3d6 for skills
1d20 for combat
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3d6 for skills. 1d20 for combat
3d6 for skills
1d20 for combat
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Anon that is just adnd.
Fading Suns? I vaguely remember Fading Suns 1E being like that.
>"skills" are just dice rolls plus/minus number
How am I supposed to know if something work them?
Don't mind him. He's a mobatard and is used to the term skill referring to hotbar actions.
By reading the skill's description and checking if your resources and situation are valid.
My games aren't online, nor are battle arenas, and they don't have hotbars, so keep your moronation to a minimum.
If a skill acts like an attribute, it should be called an attribute.
Having skills be more than just modifiers usually doesn't automatically mean multiplication or division is involved.
What about the chance of seeing if those resources and situation are gonna work?
That's in the skill description, too.
Every skill has its own range of codified outcomes, instead of being one single modifier for something that's vaguely-defined and left up to daddy DM.
Sounds tiresome ngl
Having some mechanic that behaves exactly like another but with a different name is even more tiresome.
It got more than just "tiresome" having some moron decide he didn't want this or that thing to happen because of precious script or to be petty to the other players.
And then on top of that, being told as a player I can just rewrite what I don't like when I brought them up in discussions about the "game's" quality was the anal cherry on the shit sundae.
You can shove your arbiter-jerkoff systems up your ass.
If you can't trust your GM play solo or find a new GM, dumbass. No matter what system you play he can always decide he doesn't want you to do something
I do play solo now.
The point of everything I said about skills-as-attributes remains unchanged.
Regardless of what anyone personally does for their own game, the quality of a given mechanic remains unchanged.
That's what it means to stay consistent with one's own standards.
Much of your suggested improvements, are just how 3.5 and gurps work already. Gurps has a ton of modifiers. 3.5 is a bit less exhaustive, but still has a ton of explicit benchmarks. Either way, it's spelled out explicitly.
That’s not how 3.5 does it. The skills in 3.5 are still a list of number modifiers that get applied to different situations at the DMs discretion. He’s describing a system where skills work like spells, in that they have an exact description of what they do or situations where they are applicable. If you meet those conditions then no rolling would be involved.
You mean like if you are asked to roll a 3.5 check, the thing you're doing is on the list of examples, and your bonus is high enough that you tell the DM "that's normally DC15, and I have a +10, so I take 10."? Or "that would be easier than task example ______, and I can take 10 on that task, so I take 10?"
Each skill has a page or two of rules and examples.
Yeah except there would be no need to roll checks or take tens, you just either explicitly are skilled enough to do something or you are not, as described by the detailed info pages for the skills. The DnD 3.5 skills list should be separated into 2 different things. All of the ‘trained only’ skills on the list should be the actual skills, which are treated more like world of Warcraft professions or real life trades, in that they are things you typically do not do under duress or in combat, and are more academic/knowledge/crafting oriented. Give each one it’s one talent tree or spells list type thing, with explicit benchmarks of aptitude which allow for certain things. The things like spot, climb, ride, swim, etc shouldn’t be skills at all because they are just actions anyone can do, and those should be the only things that work the way the current skills do. Call it ‘training’ or something other than skills.
There are both number modifiers and DCs right in the PHB and ELH and a few other places. You want to teach an animal to attack enemies? DC20. It's right there in the skill description.
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/handleAnimal.htm
The 3.5 hardcoded DCs don't cover every possible task, but they cover a fair bit. Certainly enough that setting a new DC is just a matter of 'is this easier or harder than this task on the list' a few times.
Are there DMs who throw out the skill rules? Sure. Just like there are DMs who throw out WBL despite the DMG page 56 literally calling balancing party wealth their "job". Or that dbag DM everyone's encountered who starts nerfing people's class features because competence is apparently bad.
But that's not the game as published. That's a shitty DM running the game badly, with broken houserules.
Yes that’s my point. You still have to make a roll and pass a DC each time you do something. The system I think he’s talking about would be one where, if your skill is high enough, you essentially autopass anything with a DC lower than your skill, like how in WoW if your skill level is high enough in alchemy to make a certain potion, you always make that potion. I had to do a lot of chemistry for my masters, and for example once you learn how to mix a zinc chloride solution of a certain density, it becomes trivial enough to never mess it up to the point where it would not justify adding a roll to it if you were do ‘gamify’ chemistry.
