1/36, which is less often than the natural 1s and 20s of the d20. Also, you'll note that modified die rolls have different probabilities for critical effects, but they are never 0% or 100%. I view those as good things, but at the price of complicating the mechanics.
Have you considered which die you apply a modifier to? For example, I might apply the character/skill modifier to the resolution die, and apply gear (e.g. +2 Magical Sword) modifiers only to the critical die. This makes gear an add on to skill, that is, if you are a horrible swordsman a magic sword isn't going to help you hit, but when you do it will be better. You could of course play with this, there may be gear that provide benefit to both die.

I probably didn't explain this well enough. Die modifiers don't directly modify any rolled values, but they modify the number of dice rolled. So a +2 fencing skill means that you'd roll three dice and keep the highest for your basic resolution value (assuming there were no other modifiers). If you are opposed by an enemy with +3 fencing, the die mod total is -1, so you roll one extra die and take the lowest value.
When I do this stuff myself (which I've done a lot of) I usually make an odds table. Then the only way to truly know the feel is to test it. Set up simple scenarios and roll the dice. Repeat them and see how it goes. If you have players willing to help you all the better.

I've worked out the basic cases, and there's one big hole in the probability distribution.

So a basic unmodified roll is 50/50. A modifier of +/-1 makes it 75/25. Beyond that, things get more fine-grained, but there's a big 25% jump in the first modifier to the die roll. Probably the biggest weakness of this system. I suggest (in the text) an optional rule that the GM can decide any die roll of -1, +0 or +1 can be turned into a basic die roll with +/-1 added to the actual roll value. This gives me a 67/33 spot at the expense of a little elegance.
Have you considered just rolling two die together and the player chooses which is the crit and which is the resolution?

That's a cool idea, but (a) I have to work out the probabilities, and (b) what do you do in an opposed situation? But it does sound cool and I'd like to think about it.
On the multiple die thing, take the highest/lowest, the odds are very non-linear. That is, take the highest on 2d6 (d6 being a die with low variance compared to a d20)

Yup, I guess you noticed :smile:
As with most things die statistic wise, maybe spoke too soon. Realize I already have the odds for 1D6, 2D6, 3D6, 4D6, etc. take highest. If only a 6 is a success the odds are (rounding) 17%, 31%, 42%, 52%, 60%, 66%, 72%...

I'm not sure I'm following you here, and this might stem from vagueness in my description. The progression in success rates from +0 to +5 is like this:
  • +0: 50%
  • +1: 75%
  • +2: 87.5%
  • +3: 93.75%
  • +4: 96.875%
  • +5: 98.4375%
So yeah, that's super non-linear. Of course, the negative progression is just 1 - P.
 
I'm not sure I'm following you here, and this might stem from vagueness in my description. The progression in success rates from +0 to +5 is like this:
  • +0: 50%
  • +1: 75%
  • +2: 87.5%
  • +3: 93.75%
  • +4: 96.875%
  • +5: 98.4375%
So yeah, that's super non-linear. Of course, the negative progression is just 1 - P.

The error is mine, I forgot the a 4 was a marginal success and gave numbers where a 6, or a 5 and a 6 were a success.

Alas I should have kept my initial text where said rolling 3D6 keep low/high was pretty much guaranteed failure/success.

The good on the above is you are going to have a lot of "hits," the bad is you have very little dynamic range, basically at +3 your capped out.

I guess I'm wondering how this works. I a goblin with +0 skill faces off against a fighter with +3 skill then does the fighter have about a 94% chance to hit and the goblin about a 6% chance?

If so this would produce a huge effectiveness gap over a "three level" spread. In that sense gaining a +1 to skill will be huge, probably akin to like gaining 5 levels in D&D. Is that intended? If you made 4 neutral (neither a hit or miss) you could spread this out to about a +7 skill a "seven level spread".
 
The error is mine, I forgot the a 4 was a marginal success and gave numbers where a 6, or a 5 and a 6 were a success.

Alas I should have kept my initial text where said rolling 3D6 keep low/high was pretty much guaranteed failure/success.

Well you were close enough...after all, if only 5 and 6 are success, then negative dice mods (i.e. taking the lowest) will have an even steeper curve. Since the same system is used for opposed rolls, this means that someone gets really screwed.

I do believe I ran into a system that works this way, though I forget which one. I briefly considered adopting it due to the gentler curve on positive dice mods, but then I realized how cruel it was to disadvantaged rolls...and it's asymmetric to boot.

