What are some good mechanics for skill use? I'm looking for something better than this:
>I roll 15 on my jumping skill, so I jumped across the gap.
I'm looking for creative and FUN mechanics that would serve as a representation of highly-specialized knowledge/training, preferably in a sci-fi setting
The GENESYS system uses proprietary dice that make individual skill rolls more interesting.
There are 3 different positive symbols - Success, advantage, Triumph - and their negative counterparts - Failure, threat, Despair. Success and failure cancel each other out to determine if you succeed at the desired task. Advantage and threat cancel each other out to determine if there's some unforeseen boon or bane. Triumph and Despair don't cancel each other out and create extraordinary circumstances, a more extreme form of advantage or threat.
For example a hacker wishes to into a secured data vault and roll a success, three threats, and a triumph. They successfully enter with the success, and with the triumph craft a key to allow themselves to enter this mainframe at any time with no check required. However with the threats they caught the attention of the AI administrator and must make further checks to avoid it's prying "eyes".
Though I don't really enjoy even-funnier dice, I feel like I can get some ideas from this.
It gets boring after a while, and there's so much you can do with a d6, when it comes to percentages.
I'm not interested in narrative/role-play heavy stuff. I'll mostly use it in combat, in a skirmish-type game.
>I'll mostly use it in combat, in a skirmish-type game.
Most definitely check HEX then.
seconding this system, it's called the Ubiquity system and you can use any dice with it (it has proprietary dice to make it simpler, but it's basically a d2 - yes, d2 - dicepool mechanic so you can roll a bunch of d6s and treat evens as success and odds as failure)
Personally I prefer All For One: Regime Diabolique, it's another entry in the Ubiquity system series and I like it more, mainly for the theme but also because it has different fencing styles which is pretty cool
Firstly, describe the reason as to why your skill system cannot be boiled down to a percentage chance to succeed or fail with a simple, linear roll.
Secondly, what's the rest of the point of the system? Is it based on progression/mechanical expression systems? Roleplay heavy? Narrative or more "game" heavy? These are all extremely important factors which would chance what the best (or even possible) implementation could be.
Hollow Earth Expedition, and thus, by extension, all Ubiquity-based games.
The game has a kinda-sorta auto-resolve system
>You are Flyboy McDouglas, the acest of ace pilot, you land your plane without a hitch on that big-ass tarmac airstrip in perfect weather, because your Piloting rate is 12 and this is routine maneuver
>You are Cherry Goodlooks, the bombshell actress trying to land McDouglas' plane, while he instructs you, badly wounded from a co-pilot seat. Your Piloting rank is just 2 and you need 2 successes to land the plane, so you roll those 2 dice and hope for the best, or at least to score a single success and not crash-land entirely
Or
>You are Aligator Aberdeen, you have your trusted knife. There is a punk by the post, so you throw it effortlessly in his direction. Your Knife , along with Brawl and Throwing syneries, give you together fricking 16/15 rate, you clip the punk instantly.
>You are a punk that pulled a knife on Aligator Aberdeen. It's just a switchblade, and you're a punk. Even if you're going to hit, that's not a real knife, so you're going to deal measly 2 damage
Or
>You are Wu-Cheng, and your kung-fu is the strongest. Your Tiger Claw technique is absolutely perfect, the commie goon stood no chance and is sent flying
>You are Dakota Miller, and you know how to punch people. The comme goon is a nasty kung-fu motherfricker, so you test your 7 ranks of Brawl, punching the asiatic out of the Great Wall
>You are Cherry Bombshell. You can at best b***h-slap someone and scream really high. Your final Brawl rank is -1, since you only have 1 Strength and 0 Brawl, making it untrained roll. The commie goon overpowers you without any issues, roll Dexterity to see if you can get away.
Nta, but there is nothing more tiresome than having to roll for shit that your character has no logical reason to fail in the first place. Your character is an expert in that field, why the frick are you rolling that check, if it's a routine procedure?