How does take 10 not cover that though? DC20, outside of combat, means you don't roll if you have a +10 or better, you just do it. You auto pass anything DC20 or less (outside combat), and have to roll for DC21-30
It does cover it, I’m just saying DCs and rolling wouldn’t be necessary in a skills system built from the ground up in a different way. ‘Trained only’ skills should be more context based than pure training based anyway. Like it doesn’t matter how skilled you are in alchemy, if you’re out of combat, what have you, if you do not have the equipment or ingredients to make a certain potion. Or it does not matter how learned you are in history if the ancient language on the wall you are trying to read has never been translated into a language anyone alive today knows. You could just say that you can assign much higher DCs to these things, but reducing everything to a roll cheapens the engagement in the skills. A system built from the ground up without DCs or rolls in mind would require the players to invest actual effort and playtime into their skills. I realize this would be a hard sell for a lot of people, who mostly play ttrpg games as dungeon crawler fight simulators.
Actually, that sounds pretty interesting. I'd be down to read that. I think I also like some amount of 'this is like that but harder', but you're right, context dependency would change things. Have you seen a skill system like this?
>a system where skills work like spells
No.
The skills tend to operate off of resources that recover every turn (like action points) or from items/weapons.
Spells run off of resources that must be consciously generated based on what kind of power is being used.
And, as I said before, there IS rolling involved; the difference is that the skill isn't JUST a roll plus modifier.
Yes I know you’re describing the way those systems work, but I’m talking about a system I think that guy was describing; one where there is no rolling involved and skills work predictably the same way every times based off of its description.
Wrong anon. I think that's the guy describing what he had in mind. I was describing existing games.
Ah. I see what you mean now. It sounds neat in theory, but buckets of days are impractical even when you're just counting how many are 5s and 6s, nevermind adding them all up. I imagine that would be really slow every time people roll, unless you use a dice bot.
If the d100 is giving you your actual % success rate like BRP (as opposed to Rolemaster where it's like D&D but with bigger dice), most people are used to odds expressed as a percentage, that's also a convenience factor.
Your more detailed context dependent skills with fleshed out subsystems sounds a bit more interesting than
, but to me
just sounds like 3.5 with skill tricks from... Complete scoundrel, I think?
>If a skill acts like an attribute, it should be called an attribute.
That's fricking moronic.
>Every skill has its own range of codified outcomes, instead of being one single modifier for something that's vaguely-defined and left up to daddy DM.
That's also fricking moronic, because you literally cannot codify every single thing without turning a TTRPG into a shitty video game. By codifying every single little thing, you are removing the flexibility that TTRPGs provide in their problem solving.
>It got more than just "tiresome" having some moron decide he didn't want this or that thing to happen because of precious script or to be petty to the other players.
Literal strawman from a nogames.
>And then on top of that, being told as a player I can just rewrite what I don't like when I brought them up in discussions about the "game's" quality was the anal cherry on the shit sundae.
That's the advantage of TTRPGs. If you don't like the system being flexible, adaptable, and offering more agency than vidya, go back to Ganker and stay there.
>You can shove your arbiter-jerkoff systems up your ass.
That's every TTRPG. Rule 0 exists and supercedes every other rule in every single system and has since day fricking 1 of TTRPGs existing. Frick, the first pseudo TTRPG (B/X/OD&D) is literally a bunch of houserules/homebrew stapled onto a shitty wargame.
Solo play isn't actual tabletop gaming. TTRPGs are inherently a social activity, and if you're too autistic or sociopathic to handle basic human communication and the social contract, then go play video games. They're much more your speed.
>The point of everything I said about skills-as-attributes remains unchanged.
Except it doesn't, because while Stats or Attributes represent baseline physical or mental ability, Skills represent something your character has learned through training and/or experience. They are, generally speaking, easier to improve than stats for good reason
>Solo play isn't actual tabletop gaming
Says who? A rando on /tg/? Why does the game stop being a game if I play it solo? Are single player video games not video games? Are TTRPGs specifically designed for solo play still a social activity?
Sad to see someone lashing at something utterly harmless for no other reason than they don't understand it. Thought someone in the RPG space would move past the mindset of the satanic panic.
Solo gaming is bad because the solo gamer said something bad about D&D and other systems based heavily on whim instead of game structure.
>wark wark wark vidya gaems vidya gaems
Since video games live in your head rent-free, and you're incapable of telling the vast valley of differences between a pen and paper game and something electronic and automated just because you don't like how something is described, maybe you ought to frick off to Ganker. Or have a nice day.
>By reading the skill's description and checking if your resources and situation are valid.
>I have never overachieved or underachieved in my life
Okay chatgpt
>check if you're hecking valid!
Go to your local theater club then you homosexual, this is a tabletop games board not a LARP while holding a mini board.
You are cancer.
It gets really annoying if you have to divide and multiply for every roll.
1d12 for action-filled and intense scenes
2d6 if you can concentrate on the task
3d4 for downtime, casual tasks, etc.
Could this also scale upwards and downwards based on the user’s expertise with the skill; perhaps based on a generalized mathematical formula?
