Roll & Keep Systems: Any Good?

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
virgil
King
Posts: 6339
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Roll & Keep Systems: Any Good?

Post by virgil »

Are there any good implementations of games that use Roll & Keep dice mechanics? I can't find much discussion of it on the Den for variations that work.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
EXPLOSIVE RUNES!
Username17
Serious Badass
Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Re: Roll & Keep Systems: Any Good?

Post by Username17 »

virgil wrote:Are there any good implementations of games that use Roll & Keep dice mechanics?
Not really, no. Some Roll and Keep systems are definitely worse, but it's basically a bad mechanic. None of the designers understand the probabilities well enough to design rules that have anything remotely similar to reasonable outputs.

Cthulhutech's "Poker Dice" and One Roll Engine's whatever the fuck that shit is supposed to be are the worst offenders, but L5R and Seventh Sea are also bad.

-Username17
Lago PARANOIA
Invincible Overlord
Posts: 10555
Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Are the problems of roll and keep a problem game-designer side, as in there hasn't been someone with sufficient statistical or game design skillz to make it work? Or is it an interface problem, where it's just too unwieldy for players to use or the probabilities don't model any stories people want to tell better than linear/curved/dice pool rolling?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
User avatar
erik
King
Posts: 5861
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by erik »

Username17
Serious Badass
Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Username17 »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Are the problems of roll and keep a problem game-designer side, as in there hasn't been someone with sufficient statistical or game design skillz to make it work? Or is it an interface problem, where it's just too unwieldy for players to use or the probabilities don't model any stories people want to tell better than linear/curved/dice pool rolling?
I actually don't know what the roll and keep probabilities are supposed to represent in-world. Every extra die you keep increases maximum and minimum and average and variance. Every extra die you roll increases average, decreases variance, and has no effect on minimum or maximum. That's... really fucking weird actually.

And the hits just keep on coming. Keeping an extra die decreases the chance that you'll roll maximum and leaves the chance that you'll roll minimum unchanged. Rolling an extra die increases the chance you'll roll maximum and decreases the chance you'll roll minimum. What?

But probably the biggest piece of ugliness is that in order for the roll and keep to really see much of a difference when you roll more dice, you need to be throwing around dice pools of d10s at the minimum (otherwise you end up with the horseshit that is Silhouette). And once you do that, the difference in jumping to one more kept die is actually really fucking big. Which severely undermines all the statistical fuckery you wanted to do with modestly changing variance and shit by screwing with the size of the rolled dice.

Frankly, I don't think Roll and Keep can actually work with whole numbers of dice. If you really wanted this shit to fly, we'd have to be keeping 2.7 dice or something, and that can't happen in tabletop at all. Only a computer could handle a random number generator like that, at which point the user might not even know it was happening.

-Username17
spongeknight
Master
Posts: 274
Joined: Sun Jun 02, 2013 11:48 am

Post by spongeknight »

erik wrote:Because it bears mention:

My favorite roll and keep game that I've never played.
I've played that, and it's just as insane as the introduction promises. Which is, you know, completely terrible for a long running tabletop game. You can create characters straight out of chargen that are on completely different power levels just by accident, and unless you plan your advancement out very carefully before even starting you can fuck yourself into irrelevance pretty quickly. It's good for a very crack-filled one shot but that's about it.
A Man In Black wrote:I do not want people to feel like they can never get rid of their Guisarme or else they can't cast Evard's Swarm Of Black Tentacleguisarmes.
Voss wrote:Which is pretty classic WW bullshit, really. Suck people in and then announce that everyone was a dogfucker all along.
User avatar
NineInchNall
Duke
Posts: 1222
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by NineInchNall »

FrankTrollman wrote: I actually don't know what the roll and keep probabilities are supposed to represent in-world. Every extra die you keep increases maximum and minimum and average and variance. Every extra die you roll increases average, decreases variance, and has no effect on minimum or maximum. That's... really fucking weird actually.