The good on the above is you are going to have a lot of "hits," the bad is you have very little dynamic range, basically at +3 your capped out.

I guess I'm wondering how this works. I a goblin with +0 skill faces off against a fighter with +3 skill then does the fighter have about a 94% chance to hit and the goblin about a 6% chance?

If so this would produce a huge effectiveness gap over a "three level" spread. In that sense gaining a +1 to skill will be huge, probably akin to like gaining 5 levels in D&D. Is that intended?

All good points, and yes, I view these as potential weaknesses of the system.

That being said, my intent for how this system would be used is that most advantageous traits for PCs and non-boss enemies will be rated +1. A +2 is a really big deal, and +3 may be the pinnacle of human achievement. That may not seem like much room to move or differentiate characters, but my design goal here is to create a very simple pick-up-and-play game that de-emphasizes statistics. Also, I'm in favor of keeping advancement to an absolute minimum. The ultimate goal is to create an RPG game that almost anyone can play with about 15 minutes of explanation. Admittedly, the whole critical die mechanic may get in the way of that.

Like I said, the jump between +0 and +/-1 is steep. I can see a situation where that might not be a bad thing: partly I'd like to encourage players to use their environment and planning to tilt situational factors their way. Thus, it could be very difficult to hit and kill a dragon if you just stand in front of it and whack away with a sword, but if you get creative and do things like surround it, bait it into narrow spaces, etc. you can drastically improve your chances. Maybe that's a stretch, but if it works in play, I'd still view it as a good thing.

If you made 4 neutral (neither a hit or miss) you could spread this out to about a +7 skill a "seven level spread".

That's another good point, but it could be hard to take advantage of. I actually do have guidelines for rolls with neutral or tie results; those are given by 3 and 4 (again, symmetry is important for opposed rolls). The problem is that many or most rolls don't really have a neutral result.

For instance, I'm not sure how I would handle that in combat. If a tie is always a miss, then the die modifiers tilt hideously in the direction of the defender. And visa versa if it's always a hit. Giving every roll a potential neutral result means you have to figure out what that can mean in all cases, and that's not trivial.

Still, it works really well for some things, like reaction rolls from NPCs. If I could find a way to incorporate that more broadly, it would open up the probability distributions a bit and soften up those steep curves.
 
I do think you're on to something here, you've designed something like FFG's Narrative Dice System, but you're adding complications where you don't necessarily need them; this is a situation where having a special "critical" die may actually be useful. I'd probably be inclined to go full narrative, so a 1 on the critical die always translates to "...but something goes wrong" and a 6 to "...but on the other hand, something good also happened" regardless of the resolution dice.

I'd also suggest looking at Cthulhu Dark, which uses a similar "build pool, roll, keep hghest, one die is special" concept.

That being said, my intent for how this system would be used is that most advantageous traits for PCs and non-boss enemies will be rated +1. A +2 is a really big deal, and +3 may be the pinnacle of human achievement. That may not seem like much room to move or differentiate characters, but my design goal here is to create a very simple pick-up-and-play game that de-emphasizes statistics. Also, I'm in favor of keeping advancement to an absolute minimum. The ultimate goal is to create an RPG game that almost anyone can play with about 15 minutes of explanation. Admittedly, the whole critical die mechanic may get in the way of that.
Keep your goals in mind, though. Do you really need an advancement system for a pick-up game, how many times do you imagine someone playing the same character? Maybe "experience dice" could be spent to let you add an extra die to a roll (Which, as we've seen, is very strong), with the pool refreshing each session; you may not need more.
Your scale looks good. I'd probably be inclined to treat injuries as "negative traits" that the GM can apply to pools if they're appropriate, because that seems to fit more naturally than HP pools.

Like I said, the jump between +0 and +/-1 is steep. I can see a situation where that might not be a bad thing: partly I'd like to encourage players to use their environment and planning to tilt situational factors their way. Thus, it could be very difficult to hit and kill a dragon if you just stand in front of it and whack away with a sword, but if you get creative and do things like surround it, bait it into narrow spaces, etc. you can drastically improve your chances. Maybe that's a stretch, but if it works in play, I'd still view it as a good thing.
Yeah, sounds good to me. The jump isn't necessarily a bad thing, because even the base 50% success chance is pretty good.

For instance, I'm not sure how I would handle that in combat. If a tie is always a miss, then the die modifiers tilt hideously in the direction of the defender. And visa versa if it's always a hit. Giving every roll a potential neutral result means you have to figure out what that can mean in all cases, and that's not trivial.
How about making combat rolls opposed and representing a scuffle rather than an attack, with ties meaning "neither of you get the upper hand"?
 