Anon, it's the problem of your GM if he forces you to roll for routine bullshit. Dice are only supposed to come in cases of meaningful failure/success and the breadth of things your PC can do without a roll should increase with the rise in power/levels.
>t. moron who never played anything
>nor read the post he replied to
You've asked what's the problem with using percentage system instead, got answer to that, so now... rolls don't matter? Are you all right, anon?
Or are you just ESL?
Percentage systems by design leave you with space to failure, even in shit that your character shouldn't be failing, YET will also require to make that roll, BECAUSE there is a field for failure. It's all fun and games when the system is CoC and failing is part of the experience, but it's a serious problem in any other configuration than horror campaign. Especially when having to do some high octane shit, and yet failing a 95% roll of most basic shit.
>s-so don't roll
Then why are you proposing the sort of system that has it baked into it that you have to roll?
>I roll 15 on my jumping skill, so I jumped across the gap.
That is literally the best system for that kind of situation.
>GM: What do you want to do?
>Player: I want to jump over that gap.
>GM: Since there is ample space for a run-up, you manage to cross the gap with a long jump. What do you want to do?
or
>GM: The chasm is over 10 meters wide. You realize that there's no mundane way for you to make a jump. [Optionally clue them in that they can attempt to climb or use tools.] What do you want to do?
Best skill mechanic is don't roll for shit like that. Use common sense or in this particular case, the movement rules of your game.
To add on to this comment, remember that if your character has no chance to fail, and no consequences for failing, then they don't need to roll.
To take it another step: You're not rolling to see if you will succeed, you're rolling to see if you'll fail.
Skill system sucks aince it turn characters into toolboxs that won't do anything unless they have a skill on it.
Yeah
Zoomies think asking to roll against a skill is clever play
>things 3.x drones believe in
The irony is golden
>I want to cross the gap
>I'll look for something strong and sturdy to lay across it
>I'll have a team member tie a rope around themselves to protect me from falling if I fall, as they brace against a rock for support
>DM: Fine, you cross no problem
>Great, now we do that for every team member
Skill checks are for boardgamers.
Now if I was escaping a monster in a hurry I'd be happy to roll a skill check to jump the gap.
>Baseline
Degrees of success; Crit fail/fail/success/crit success that boil down to "No, and also...", "No", "Yes", and "Yes, and also", as well as some means of earning a bonus/reducing the DC of checks based on good planning, use of proper equipment, or both.
If you want what I call fun, some sort of stunting system that lets players earn bonuses based on how creative and "cool" they get with their actions in-character, some sort of granular modifier system.
A Specialization system is also a good thing; might allow re-rolls, give specific bonuses to certain checks within a Skill (i.e., a Mechanics (Land Vehicles) specialization would give a bonus to repairing or otherwise working with land vehicles).
If there's AI slop in OP, don't reply.
You mean like using descriptions and consequences by how much you beat or fail the TN? You can do that with any dice system on your own, but you won't do it.
OP here,
I'd like to clarify:
>I would like to be able to use d6s only.
>I would like to use them in specific situations, such as when using a sniper rifle, or some light mortar
Play GURPS
Look into Don't Rest Your Head, it uses a really unique D6 pool system with several colors of D6, where the total number of sixes determines whether you succeed and the color with the most sixes determines the cost of that success.
Or something like that, it's been a while.
I don't think it would work well with sci-fi, but it's more interesting than "if roll is X or higher then u win". Maybe it'll give you some ideas.
Try this: skills are resolved by rolling one or more d6, and counting up how many individual die come up a success. Say that as a general rule a 5 or a 6 counts as a success, anything else is a failure, but there is an advantage/disadvantage mechanic where if things are in your favor you win on 4 5 6 or if the odds are especially shitty you succeed only on 6. The better you are at the skill, the more dice you roll so you have better odds of success.