And the hits just keep on coming. Keeping an extra die decreases the chance that you'll roll maximum and leaves the chance that you'll roll minimum unchanged. Rolling an extra die increases the chance you'll roll maximum and decreases the chance you'll roll minimum. What?
Don't forget that L5R adds to the insanity by making dice explode.
Current pet peeves:
Misuse of "per se". It means "[in] itself", not "precisely". Learn English.
Malformed singular possessives. It's almost always supposed to be 's.
Laertes
Duke
Posts: 1021
Joined: Thu Apr 24, 2014 4:09 pm
Location: The Mother of Cities

Post by Laertes »

I really like roll and keep games. By which I mean, I am a huge fan of John Wick's settings and thus have learned to accept the system.
Laertes
Duke
Posts: 1021
Joined: Thu Apr 24, 2014 4:09 pm
Location: The Mother of Cities

Post by Laertes »

erik wrote:Because it bears mention:

My favorite roll and keep game that I've never played.
Also:

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING THAT ANY HUMAN HAS EVER DONE
EVER
...You Lost Me
Duke
Posts: 1854
Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2011 5:21 am

Post by ...You Lost Me »

No, it's terrible. It's really really terrible.
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.
User avatar
Hicks
Duke
Posts: 1318
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2008 3:36 pm
Location: On the road

Post by Hicks »

Personally, I'm in the "Terribly Awesome" camp.

YES, the mechanics are bad and should feel bad.

This is the system let's me play a starting character with no personal combat skill, who lacks basic weapon training, and instead directs his personal orbiting battlecruiser to to vaporize problems from orbit. It's like Vampire, shit system with cool premises, except take all the bullshit that holds you back in other in-awesome RPGs, cover it with skulls and eagles, and send it screaming through space. It is so FUCK YEAH AWESOME that I would totally sit down and play, dispute every mechanical misgiving I have in its system.
Last edited by Hicks on Thu Jun 05, 2014 10:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Image
"Besides, my strong, cult like faith in the colon of the cards allows me to pull whatever I need out of my posterior!"
-Kid Radd
shadzar wrote:those training harder get more, and training less, don't get the more.
Lokathor wrote:Anything worth sniffing can't be sniffed
Stuff I've Made
rampaging-poet
Knight
Posts: 473
Joined: Sat Oct 23, 2010 5:18 am

Post by rampaging-poet »

The Game of Thrones RPG uses Roll and Keep. Each "attribute" (which is more like a D&D skill) sets the number of dice you keep. You roll a number of dice equal to your attribute plus any bonuses from specialization or circumstances. It is therefore fundamentally impossible to increase the number of dice you keep without also increasing the number of dice you roll, reducing some of the potential for weirdness.

Specializations have some degree of diminishing returns, but the initial return on specialization is higher the more points you already have in the attribute. The rulebook suggests using specializations to shore up low attributes, but that's actually a pretty bad idea. The only way I can see that working would be choosing not to max one attribute to give yourself spare XP for other attributes, but you'd still want to put your specializations in attributes you specialize in. Other than that I know nothing about the system.

The main advantage of that RNG is that bonuses have diminishing returns and fundamentally can't push you off the RNG. Its other feature (which could be good or bad depending on what you're modeling) is that keeping more dice greatly increases the number you're likely to roll. In opposed rolls, it makes it highly likely that the person with the higher number of dice kept will win while providing an outside chance of an upset. Bonuses do little to increase your average roll, but they make low rolls much less likely. This greatly reduces the chance of losing to a less-skilled opponent or flubbing an easy task.

The main problem is that the chances of hitting any given number don't scale in a reasonable way. Rolling more dice makes tasks at the bottom of the RNG easier without having much effect on the top of the RNG. Keeping more dice greatly increases your odds of rolling anything you could roll before in addition to improving your capabilities. However, tasks that are impossible with N dice are still difficult with N+1 dice, and the odds of succeeding at them fall off quickly as N increases. For example, there's about a 26% chance of rolling 13 or better on 3d6, but only a 10% chance of rolling 19 or better on 4d6.