Hey, there's a lot of stuff you said here that got me thinking!

I'd probably be inclined to go full narrative, so a 1 on the critical die always translates to "...but something goes wrong" and a 6 to "...but on the other hand, something good also happened" regardless of the resolution dice.

I have to think about this, but you may really be on to something, here. The critical die used this way could also provide marginal results (i.e. rolling a 1 with a success or a 6 with a failure). Using the critical die like this, let's call it a quality die, can really simplify things at the expense of having the curve more responsive to character ability. After all, this isn't a simulationist concept by any means.

Another option is to simply drop the critical die altogether. I can drop the idea of a critical state, or simply re-roll on a 1 or 6 and apply a critical effect if the roll recurs. The former is much simpler while the latter is easier to understand if a bit slower in practice. But the critical/quality die has a certain drama that can be fun.

Maybe "experience dice" could be spent to let you add an extra die to a roll (Which, as we've seen, is very strong), with the pool refreshing each session; you may not need more.

Wow, that's weird...I briefly considered a mechanic like this, though I wasn't sure how to pull it off right. For what it's worth, I'm willing to drop the idea of character advancement entirely. My preference would be to have optional rules for very gradual advancement with very low caps.

How about making combat rolls opposed and representing a scuffle rather than an attack, with ties meaning "neither of you get the upper hand"?

I'm struggling with how to make combat as dead simple as possible. I'm very inspired by systems that I've recently encountered that work hard to treat combat as Just Another Activity. I'm thinking of Heroquest, Blades in the Dark and PbtA games. I'm not looking to go quite as narrativist as the latter two, but I have a big chip on my shoulder about how draggy RPG combat tends to be.

So yeah, the idea of a struggle works, but there are still a few complications. If you have success/neutral/fail conditions for a scene of scuffling, you won't have many situations where both parties are injured. That's not a game-breaker for a very narrativist game, but like I said, I don't want to go quite that far.

More where I'd like to lean is the flow of Dungeon World, where action is just narrated back and forth between players and GM without rounds or strict timekeeping. A player says what he's trying to do, you roll the dice to see if it works and the GM interprets the results with some mechanical guidelines. Then the GM says what's happening, asks other players what they are doing as needed, etc.

In other words, I want to get rid of initiative and "attacks," replacing them with just "things you try to do." Which will often be attacks, but hey, I get a lot of players who like to give me this detailed description of how their character is swinging their blades trying to catch multiple opponents or at least get them to back off, etc. In almost every system, as a GM you have to struggle to figure out how to translate these descriptions into mechanical terms without breaking the game. It feels like both player and GM are penalized when a player gets creative in combat.
 
Another option is to simply drop the critical die altogether. I can drop the idea of a critical state, or simply re-roll on a 1 or 6 and apply a critical effect if the roll recurs. The former is much simpler while the latter is easier to understand if a bit slower in practice. But the critical/quality die has a certain drama that can be fun.
I do like the criotical die, always find it better to roll all at once even if you ignore that critical die.


Wow, that's weird...I briefly considered a mechanic like this, though I wasn't sure how to pull it off right. For what it's worth, I'm willing to drop the idea of character advancement entirely. My preference would be to have optional rules for very gradual advancement with very low caps.
My comments about the dynamic range really only matter for character advancement or a breadth of ways to distinguish monsters. Take those out as design goals and a narrow range is preferred I'd think. I have to guess because my own design goals are to include advancement and design for long campaign play (like a 100 sessions type play); very different.


In other words, I want to get rid of initiative and "attacks," replacing them with just "things you try to do." Which will often be attacks, but hey, I get a lot of players who like to give me this detailed description of how their character is swinging their blades trying to catch multiple opponents or at least get them to back off, etc. In almost every system, as a GM you have to struggle to figure out how to translate these descriptions into mechanical terms without breaking the game. It feels like both player and GM are penalized when a player gets creative in combat.
This is a core concern of mine and for me I found the best way to handle this is with a degree of success approach. You're categories of success and failure could serve as such, where a 6 allows you to fend off 3 attackers, a 5 two attackers, etc. basically translating the desired activity into one of three (or more if you use the critical die) categories of success. Or more broadly a 6 allows you to do three things, a 5 two things and a 4 one thing.
 