However, there are 2 additional layers to this mechanic:
The first is 'expertise'. Basically, for each stat you have a modifer, and per session you can spent points equal to that modifier as free success for a roll of a skill linked to that ability. So, lets say you have a strength modifier of 2, that means you can generate 2 free 'success' results. Want to jump across the gap? You can roll for it, or you can spend 1 point to just do it without a roll. You are, after all, good at this sort of thing so you can occasionally just cut out the risk of failure entirely. But you have to decide to spend your points BEFORE you roll, not after.
The second wrinkle is that some skill checks require multiple successes to beat, but each success is linked to a specific condition to beat. So, lets say you are trying to sneak past some guards and open a locked chest they have. Thats a 3 success check, with three separate conditions: don't get caught, open the lock, steal the thing. If you roll well enough that you have 3 or more success results, you did great and you do all of that. But if you only roll 2 successes, you the player have to decide *which condition you failed*. So maybe you open the lock and don't get caught, but you had to bail before you actually grabbed the item or it was too heavy to move. Maybe you prioritize getting the item but choose to alert the guards and fight your way out. Entirely up to you.
>All this over-engineered bullshit
So you are trying to make DnD 5e or WFRP 2e more """realistic"""?
> mechanics are for a d6 dice pool system
> tries to 'gotcha!' me with a d20 system and a d10 system
> ???
I legitimately have no idea what point you think you are making.
You would know, if you played games, rather than being a theorycrafting Idea Guy that just posted nearly 2k signs of utterly useless "mechanic".
Oh, so you don't actually have a point to make. You are just being vaguely, nonspecifically caustic. Cool.
I look forward to your reply where you convey no information but do it in a mean tone of voice so you can feel like you had the last word.
My point is pretty simple:
You posted over-engineered bullshit that in the same time doesn't have ANY concrete, actual mechanics. It's just theorycrafting.
How is "This is what you roll, this is how you determine a success from a failure" not a mechanic?
>How is a vague idea anything else than a vague idea?
Cool.
You've just described Ubiquity, except badly done and with pointless extra steps that make it cumbersome. Along with being entirely exploitative, despite in your fricked up head you probably see them as super-risky and "unfair", in the mudcore sense.
Do you by chance jerk off to FitD? Because it sounds like you do
Make it a d6 pool system with special meanings to width (doubles, triples etc) height (biggest number) and patterns (straight, full house, 69)
I've been reading about Cthulhu Dark and the system sounds pretty good.
>When you roll to do something, roll a number of D6es and take the highest result. For a normal-difficulty task, if it's a 5 or 6, you succeed.
>You get one D6 for free, plus a second D6 if your Profession (chosen at creation) relates to the task.
>You can also add a third D6, the insanity die, if you want to push yourself. You can add it to any roll, but if it rolls a 1 you gain one Insanity Point.
It's simple, perhaps too simple for anything past a one-shot, but it's good as an extremely simple system. Your odds with one die are 33%, but having either a relevant skill or adding the insanity die immediately boost it to 55%. Being skilled AND pushing yourself bumps you to 70%.
Thays seems super harsh. How many everyday normal things do you fail 66% of the time?
That's kind of the point of Cthulhu Dark - you fail way too often, because muh grimderp scary impossible tentacles and that of course builds up your character (but not the PC)
Please just stop it with the AI art already I don't understand how anyone thinks it looks appealing
>I don't understand how anyone thinks it looks appealing
>thinks
They don't.
Because bots can't think.
I don't think it's appealing. I posted it because it looks funny
I feel like the person who spams AI art because they think it's funny is the same kind of person who spams and wants to look at those wojaks of gross looking trannies wojacks over and over because it apparently doesn't stop being funny for them. It might be funny the first time but after 100 times I don't get it
Skills are cancer, interrogate the fiction instead
13th Age does skills via backgrounds. At character creation you get 8 points for backgrounds with each one having a 5 point max. So you could make a fighter who's backgrounds are like
Farm kid: 1
Conscript: 3
Merchant caravan guard: 4
Then, when you want to do something the GM says needs a skill check, he picks an ability score then asks if you have any backgrounds that relate to the situation. So even if you're a low WIS fighter, you can still say "I have a lot of experience with trade and commerce, so I'm going to inspect the item to see if its counterfeit" and have a good chance of success.