Overall, it might work in systems that feature a large number of opposed rolls and accept that the line between impossible and improbable is well-defined at the low end and very fuzzy at the top end. That fuzzyness could actually be useful if resources could be spent to add a pile of bonus dice or "take max" - you'll still never succeed at something you're incapable of succeeding at, but you can push yourself to the limit and overcome million-to-one odds exactly when you need to.
DSMatticus wrote:I sort my leisure activities into a neat and manageable categorized hierarchy, then ignore it and dick around on the internet.
My deviantArt account, in case anyone cares.
Username17
Serious Badass
Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Username17 »

rampaging poet wrote:It is therefore fundamentally impossible to increase the number of dice you keep without also increasing the number of dice you roll, reducing some of the potential for weirdness.
No. Systems where extra kept dice come with extra rolled dice are not less weird. You still have the fundamental issue where adding a kept die increases variance and adding a rolled die decreases variance. When you necessarily do both together,variance will either rise or fall depending on how many dice you are already rolling and keeping (although in most cases, it will rise). It's a fucking nightmare.

-Username17
Koumei
Serious Badass
Posts: 13871
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Location: South Ausfailia

Post by Koumei »

I prefer roll+keep to "Dice Pools as seen in Shadowrun and White Wolf Games", particularly on rolls where the actual number matters, not just Pass/Fail. Because each extra die does something for the XP you invested, even just a 1, as opposed to having a 2/3 (or more or less based on what WW wanted to do in that particular game you're playing) chance of being "thanks for blowing XP on it, now fuck you".
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
rampaging-poet
Knight
Posts: 473
Joined: Sat Oct 23, 2010 5:18 am

Post by rampaging-poet »

I was mostly talking about this bit:
FrankTrollman wrote:Keeping an extra die decreases the chance that you'll roll maximum and leaves the chance that you'll roll minimum unchanged.
The variance is still hellish, but if you always add rolled dice every time you add kept dice then your odds of rolling minimum always decrease. It's still weird, but it's less weird.

The ratio of rolled dice to kept dice determines how negative the skew of the overall distribution is. Adding one rolled die every time a kept die is added will cause the skew to approach zero. However, it still increases the mean, minimum, and maximum rolls. Like any bell curve, the odds of rolling the most extreme results decrease as dice are added. Rolling a few dice more than you keep makes those black swan low rolls even rarer. I stand by my assertion that roll and keep systems are suitable when there are a large number of opposed rolls and higher-skill characters should win most but not all contests (at a reasonably low number of dice kept). Roll and keep creates stark contrast between high- and low-skill characters while contests between high-skilled characters approach coinflips as N approaches infinity.

Upon reflection, I do see another mistake I made. I claimed that there are diminishing returns on adding more dice rolled, and while that's certainly true at any given number of dice kept each individual bonus die counts for less when a large number of dice are rolled. As the number of dice kept increases the same bonus causes a less pronounced skew, so your specializations eventually become irrelevant. There are two possible solutions to this: accept that your piddly +2 sword specialization will eventually be obsolete, ensure bonus dice rolled scale faster than bonus dice kept, or cap the number of dice kept at a low enough number that expected bonus dice remain relevant.

The other thing I think should be kept in mind is whether roll and keep falls apart before reaching unwieldy numbers of dice anyway. The slow resolution speed is another mark against roll and keep in general, but if the worst probability failures occur when the number of dice is already high enough to rule out roll and keep then probability failure is pretty much irrelevant.

Roll and keep systems imply limited scaling and a big GTFO sign for low-skill characters. They let you feel big and important stomping mooks without being literally untouchable, but create more even contests between characters of similar high skill. They let you hand out bonus rolled dice like candy without increasing the magnitude of effect a characters are capable of. I don't think they would be appropriate for tactical combat simulators because of the slow resolution speed relative to dX and dicepool systems, but I think the concept could be made to work.
DSMatticus wrote:I sort my leisure activities into a neat and manageable categorized hierarchy, then ignore it and dick around on the internet.
My deviantArt account, in case anyone cares.
Username17
Serious Badass
Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Username17 »

Koumei wrote:I prefer roll+keep to "Dice Pools as seen in Shadowrun and White Wolf Games", particularly on rolls where the actual number matters, not just Pass/Fail. Because each extra die does something for the XP you invested, even just a 1, as opposed to having a 2/3 (or more or less based on what WW wanted to do in that particular game you're playing) chance of being "thanks for blowing XP on it, now fuck you".
Over the years, you've said a lot of stupid shit. Hell, we all have. But this, this right here, is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen you say.