I have to think about this, but you may really be on to something, here. The critical die used this way could also provide marginal results (i.e. rolling a 1 with a success or a 6 with a failure). Using the critical die like this, let's call it a quality die, can really simplify things at the expense of having the curve more responsive to character ability. After all, this isn't a simulationist concept by any means.

Another option is to simply drop the critical die altogether. I can drop the idea of a critical state, or simply re-roll on a 1 or 6 and apply a critical effect if the roll recurs. The former is much simpler while the latter is easier to understand if a bit slower in practice. But the critical/quality die has a certain drama that can be fun.
I like the critical die idea, it feels pretty good and it will keep things happening; I think you should stick with it!

Wow, that's weird...I briefly considered a mechanic like this, though I wasn't sure how to pull it off right. For what it's worth, I'm willing to drop the idea of character advancement entirely. My preference would be to have optional rules for very gradual advancement with very low caps.
Your system doesn't leave much room for advancement, though. Maybe you could go with 1xp / session, 1xp to buy a new trait at +1, 2xp to upgrade a +1 trait to +2, etc. Or maybe you don't really need one anyway.
XP dice do have the advantage that a player gets a new thing more regularly, and players like getting things.

I'm struggling with how to make combat as dead simple as possible. I'm very inspired by systems that I've recently encountered that work hard to treat combat as Just Another Activity. I'm thinking of Heroquest, Blades in the Dark and PbtA games. I'm not looking to go quite as narrativist as the latter two, but I have a big chip on my shoulder about how draggy RPG combat tends to be.

So yeah, the idea of a struggle works, but there are still a few complications. If you have success/neutral/fail conditions for a scene of scuffling, you won't have many situations where both parties are injured. That's not a game-breaker for a very narrativist game, but like I said, I don't want to go quite that far.
I was thinking of Fighting Fantasy (Where it's opposed rolls, loser takes damage) but it depends on how you want to rationalise it - if it's "both characters are going into it to hurt the other" then your combat mechanic could be both characters roll, successes inflict damage, don't compare results so ties don't matter...

In other words, I want to get rid of initiative and "attacks," replacing them with just "things you try to do." Which will often be attacks, but hey, I get a lot of players who like to give me this detailed description of how their character is swinging their blades trying to catch multiple opponents or at least get them to back off, etc. In almost every system, as a GM you have to struggle to figure out how to translate these descriptions into mechanical terms without breaking the game.
...or it could be both sides declare intentions for the scuffle, roll, winner gets what they want, nobody gets anything in the event of a tie... which is more versatile, and means you don't have to do as much work defining types of situations as the players will do that for you in play. Mechanically, getting opponents to back off sounds like imposing a negative modifier on some of their actions...

My comments about the dynamic range really only matter for character advancement or a breadth of ways to distinguish monsters. Take those out as design goals and a narrow range is preferred I'd think. I have to guess because my own design goals are to include advancement and design for long campaign play (like a 100 sessions type play); very different.
Yeah, it does depend on the game; the one-off, the short campaign, and the long campaign are all very different sorts of game that require different sorts of design.
 
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You have very nearly recreated the dice mechanics of blades in the dark.

No skill: 2d keep lowest
Otherwise roll skill keep highest
1-3: Fail (major consequences)
4-5: Success but with a consequence
6: Full success
2 or more 6s is a critical
If you then applied a more Dungeon World timescale and maybe HP system, you might get to what you want. As it stands I would comment that negative mods should be pretty rare as they will have a massive impact.
 
You have very nearly recreated the dice mechanics of blades in the dark.

No skill: 2d keep lowest
Otherwise roll skill keep highest
1-3: Fail (major consequences)
4-5: Success but with a consequence
6: Full success
2 or more 6s is a critical
.....

Dang that looks like a harsh system, if I'm correct off the top of my head even a skill 2 person will fail with major consequences 25% of the time. For a skilled person, I read that mechanic as a chance on 2d6 to critically fail = 25%; chance to fully succeed (one 6s) about 31%, and your critical success is only 3%. Even if you are skilled and roll 3 dice, your chance to critically fail is 12.5%, and chance to fully succeed goes to a whopping about 42%. To me, the 3 dice odds are what I'd expect of a basic character, like a veteran infantry, a 2nd level fighter. It looks like you need 4 dice to reach what I'd begin to even call good or more than above average, greater than 50% chance to fully succeed.

In a way this is good as a you have a lot of runway for improvement, even with 6 dice you only have about a 66% chance of getting a full success or better. So you have meaningful skill improvements out to about 10 dice or so.