D6 for everything. No i will not elaborate
Bassd and "I stole pieces from the Monopoly board" pilled tbh.
sir tom of finland
heh
Why tho?
I houseruled 5e exactly thus. Ability checks on 3d6, attack rolls and saves still using the d20. Very satisfied with the result. It requires just a little hacking to implement the Advantage roll. We used 4d6d1 instead of 2d20d1.
>Why tho?
It reduces variance without changing the average roll. Checks that you should pass >50% of the time become easier to pass, checks that you should pass <50% of the time become harder.
It's oft cited as a problem (although it's totally subjective) that things like "the wizard passes the strength check that the barbarian failed", etc., happen quite a bit in a system where the variance of the die roll is twice as much, or more, as your character's flat value for a skill check. four times as much, in fact, in low-level play.
again it's NOT objectively a problem, and yes, you can almost always explain away, as the narrator, why the wizard succeeded where the barbarian failed. but the ideal amount of swinginess is subjective. a lot of people want less swinginess. (hell, maybe you want MORE swinginess. you could just as easily do d100-80 and end up with the same average as d20 and 3d6. that would be crazy, but you could do it without breaking 5e)
reduced swinginess has certain upsides: character's successes feel more distinct from each other, and players receive psychological positive feedback for decisions they made during character creation ("my choice resulted in a concrete difference in outcome")
>Obvious followup question: Why reduce variance specifically for ability checks but not combat?
because 5e breaks if you change the accuracy math. tldr: AC stacking becomes overpowered, among other things.
It would help, but a tiny bonus on a range of 10 (90% of the time) is still not much. It'll make late levels be less trash though. With the tiny bonuses in 5e, I played with dice options and it wasn't until I got to D4+8(add a couple fate dice for a roundover if desired) that 5e's bonuses before level 10 start looking somewhat passable. I settled on keeping the d20 but tripling proficiency bonuses on ability checks, until I stopped running 5e entirely.
>d4+8
wew. so a character with a +0 just literally cannot outperform a character with a +5, ever.
the more I think about it, the less I hate it. but that's a radical departure from 5e's game design philosophy. many rolls in standard adventuring situations are going to be made auto-pass or auto-fail as a result. 3d6 makes 19s and 20s impossible, but d4+8 makes everything from 13 on up impossible. many typical 5e rolls require something between a 13 and a 20 to succeed, or require something between a 7 and a 1 to fail.
there are times where I like leaving open the possibility for fluke successes, though. for instance I like setting high Knowledge and Perception DCs for obscure facts or details while assuming the players aren't going to pass them. then if someone really does roll a 1-in-100 result you get to have fun contriving a reason how only this one character knew this thing, or noticed the trap or what have you. it's more fun and feels more 'real' when it's actually rare. rolling d4+8 all but wipes out that possibility. nonetheless I'm curious to know how it went for you, could you write something about your experience with and thoughts on that houserule?
Ah. No. It only got number crunched in a spreadsheet. You're right that it requires recalibrated DCs. I was actually looking at 1D4+8+3df, so you could get up to a 15, but at low odds.
https://anydice.com/program/34b4f
I ended up leaving the dice as d20 and tripling the proficiency bonuses instead, as I mentioned. So LV2 bard with jack of all trades got you a +3, and anyone at level 17 with expertise was getting a +36. It went well enough.
Ultimately I concluded getting a game I wanted to run would be easier by heavily houseruling 3.5 and importing bits of other editions I liked than by houseruling 5e and trying to make it satisfactory, and I wasn't enjoying running 5e, and so the 5e books went into storage.
>many rolls in standard adventuring situations are going to be made auto-pass or auto-fail as a result.
The more you think about it, the more you will realize that this is good (or, to put it differently, that D&D is bad). Tense 'roll of the die' conflicts are supposed to emerge naturally in situations where challenger and challenge are roughly matched, that's what makes them exciting, it makes storytelling sense and encourages players to think more. D&D uses such a big die with such small modifiers that the 'tense challenge' range is artificially enhanced, because someone somewhere thought that would make the game more exciting, but they were wrong. Giving bad modifiers a 25% chance of success encourages mindless gameplay, and giving good modifiers a 25% chance of failure is tactically and narratively unsatisfying, people complain about it all the time.
it's definitely subjective... as much as I might be inclined to agree with you there are people who like the wacky high variance of d&d
>It's oft cited as a problem (although it's totally subjective) that things like "the wizard passes the strength check that the barbarian failed", etc., happen quite a bit in a system where the variance of the die roll is twice as much, or more, as your character's flat value for a skill check. four times as much, in fact, in low-level play.
The problem with most modern TTRPG systems that use a d20.