I like this because its snappy and avoids the problem of having Lore skills for each and every aspect of life and things like that. It also prompts players to think of their character more than a stat block if that's how they're naturally inclined, while also taking massive-backstory-writers and corralling them by saying "You can get mechanical benefit from your backstory, but you need to keep it within 8 points"
What a great example of why this board is dead. 50% of a thread on a legit topic is either AI whining or some moron arguing for no reason
>50% of a thread on a legit topic is either AI whining
Gee whiz, I wonder why? Who knows maybe I'll find out if I take a look at the catalogue?
Oh no, anons are making their own thread images instead of googling "elf slave". Better whine about it constantly
>Offtopic image dump threads? Why are people getting so angry
So let me get this straight: you came to this thread to b***h about people b***hing, as a way to point out how dead /tg/ is? While pausing between jerking off to AI waifus?
Filter, you lazy bums
>If you close your eyes, the problem will disappear
I have currently 82 hidden threads. That's over half of the catalog. And 9 of those are AI spam. But I guess they don't exist, because they are hidden, right?
It wasn't this fricking bad during literal /misc/ tourism years. Back then I had like 2-5 threads hidden, and only mostly during weekends. Now the fricking autofilter removes 30-40 threads a day.
I guess I should close my eyes some more, that will definitely make aimless spam and shitposting less present.
>I f you close your eyes, the problem will disappear
Literally yes and the fact that you don’t realize this is funny to me
>I have currently 82 hidden threads.
Literally seething about everything lol.
>And 9 of those are AI spam
Funny because there's on 4 /slop/ threads up.
Lying again, artgays?
Nta, but I can easily see how he could reach such number. Flagging all the spam, shitposting and sliding threads would easily get you to 60+ threads. And it's not even about seething, just to make the catalog more useful, rather than overflow of useless crap. Then there are generals of games people don't play, so go figure.
Also, checked archive and there are 29 of those. Which goes beyond your absurd non-argument of "when I checked day later, there are only X, and not Y threads like that, so it means you are lying". I wish it's either jannies taking steps and saging, or at least the spammer getting finally bored
There are a limited amount of threads that can exist, those slop threads can bump good threads for games that deserve more attention like Traveller off the page
Skill issue
OP here
>to the AI whiners:
I couldn't care less about the ai images, I posted it BECAUSE THIS IS A FRICKING IMAGE BOARD AND IT WONT LET ME POST WITHOUT AN IMAGE.
You can have a separate thread to complain about AI art.
How big is too big when it comes to dice pools, I feel like 6d6s is the max, no? Anything beyond sounds a bit too much...
>You can have a separate thread to complain about AI art.
Thanks, but we already have 12 AI image dumps and another 30+ threads opening with AI, making me sick by just looking at the catalogue
>How big is too big when it comes to dice pools, I feel like 6d6s is the max
Ubiquity's regular "max" is 15. Actual max-max you can pool is... Either 30 or 35, I would have to check. And then there are of course talent bonuses, which could add another +3 or even +4.
However, keep in mind that the game
- was build around using pic related, so the image you see is actually an equivalent of 18d6 (blues are 3s, reds are 2s and whites are 1s)
- allows you to just use half the size of your related pool for auto-resolve (so instead of having to physically whichever amount of dice you have, you get auto-success of half the pool)
- you can use your rating except the final number of it and toss a coin for it (and this is what you do when your rate ends with .5, eg. you have Str 3 and Melee 2, so your rate is 2.5, so you can either roll 5 dice, or assume you've got 2 successes and roll 3rd die to resolve the .5)
Any pool system that doesn't use any kind of shorthand is moronic by design.
Ok, pajeet
kill AI "artist"
8-10 threads of the same general for AI images being up at all times is not something most people want and you know it