If you have no skill, looks like your are doomed with about a 75% chance to critically fail; and about 50% chance to critically fail two times in a row.

Does it feel that way in play? Where there is a whole bunch of complete fail, feel lucky if you can succeed with consequences, and rarely succeed without a "you succeed, but..." statement?

Or, as I suspect, does it get watered down in play, those consequences on "success with consequences" are made trivial and the major consequences are really not that major at all. For me, a major consequence is something that would put fear in my heart, that is, suffering two major consequences has a very good chance in resulting in character "death" and three in a row is guaranteed character "death." Death being death, or so much "back to square one" it's like you just started playing the game.

Or, does the game posit / assume that you will be using gear or must work on situational modifiers to get pluses to the dice roll to keep from rolling a 1-3?
 
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You have very nearly recreated the dice mechanics of blades in the dark.
.....

To follow up on the above, the posited mechanic of the OP is much, much more positive. 5 or 6 is a success, 4 a marginal success. The bad is not nearly so bad. Instead of a 3 being a major fail, it is a marginal fail, only a 1 gives a major fail.

So in the OP's posited system, if I roll 3d6, keep high, my chance to major fail is less than 1%, my chance to major succeed is about 42%, my chance to just succeed (5 or 6) or better is about 70%. Compared to the Blades in the Dark where 3D6, keep high, gets you a 12.5% chance to majorly fail, a 3% chance of a major success, and only a 42% to just succeed or better.

Or another way to look at it, that makes more sense at the table, is the OPs system for a 3d6 character, gives you about a 50% chance to put together two basic successes in a row, in the Blades that chance drops to less than 18%.
 
Hmm well in blades you do not get negative modifiers, and can always take a Devils Bargain to get at least 1dice, so the odds almost never get worse than 50-50.

Also the degree of consequence is related more to your starting position (controlled consequences are not as bad as risky, which are not as bad as desperate) than to your die roll. Tbh I probably overstated the major consequences, I meant just meant you fail with consequences (not a fumble or critical fail).

Finally critical fails do not exist, failing / taking consequences in a desperate situation is the closest you get. And consequences can be resisted to some degree.

The important element is that the skill dice are roll and keep best result, and you can always get at least one extra die. And the results dictate consequences. Naturally the OPs variant is slightly different and slightly more forgiving, but similar enough for the comparison. If he hasn't already I suggest he take a look at both blades and dungeon world mechanics.
 
Hmm well in blades you do not get negative modifiers, and can always take a Devils Bargain to get at least 1dice, so the odds almost never get worse than 50-50.
....

I'd place this into "it assumes you will use bonus gear/situations" category. Still sounds pretty dark that to get, for me, your baseline competency of 50% you need to make a Devils Bargain. A Devils Bargain sounds pretty bad as they are ones where you get very little or not what you thought, but at a much higher price than you thought, which has to be paid sooner than you think. Of course in play that may be much less onerous than the name implies.
 
Dang that looks like a harsh system, if I'm correct off the top of my head even a skill 2 person will fail with major consequences 25% of the time. For a skilled person, I read that mechanic as a chance on 2d6 to critically fail = 25%; chance to fully succeed (one 6s) about 31%, and your critical success is only 3%. Even if you are skilled and roll 3 dice, your chance to critically fail is 12.5%, and chance to fully succeed goes to a whopping about 42%. To me, the 3 dice odds are what I'd expect of a basic character, like a veteran infantry, a 2nd level fighter. It looks like you need 4 dice to reach what I'd begin to even call good or more than above average, greater than 50% chance to fully succeed.

I would say that Blades is tougher in the base case, but the mechanics I've given have a potential to yield an even more difficult roll (a -4 roll would have about 1.5% chance of success). I won't deny that BitD was a big influence on these mechanics. Specifically that and Heroquest represent a lot of what I'm trying to get.

Probably the main reason that my base case is "nicer" than Blades is because I wanted the roll to be easily usable for opposed tests. I'm not quite at the point of games like Blades, PbtA and the The Black Hack (a less obvious inspiration) where I am willing to drop opposed rolls. That's a little too story-centric for me...I prefer my mechanics to treat NPCs and PCs the same.

Apropos of nothing: One of the minor weaknesses of this die rolling system is that it can't fully handle opposed checks with more than two parties. You could make every party roll separate to determine a ranking, like if I was doing initiative rolls. But calculating a degree of success is a bit wonky because subtracting one roll from another is going to yield a very different probability distribution than you get from a single roll. That's what made me understand why Heroquest has the GM roll for a PC challenge rather than just apply a static DC.