So like the Without Number games? It explicitly uses d20 for attack rolls and saving throws while skills are cribbed from Traveller and use 2d6.
>not using d100
Filtered.
3d6 for everything (roll under)
This. I’m homebrewing my own system and I went through several resolution mechanics before I arrived at 3d6 under. I stole a lot of shit from GURPS lol
what the heck is the difference between roll under and roll over. mathematically it's the same, isn't it? I lean toward roll over because there's a natural intuition in "higher number = better"
If the number you're trying to roll under is an attribute, it makes sense to have it increase as the character improves
with roll over it's generally
>roll + skill >= target number
with roll under you can do
>roll + difficulty modifier <= skill rating
roll over I think it's pretty natural in that "more is good" but roll under definitely makes for easier math with smaller numbers. Also lets you double dip in that bonuses to the difficulty modifier (say you're in the dark, so +1 difficulty for lockpicking or whatever) you add it to the left side with the difficulty, if it's a bonus to you (good tools) you can add to the left side with your skill rating.
1D2
NO MODIFIERS
>(1d2 -1) x20
HEADS, YOU LIVE
TAILS... YOU DIE
~t. Harvey the Two-Face
>always rolling
>no usage of a "your character knows this" challenge-tier system
I do like the 3d6 skill idea
>1 day ago
I swear this was posted last week.
It's a regular repost with different wording and images sometimes.
1d4 for dumb animals and wretched goblins.
1d6 for smart animals, most people, and goblin heroes
1d8 for battle-hardened humanoids and for most intelligent magical beings
1d10 for elite action badasses and for most big monsters
1d12 for best-in-the-world human masters and for old, wise monsters.
1d20 for ascended immortal badasses and for most of the threats that they'll face.
3d6 for everything but skills, and skills are a d100 roll under system. Also dice can be upgraded or downgraded through buffs or debuffs from d4-d12. Also combat happens in phases or rounds, not turns, so all attacks are met by an actionable reaction by the attacked person.
>d100 skill system
>still works on increments of multiples of 5.
What is even the point of using it instead of a d20 then?
Critical Success/Failure pretty much.
Not enough systems do it, but you can do cool stuff with d100s, like be able to flipflop your result, or adding bonus/penalty dice. I also like the BRP advancement system.
I also just like d100 systems from an aesthetic perspective. That's totally subjective, but whatever. I like it better than a d20.
I really like the idea of a game that is xd6, roll under, and the difficulty is the number of d6 you roll. Laughably easy would be a single die, up to like 10 would be nearly impossible.
How is it easy to roll under 1 on 1d6?
I'm clearly missing something from your idea.
No, you'd be rolling under something, like your skill or ability or a combo.
Let's say it's ability plus skill. You need to roll intelligence+engineering to fix the spaceship engine. You have a 10 int and a 4 engineering, so the target number is 4. If it's an easy fix, maybe you don't have to roll at all, because 1 or 2d6 is always gonna be under 14. The harder it is, the more dice you roll.
>take10
take1 and take20 are fine, though
What are the rules for taking 1?
it's not a mechanic but rather a rule of thumb, if a pass/fail check can't be failed by a character rolling 1, then skip the roll
this rule of thumb becomes more relevant if you have mechanics that floor a character's rolls above 1, such as the Rogue's Reliable Talent in 5e
Oh, yea, that's sensible even in systems where it isn't explicitly explained. It's why you don't have to roll to tie your shoes.
3d6 for everything.
3d6 for stats; to derive your stat bonuses, divide stats by anywhere between 3 & 6 (round down), depending on the flavor of your campaign. Wait. No. Divide your stat by 6 if you have no skill; divide your stat by 5 if you have Level 1 skill, or 4 if you have Level 2 skill, and so forth, all the way to Level 5 (Mastery)... or is it 6? Someone else may do the math. Perhaps Equipment or other Advantages could reduce this divisor instead of Skill Levels (which would be simply added to the stat)? Hmmm...
(ATTRIBUTE+SKILL)/[(OPPOSITION+DISADVANTAGE)-(EQUIPMENT+ADVANTAGE)]=X
X+diceroll=score; score-target=margin(success/fail)
3d6 for everything, except you drop the lowest in low-intensity situations allowing focus, or drop the highest in high-intensity situations like combat, or drop the middle if you're able to focus but in a rush.
So, it's 3d6 for action resolution, but you only get to use two of the dice, then add your stat bonus plus whatever proficiencies & abilities you possess along with equipment bonuses you apply.
>continues to smoke weed and shitpost on Ganker into the wee hours of the morning
1d1 you win always
1d20, used as a percentile die, roll over mechanics, for everything.
3d6/d20/d100 roll under
roll over is always gay
simple as