Now, at its core your complaint is that in a game system that requires you to roll dice, that it is entirely possible to roll those dice and still fail the roll. This is a very stupid complaint. After all, if it was not possible to fail the roll, why would you roll at all? That is ultimately an entire line of reasoning that doesn't make sense. But it gets worse. Because the things you are complaining about are not as bad along the axis you claim is bad as the things you are comparing them to.

Now, in a very real way, your argument is that in D&D if you invest character resources in bonuses to hit and you roll a d20 and roll a 1, you miss. And that makes you feel bad. Or something. And to that I can only say: So fucking what? You spent resources on increasing the chance of something happening, and dice were rolled, and it still didn't happen. And that's tough shit! But your argument is actually worse than that. Because the things you are complaining about are not as bad along the axis you claim is bad as the things you are comparing them to.

So let's talk about Shadowrun dice pools. When you add a die rolled, it increases the average result and the maximum result, but doesn't change the minimum result. Apparently you get butthurt over the fact that minimum results are still possible even when you spend character resources to make them less likely? bqhatevwr. You realize that when you add a die to a roll and keep roll, you increase the average but don't increase the minimum or the maximum, right? You fucking realize that, right? That the thing you're complaining about is fucking retarded, but even at face value you're still fucking wrong! Walrus fuck!

And on top of that, Shadowrun has the whole taking 4 mechanic, where you do actually get linear benefit from your pool size. Arrgle bargle.

-Username17
Koumei
Serious Badass
Posts: 13871
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Location: South Ausfailia

Post by Koumei »

No, fuckknuckle, if you roll low enough to miss in D&D, that's kind of annoying in the same way that hitting is kind of good. Now the degree of success (or failure) doesn't matter there, so indeed, if you roll low enough that you miss by 1 then that's exactly the same as if you hadn't taken Weapon Focus and you missed by 2. So let's look at Skill checks, where the investiture could mean:
"I failed to disarm the trap, but it didn't blow up in my face."
"I activated the staff at CL 20 instead of CL 19, so it lasts an hour longer"
"I gain an extra CP from the check, I'M PUTTING THAT IN THE MOTHERFUCKING BANK"
Ultimately the same thing applies to damage rolls - even if your damage bonus doesn't turn a non-lethal hit into a lethal one, it moves you closer to the point where they die. In fact, damage is perfect: fireball is a dicepool "roll and keep" system, where your CL bonus from an ioun stone gives +1k1 dice, and in the worst-case scenario it adds 1 to the result.

Now let's look at that kind of thing in Exalted:
"I failed to disarm the trap, wait, I have that extra die! ...nope, it still blows up in my face."
"I got 3 successes which succeeds but doesn't succeed enough, wait, that extra die! No, I don't succeed enough to really call it succeeding."
"I got some amount of cash because using Exalted is a bad example when talking about amounts of money. And being more skilled... nope, being more skilled didn't improve my outcome."
And the damage thing shows up even more when "dead" and "alive" are all of seven points away.

That doesn't apply to attack rolls and saves. But it does to damage and "a bunch of skills". And yeah, the static numbers, things where you can take the average and so on, basically anything that involves not actually rolling the dice get around that problem. If your proposed solution is not rolling dice in dicepool games and just taking the average for everything, then I'm all for it, but I'd be hesitant to call it a dicepool game at that point.

I get it, you think every game could be better by being Shadowrun. I feel that way about video games and Disgaea. But I don't need to go telling other people they're stupid for not playing games with prinnies in them, so perhaps you could accept that dice pools can be utter balls (especially when mixed with either "buy one crappy advance at a time" or "you have six hit points total, that extra +1 to the result really fucking matters", both of which apply to... games that use Dice Pools!)
Last edited by Koumei on Fri Jun 06, 2014 10:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
Username17
Serious Badass
Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Username17 »

Koumei wrote: fireball is a dicepool "roll and keep" system
No it fucking isn't. Fireball is a roll and add all the dice together system. A roll and keep system involves some non-zero number of dice being rolled and then not being kept. On literally every single die roll there are some non-zero number of dice that don't count towards your total. Every single fucking roll. Exactly the thing you say is bad, but it's hard coded to happen on every fucking roll.