Your system doesn't leave much room for advancement, though. Maybe you could go with 1xp / session, 1xp to buy a new trait at +1, 2xp to upgrade a +1 trait to +2, etc. Or maybe you don't really need one anyway.

This is definitely true. If there's any advancement in a game like this, it's going to be very slow. I would probably say not only that +3 is the maximum of any trait for a human, but a PC should only be able to have a maximum of 2 or 3 that reach that high. After all, peak skill, in real life, requires constant training. The rest would be capped at +2, and even a new +1 should be a significant achievement.

I'd go so far as to say that +1 in a trait is the equivalent of a level of experience in D&D, and +2 is worth three, and a +3 is worth six. As a rough equivalent to how much time you'd expect to devote to a PC to get there. And I'm not talking about 5e levels. Probably closer to DCC scaling, where a 10th level PC is an effectively unattainable peak.
 
Also what happens when you fail? Can you mitigate consequences in any way?

For example I play a heavily modded game of 7th Sea 1st ed. It has consequences built in through the raise system. Consequences cannot generally be mitigated as a game mechanic as players have lots of ways of getting extra dice to succeed if they really need to... oft times with other consequences attached.
Blades has ways in which many consequences can be resisted, but at a cost in stress.
 
I'd place this into "it assumes you will use bonus gear/situations" category. Still sounds pretty dark that to get, for me, your baseline competency of 50% you need to make a Devils Bargain. A Devils Bargain sounds pretty bad as they are ones where you get very little or not what you thought, but at a much higher price than you thought, which has to be paid sooner than you think. Of course in play that may be much less onerous than the name implies.

I think this is a fairly accurate interpretation of the Blades approach. One thing you have to remember is that it leans into narrative play, so difficulty isn't as much a source of imminent death as it meant to provide "fun" complications. Devil's Bargains are very much in line with this.

Blades has ways in which many consequences can be resisted, but at a cost in stress.

I was going to mention this but I was a bit vague on the exact mechanics. IIRC they are kind of like a combo of hero points and hit points.

I also have a Luck mechanic in my rules; I'm a big fan of how DCC does Luck, and it's kind of similar.
 
.......I prefer my mechanics to treat NPCs and PCs the same.

Me to, for philosophical reasons, but also ease of use; I don't want to remember different rules for PCs vs NPCs.

Apropos of nothing: One of the minor weaknesses of this die rolling system is that it can't fully handle opposed checks with more than two parties. You could make every party roll separate to determine a ranking, like if I was doing initiative rolls. But calculating a degree of success is a bit wonky because subtracting one roll from another is going to yield a very different probability distribution than you get from a single roll. That's what made me understand why Heroquest has the GM roll for a PC challenge rather than just apply a static DC.
If I understand what you are saying, it would be like using one roll to attack two different targets?

This may be something you need to live with OR you could have a worse case Ontario where if I'm opposed to two others I take the best of the skills of the opponents, or you could take and average of the skills of multiple opponents and use that. The later is probably better as the PCs will use the former to great advantage. The we are all in this together feeling from averaging skills is kind of a Tunnels & Trolls thing.
 
I think this is a fairly accurate interpretation of the Blades approach. One thing you have to remember is that it leans into narrative play, so difficulty isn't as much a source of imminent death as it meant to provide "fun" complications. Devil's Bargains are very much in line with this.

I did a quick look at Heroquest the Chaosium RPG so see where you are coming from on the narrative play idea. I do like the degrees of success, always have, but those can be applied across play styles. As to the other narrative concepts (as I call them) I see in Heroquest, where the rules are interpreted and applied as required to achieve the dramatic outcome desired (including the whole Mock Combat thing); they are not for me.

I want the dice to fall where they may, so to speak. I work on the rules and design and how I run the game so that sufficiently satisfying dramatic outcomes will emerge (and hopefully surprising ones) from actions and not my preconception. Yet I'm thinking that is not what is really needed here if Heroquest (as I understand it) is a good model for the gameplay you are doing and going for.

In that regard, if you are following what I understand to be the Heroquest way it almost doesn't matter what the mechanic is as you will either ignore an NPC roll that doesn't fit (e.g. Mock combat), adjust a negative consequence as needed, or provide a plentiful (or easily acquired, e.g. Devils Bargain) PC resource to adjust the odds. Mechanics really only mean something when they are constraining. Resources only mean something when they are limited and/or hard to come by. When consequences can be adjust post hoc and set ad hoc (e.g. it doesn't matter if the number of die you roll is set but if failure and success are really loose and mean whatever dramatic purposes require at that instant) there is no constraint in practice from those mechanics.

