Brain Hurts! 4d6 with individual rerolls

[erik]

On our different experiences I am certain my bias is in the other direction as one of my friends is an actuary and another few were comp sci majors and engineers. I was mocked in my high school clique for only getting 740 on the math portion of the SAT.

But even outside that group I played with a hundred plus strangers in Living Greyhawk and there were plenty of math literates among them. There's a lot of people who can't be fucked to count to 100 by 5's but I'm not even certain they are the majority.

[momothefiddler]

On our different experiences I am certain my bias is in the other direction as one of my friends is an actuary and another few were comp sci majors and engineers. I was mocked in my high school clique for only getting 740 on the math portion of the SAT.

But even outside that group I played with a hundred plus strangers in Living Greyhawk and there were plenty of math literates among them. There's a lot of people who can't be fucked to count to 100 by 5's but I'm not even certain they are the majority.

That's really strange to me, to be honest, because it sounds like I'd fit just fine in your friends but mine are really pretty consistently ambivalent about math at best.
Anyway, I withdraw any complaints based on my assumption of my IRL groups as representative.

[hyzmarca]

That's more complicated but I don't know if it is worse than ORE. You don't have a method for rewarding system mastery in there by offering a spectrum of superior and inferior dice selections while including sidebar text chastising system mastery by saying that you know your system is a broken mess and it is the fault of players if they find it is broken.

A computer could resolve your system without problems but ORE would remain a pile of shit no matter the processor.

Okay then. How about this. Variable TN D6 dice pool with exploding 5s. You can roll a number of dice up to your skill, but the number of dice that you roll are always added to your TN. So if you had a skill of 12 and a base TN of 3 and rolled all 12 dice, your final TN would be 15.

Now, this actually makes it more difficult for highly skilled people to succeed at anything, I know. But under most circumstances you should always roll your maximum dice pool anyway, and you're a rollplaying jackhole if you don't.


Also, the GM should not tell you the base TN until the roll succeeds of fails. Because knowing your TN is rollplaying, not roleplaying.

[Jason]

Jason, do you intend the individual dice rerolls to be taken sequentially or all at once?

That's actually a pretty good question. My first idea was to allow "X number of individual rolls total", which would include rerolling a single die up to 4 times. Your question made me reconsider that, however. I might try a siongle reroll of up to X dice, instead, for the sake of limiting total number of die rolls to speed the reslution up a notch.

I'm still baffled by what the virtue of this system is supposed to be.

Higher predictability of outcome. Since about 70% of the rolls will be within the range of 11 through 17, the static modifiers will play a greater roll. I dislike the utter randomness of a linear distribution, thus d20+X gets the boot. I may fall flat with it and if it doesn't work out, I'll dump it. It's easy enough to transfer my system onto a linear distribution, it's just not what I had in mind. In the end, I'll go ith playability over personal feelings, though.

Limiting maximum skill by maximum attribute is an ok solution but it sounds like Jason wants to over-complicate it.

You may be right on that, even if that is not my intention. My current system looks basically like this:

Roll 4d6, add them up, add your respective attribute modifier (-1 through +4) and see if you can beat the DC.

So far so good,but it left out skills and adding skills as a flat modifier is undesireable for two reasons:

1. Unflavorful outcomes (see the parkinson sniper vs. elven street thug)
2. easily breaking the resolution band.

So I was looking for a way to incorporate the skills in a meaningful way, without further stressing the resolution bandwidth. Hence, rerolls.

[deaddmwalking]

I don't know what your skill 'levels' look like, but you might consider other ways of reflecting high skill. A couple of alternate ways:

1) Skilled characters get to treat one (or more) di(c)e as a natural 6
2) Skilled characters get to treat a '1' as a '6'

Both limit the number of rerolls and help ensure higher skill characters tend toward higher results without putting them off the RNG completely.

[vezidoroga]

I was curious about how the single re-roll distribution would look, so I calculated it out. If I didn't mess up, these are the probabilities for a player following optimal re-rolling strategy:

	Skill 0	Skill 1	Skill 2	Skill 3	Skill 4
DC 10	90.28	95.14	97.21	98.42	99.16
DC 12	76.08	85.01	89.60	92.75	95.14
DC 14	55.63	67.07	73.92	79.10	83.51
DC 15	44.37	55.80	63.12	68.86	73.92
DC 16	33.56	44.10	51.26	57.07	62.24
DC 18	15.90	22.81	28.06	32.53	36.52
DC 20	05.40	08.46	11.01	13.30	15.48
DC 22	01.16	01.97	02.70	03.40	04.07

This seems to crowd the upper end of skill closer together. Additionally, you can see that skill points aren't buying you quite as much as a point up or down on the DC scale, making extra attribute points more valuable than skills, except for easy tasks. Skill 1 is worth more than a +1 until DC 16, Skill 2 only until ~DC 9, etc.

In terms of table resolution, I suspect the fourth skill point will also feel useless - you won't notice it unless you want to reroll all the dice.

[Jason]

I don't know what your skill 'levels' look like, but you might consider other ways of reflecting high skill. A couple of alternate ways:

1) Skilled characters get to treat one (or more) di(c)e as a natural 6
2) Skilled characters get to treat a '1' as a '6'

Both limit the number of rerolls and help ensure higher skill characters tend toward higher results without putting them off the RNG completely.

At the moment, my skills have 4 Levels (Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, Grandmaster).

I'll have a first test run in three weeks and I will keep your alternatives in mind, thanks.

I was curious about how the single re-roll distribution would look, so I calculated it out. If I didn't mess up, these are the probabilities for a player following optimal re-rolling strategy:

	Skill 0	Skill 1	Skill 2	Skill 3	Skill 4
DC 10	90.28	95.14	97.21	98.42	99.16
DC 12	76.08	85.01	89.60	92.75	95.14
DC 14	55.63	67.07	73.92	79.10	83.51
DC 15	44.37	55.80	63.12	68.86	73.92
DC 16	33.56	44.10	51.26	57.07	62.24
DC 18	15.90	22.81	28.06	32.53	36.52
DC 20	05.40	08.46	11.01	13.30	15.48
DC 22	01.16	01.97	02.70	03.40	04.07

This seems to crowd the upper end of skill closer together. Additionally, you can see that skill points aren't buying you quite as much as a point up or down on the DC scale, making extra attribute points more valuable than skills, except for easy tasks. Skill 1 is worth more than a +1 until DC 16, Skill 2 only until ~DC 9, etc.

In terms of table resolution, I suspect the fourth skill point will also feel useless - you won't notice it unless you want to reroll all the dice.

That looks really interesting and thaks a lot for the table as well. I may switch around attributes and skills based on that table (roll with skill as a static modifier and attribute for rerolls). I'll test both variants out.

[Jason]

Thanks for all the help!

Over the course of the weekend I was able to test the system and I am very satisfied with the results. I switched Skill to be the linear modifier and Attributes to be the number of dice rerolled and set for a single reroll. The players reported that while the linear modifier is objectively more powerfull, the rerolls felt more gratifying and empowering, Based on the feedback from the weekend, I will try out 4d10 instead of 4d6 as the dice roll mechanic, to allow for increased skill ranges (1 though 6 instead of 1 through 4), leading to more differentiation potential between characters.

Again, thanks a lot for all the help!

[vezidoroga]

Based on the feedback from the weekend, I will try out 4d10 instead of 4d6 as the dice roll mechanic, to allow for increased skill ranges (1 though 6 instead of 1 through 4), leading to more differentiation potential between characters.

Remember, this also makes the rerolls more powerful and the static mods a bit weaker. I haven't done any real math on this, just something to keep an eye on during the playtest.