Fuck.
Koumei wrote:"I got 3 successes which succeeds but doesn't succeed enough, wait, that extra die! No, I don't succeed enough to really call it succeeding."
"I rolled a 13 on my saving throw, but that doesn't succeed enough, wait, that extra +2 bonus! No, I don't succeed enough to really call it succeeding."

Seriously... what the shitfuck are you on about? It's entirely plausible in almost any imaginable game to roll a result which is generally high but not high enough to achieve the result that you want.

Are you specifically complaining about the fact that White Wolf authors are fucking retards and call incremental increases in output results "success" and then also call overall task completion "success?" Because while I agree that's extremely aggravating, 4th edition D&D also does that and Shadowrun doesn't. Shadowrun calls an incremental increase in output result a "Hit" and overall task completion "Success" and keeps the terminology separate.

I can't even parse your complaints. The things you say are bad are things that the games you say are good do more of than the games you say are bad because they do those things do them. Are you drunk?

-Username17
Last edited by Username17 on Fri Jun 06, 2014 10:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
Koumei
Serious Badass
Posts: 13871
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Location: South Ausfailia

Post by Koumei »

FrankTrollman wrote:No it fucking isn't. Fireball is a roll and add all the dice together system.
Ah, good point. I forgot that they usually make you drop a bunch of the dice rather than just keeping all of them and adding them together. Any time I decided to do a roll-and-keep thing when making a game, I made every single die add to the total, because that was an unfortunate part of L5R.
Koumei wrote:"I rolled a 13 on my saving throw, but that doesn't succeed enough, wait, that extra +2 bonus! No, I don't succeed enough to really call it succeeding."
Did you get the bit where I specifically said attack rolls and saves are binary Pass/Fail? And yeah, that's why I'm a big fan of everything that basically doesn't do that - things where the number rolled on the save determines how bad the effect is, the Gatling Gun attack roll you did for the Mechanus Knight, the "I can take 10 on attack rolls", and so on and so forth. I am well aware that the described problem exists in a game I generally do like, and that I don't like that bit and prefer other bits.

Though at least when you get that +1 on attack rolls (that may or may not help), you're also adding +1 to a bunch of other tiny things and also getting, for instance, the ability to cast Acid Fog or something. You really can forgive "a bunch of little inconsequential things" when they're packaged with Acid Fog. Actually I'd like to see what a dice-pool level-based game would look like.
Are you specifically complaining about the fact that White Wolf authors are fucking retards and call incremental increases in output results "success" and then also call overall task completion "success?" Because while I agree that's extremely aggravating, 4th edition D&D also does that and Shadowrun doesn't.
That thing is generally annoying as done by WW and D&D4, but their failure with words isn't actually related to the problem, so when I took a dig at that, I guess that confused the issue a bit. I assume in 4E you only need to roll a single hit in order to hit someone, thus not giving the exact same problem?
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
User avatar
Drolyt
Knight
Posts: 454
Joined: Sun May 19, 2013 3:25 am

Post by Drolyt »

Koumei wrote:I prefer roll+keep to "Dice Pools as seen in Shadowrun and White Wolf Games", particularly on rolls where the actual number matters, not just Pass/Fail. Because each extra die does something for the XP you invested, even just a 1, as opposed to having a 2/3 (or more or less based on what WW wanted to do in that particular game you're playing) chance of being "thanks for blowing XP on it, now fuck you".
Ignoring the fact that roll+keep doesn't work the way you seem to think it does, dice pool games have a concept of automatic hits. In particular some games allow you to trade dice for automatic hits, perhaps only if you have a huge pile of dice. This would seem to address your concern that you could have a huge dice pool and still roll all misses.
Lago PARANOIA
Invincible Overlord
Posts: 10555
Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Assuming that you wanted to do Roll and Keep for whatever reason, is there a proposed alternate PMF that approximates the probability curves of R&K but doesn't have the proposed interface insanity? Sort of like how you can simulate bell curve rolling with dicepools if you have enough automatic hits.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
User avatar
tussock
Prince
Posts: 2937
Joined: Sat Nov 07, 2009 4:28 am
Location: Online
Contact:

Post by tussock »

FrankTrollman wrote:I actually don't know what the roll and keep probabilities are supposed to represent in-world. Every extra die you keep increases maximum and minimum and average and variance. Every extra die you roll increases average, decreases variance, and has no effect on minimum or maximum. That's... really fucking weird actually.
That's easy. An extra keep is a bigger gun. An extra die is more skill with those guns. That means skill isn't magic and can't make your pistol kill tanks, but that's the genre a roll-and-keep system should suit. They could even have a rule for what happens when your gun is bigger than your skill, automatic minimum or something.

Or for GURPS-like melee, keeps is Big and Strong, while rolls is Dex/Skill. For D&D style you'd want levels to give you keeps on everything, and classes give you more rolls in your niche.
And the hits just keep on coming. Keeping an extra die decreases the chance that you'll roll maximum and leaves the chance that you'll roll minimum unchanged. Rolling an extra die increases the chance you'll roll maximum and decreases the chance you'll roll minimum. What?
It takes ever more skill to stabilise the results from bigger guns. Which is to say, giants are a bit clumsy and sometimes don't squash you, but also sometimes squash cars. Or "high level" people need lots of dice to compensate for their level-associated awesome being all wild and crazy-powerful (any high level person might cast a 9th level spell, but a Wizard would expect to survive the process).

But like you say, roll-and-keep systems have tiny margins for character differentiation. The distribution of results for them mean you may as well roll 1d6 to resolve everything. Which isn't a terrible idea in itself, they're just making it a lot of work to obfuscate that. Which kinda answers Lago's question there.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
Username17
Serious Badass
Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Username17 »

Tussock wrote:That's easy. An extra keep is a bigger gun. An extra die is more skill with those guns.
And that's why you're less likely to miss your target with a bigger gun?

If we were talking damage rolls, then I could maybe understand that. But I genuinely have no idea how this is supposed to represent actions analogous to to-hit rolls.

-Username17
Laertes
Duke
Posts: 1021
Joined: Thu Apr 24, 2014 4:09 pm
Location: The Mother of Cities

Post by Laertes »

I've been thinking about this and it occurs to me that roll & keep has one very, very big implication that I think a lot of people overlook, even if it doesn't come up in a lot of games: It lets you pull your blows in a mechanically intuitive manner.

Naturally, this isn't a big deal in most games because most games are about simultaneously having a power fantasy and fighting against the odds, and this creates a situation where there's very little incentive to either spare one's opponent or deceive them as to one's true capabilities.

However, having realised this I now want to do something like that, in which the most important thing is to win by as narrow a margin as possible and therefore leave yourself looking like less of a threat. That could be a lot of fun.

Watch this space.
User avatar
tussock
Prince
Posts: 2937
Joined: Sat Nov 07, 2009 4:28 am
Location: Online
Contact:

Post by tussock »

And that's why you're less likely to miss your target with a bigger gun?
I'm imagining having "bigger guns" and "more dakka" on the same resolution axis, but most games do. It's an extremely course grain with R&K, so I think that could work conceptually too: pistol, sport rifle, shotgun/SMG, assault rifle, machine gun, rocket launcher/grenades, bombs, etc. Each bigger gun can be written to "miss less". Nukes are another few steps up.

Some sort of single-shot .50 cal type thing is a conceptual problem for that, you've got to give them extra dice after a success or something, like a stun grenade needs reduced dice on a success. Depends how much you want to write a gear book for it.


Or really, how many more axis and modfiers you want to throw in there on the way to resolving each event. Discards, an encounter pool, various flat modifiers, two or three axis of resolution, all sorts. More keeps = more/bigger stuff. More dice = same stuff, but better.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
Post Reply