Cases in point, Devils Bargain really isn't much of a big deal it seems, so in effect it's just take some extra dice if things look too tough. Likewise if failure can pretty much be addressed with taking Stress, it doesn't sound so bad as Stress sounds like a form of HP and the name implies it is something pretty readily recovered, so again negative consequences not so negative.

In my opinion, better to work on the constraints to how much one can control the dramatic setting and to work on good descriptions of what degrees of success mean in various situations. In fact, I would say just drop the pretense that random things like dice rolls can control the outcome, go for a power point (works good with tokens) kind of approach where you basically bid with these for control of an outcome, and the more you win the greater the degree of success, and vice versa. You could even have flavors of power points. Keep die rolls as a ancillary element, a random one that might be usable to get some extra power.


I also have a Luck mechanic in my rules; I'm a big fan of how DCC does Luck, and it's kind of similar.
As I understand this Luck mechanic, I like it to. For me Luck gets you a re-roll after the fact, if you want something automatic cost much more, but for me Luck is a finite, gets spent, does not replenish and very a hard to come by resource, you only get so much to start and it runs out; I never hand it out as an xp type thing. I like giving it out up front as a kind of inherent genetic / species thing (this is one area where I diverge and most NPCs don't get luck but some "monsters" do as part of their nature, e.g. fairies) and it's at low levels you need it most. The Fallout version of Luck I also found kind of neat but not easy to use in a pen-n-paper game.
 
This is definitely true. If there's any advancement in a game like this, it's going to be very slow. I would probably say not only that +3 is the maximum of any trait for a human, but a PC should only be able to have a maximum of 2 or 3 that reach that high. After all, peak skill, in real life, requires constant training. The rest would be capped at +2, and even a new +1 should be a significant achievement.

I'd go so far as to say that +1 in a trait is the equivalent of a level of experience in D&D, and +2 is worth three, and a +3 is worth six. As a rough equivalent to how much time you'd expect to devote to a PC to get there. And I'm not talking about 5e levels. Probably closer to DCC scaling, where a 10th level PC is an effectively unattainable peak.
That's the thing I've been consistently trying to get at, by asking how many sessions you expect players to play the same character: rapid advancement is fine if you don't expect a player to play the character for a very long time, it's possibly even desirable so they can see that mechanical arc, and as a designer it's fine to say "this game is designed for short campaigns of up to four sessions or so, at that point characters are starting to get too strong". Most super-light systems tend, by design, to not leave much room for advancement, and that's perfectly acceptable for some games.
 
As to the other narrative concepts (as I call them) I see in Heroquest, where the rules are interpreted and applied as required to achieve the dramatic outcome desired (including the whole Mock Combat thing); they are not for me.

Ditto. I'm also not a big fan of the way it abstracts everything into a very generic contest. Interpreting that into outcomes feels a little too loosey-goosey for life-and-death situations. Players are going to get annoyed if the GM makes a soft ruling to kill a PC, so one would expect rulings to generally bend in their direction in order to keep things fun.

And don't get me started on the whole pass/fail mechanic. Fortunately, as has been pointed out in this forum a number of times, use of HQ's silly narrative difficulty management is purely optional. Even if the text doesn't make that entirely clear, you can easily see how to live without it.

When consequences can be adjust post hoc and set ad hoc (e.g. it doesn't matter if the number of die you roll is set but if failure and success are really loose and mean whatever dramatic purposes require at that instant) there is no constraint in practice from those mechanics.

That reminds me of Blades in the Dark; one of the innovations of the game is that, in the midst of a heist, you can spend stress to retcon preparation on the fly. In other words, you spend stress and declare that your PC prepared for guard dogs by bringing along sausages wrapped in wax paper. You really wouldn't like that, I think, but it serves a good purpose for the type of game that Blades is trying to be. But yeah, not my cup of tea, either.

If I understand what you are saying, it would be like using one roll to attack two different targets?

Precisely. Like I said, I want players to be able to describe combat activities instead of just individual "actions." Since those activities might consists of multiple attacks, maneuvers, tricks, etc. I would prefer to distill it to a single roll for the entire round, penalized based on how reasonable the activity is. Each opponent with an opportunity to resist could roll against that, and the outcome should depend on the margin of success.

That would be the ideal. There are two ways to get there from here: make all rolls opposed (including against passive challenges), and base level of success on the roll margin, or do that only when needed, and accept that probability distributions will be different. Using multiple opponents' skill doesn't quite work because an average character has a trait level of zero - so opposing multiple average character would be no harder or easier than opposing one.

This isn't quite a deal breaker, but it is a bit irritating.
 
You could always derive a passive TN from an opponent's skill level if you don't like opposed rolls. Maybe each skill level changes the success chance in some way. Such as pass only on a higher number or needing more dice with successes. Or opponent skill subtracts from your roll dice.
 
You could always derive a passive TN from an opponent's skill level if you don't like opposed rolls. Maybe each skill level changes the success chance in some way. Such as pass only on a higher number or needing more dice with successes. Or opponent skill subtracts from your roll dice.

I've been thinking that since the last comment I made, and I think it could work. The only issue is how to resolve ties, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
 
...
That reminds me of Blades in the Dark; one of the innovations of the game is that, in the midst of a heist, you can spend stress to retcon preparation on the fly. In other words, you spend stress and declare that your PC prepared for guard dogs by bringing along sausages wrapped in wax paper. You really wouldn't like that, I think, but it serves a good purpose for the type of game that Blades is trying to be. But yeah, not my cup of tea, either.
.

Depending on how it is done I might be able to accept that as knowledge a character has but a player does not. The more complex the technology and situation (especially if we are talking future tech or made-up or alien societies) the more likely I am to consider such a mechanic to give the feel (or verisimilitude, my favorite word :smile: ) of the situation. This is because I don't expect players to be experts on my setting or the details of high end heists. Also the more common and likely the retcon the more I'm willing to accept it. The more limited the ability the more willing I am to accept it. For example, this is the kind of thing that would be possible under my home brew Luck approach.

Of course, another way to approach it are players who want to see how good of a heist planner they are. A last one, if guard dogs was something a player could have discovered with reasonable scouting then maybe not allow it. What I wouldn't care for is using a mechanic that says the dogs are not there.

The example may not bug me too much also because I doubt I'd hang the whole adventure on the dogs and I'm pretty sure a decent guard dog is not so easily swayed.
 
Depending on how it is done I might be able to accept that as knowledge a character has but a player does not.

I admit that it's a good way of achieving the genre simulation that Blades is often shooting for i.e. Dishonored meets Oceans 11. One objective of the game (and the rules are quite explicit about this) is that the table should just be able to jump into a heist with almost no preparation by the GM or planning by the players.

Challenges use abstracted mechanics for security states (Blades extensively makes use of something it calls "clocks") which the GM interprets into the narrative. Players are able to spend stress and explain how their characters expertly planned for these eventualities.

Will have to look into that one out of curiosity, not sure what it is.

Heroquest has a bunch of mechanics for determining the challenge level for tests that PCs encounter that has nothing to do with the natural difficulty of the task and everything to do with the narrative state. Like if you've passed a bunch of challenges, you're due for a hard one. And the consequences of tied challenges are more severe is the back half of any story. The best thing about these mechanics is that you can drop them without hurting the system.
 
Interesting, as Ladybird Ladybird says it kinda reminds me of Cthulhu Dark a very simple but interesting game I think. The original game is available for free or PWYW.
 
I admit that it's a good way of achieving the genre simulation that Blades is often shooting for i.e. Dishonored meets Oceans 11. One objective of the game (and the rules are quite explicit about this) is that the table should just be able to jump into a heist with almost no preparation by the GM or planning by the players.
Yep. I’m sure we’ve all had the Shadowrun session where we spent far more time planning the job than actually executing it... and that’s fun, but not necessarily every time.
 
Based on some of the ideas here, I had come up with a different approach that I think might work better. I would have sworn I posted in but I'm not seeing it here. Ah well, I'll give it another swing.

So the new system has the same idea where you roll a resolution die and a quality die. The actor's trait rating still acts as a die mod to resolution dice as before. In addition, a character can subtract one resolution die to add two quality dice, or visa versa. As for the quality die, a result of 6 is called a pro, and 1 is called con. A pro turns a success into a critical success, and a failure into a marginal failure, while a con can likewise turn failure critical and success marginal.

Now we don't care about precisely what is rolled on the resolution die except for success and failure. Opposed rolls can be made without any math; they are just compared to see who won, and the quality dice results are used to determine degree of victory.

In general, this approach deemphasizes different degrees of success and failure, which frees the GM from having to creatively tweak the results of so many rolls. It also makes it a lot easier to interpret our erstwhile critical die.
 
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