WHAT IS EASY, MEDIUM AND HARD

[Bedrockgames]

Even if you have characters with high combat skills, they'll still hesitate if the actual combat system is harsh and unforgiving.

I am aiming for this. This is a game where I want players to fight monsters using their wits, or running away more than just charging in and attacking. So the game has monsters that can easily kill PCs in a single hit. Most of what i have been doing in the past month or so of decvelpioment with my combat path is bringing down some of their abilities because they were too competent (I wanted them to be decent at holding the line for others to escape from a monster, but I didn't want them wading through armies of undead with a lawn mower or chainsaw if you catch my meaning. One solution to this was giving them more abilities that helped them protect other characters rather than just fighting abilities, the other has been fine tuning their combat bonuses, their defenses and their abilities that allow them to hit multiple opponents. But I am also being careful not to overcorrect as many monsters are completely immune to the mundane attacks of this path. So I am being careful about reading too much into combat playtests until I have a very wide assortment of them (and until I also get a better sense of how things lay out in the context of multiple adventures over time: sometimes something looks one way in a single combat scenario, but then you realize that scenario looks different if it occurs in a single part of a much longer adventure).

 

[Fenris-77]

Hmm, Trophy Dark has a pretty stark take on that. If you try to directly fight a monster, you die. Period. You are free to try and get past a monster, or trap it, or fool it, but not fight it directly. This would apply to big bads of course, not every creature the PCs encounter.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Hmm, Trophy Dark has a pretty stark take on that. If you try to directly fight a monster, you die. Period. You are free to try and get past a monster, or trap it, or fool it, but not fight it directly. This would apply to big bads of course, not every creature the PCs encounter.

Lol. That is pretty lethal. I will have to take a look at some point. But a little more than I am aiming (it doesn't need to be a foregone conclusion, as I find an element of randomness adds to the excitement: getting your head taken off by a giant snake is thrilling in a game like this, but so is narrowly avoiding having your head taken off if you know it truly could have gone the other way)

 

[Fenris-77]

Lol. That is pretty lethal. I will have to take a look at some point. But a little more than I am aiming (it doesn't need to be a foregone conclusion, as I find an element of randomness adds to the excitement: getting your head taken off by a giant snake is thrilling in a game like this, but so is narrowly avoiding having your head taken off if you know it truly could have gone the other way)

I feel like what you're looking for is a function of enemy power level/damage mechanic rather than anything specifically to do with the skill settings. If the big guys are really hard to damage, and even harder to kill, then it probably doesn't matter how easy they are to hit, especially when the PCs themselves are on the squishy side.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I feel like what you're looking for is a function of enemy power level/damage mechanic rather than anything specifically to do with the skill settings. If the big guys are really hard to damage, and even harder to kill, then it probably doesn't matter how easy they are to hit, especially when the PCs themselves are on the squishy side.

Definitely. My only concern on skill setting here is conveying the meanings of TNs to GMs who will need to set them on occasion, in language that is clear (i.e. is my understanding of the term "Easy" the same as most peoples understanding of the term). But yes, i've mainly been dealing with this on the power and damage end with monsters (this is one of the reasons using the chart with probabilities for multiple 10 results is handy: because 10s always add an extra wound, even though you otherwise don't count successes on rolls-----you just take the single highest result). So far the monsters are mostly sufficiently deadly and the PCs sufficiently vulnerable (at least in cases where I want the monsters to be deadly) that in practice players learn how dangerous it is to charge at a vampire. I tend to like systems where characters can die from a single good hit.

 

[Fenris-77]

Hmm. If you take an example PC with a reasonably good stat in something you could use that as your exemplar. So something like a Medium task is one that this character with these dice can accomplish with these odds. I might shade toward that rather than using a less-skilled example. I think players would understand this is what X means for the stuff you're good at pretty intuitively, and easily scale things back for areas of lesser skill. As opposed to switching those two I mean.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Hmm. If you take an example PC with a reasonably good stat in something you could use that as your exemplar. So something like a Medium task is one that this character with these dice can accomplish with these odds. I might shade toward that rather than using a less-skilled example. I think players would understand this is what X means for the stuff you're good at pretty intuitively, and easily scale things back for areas of lesser skill. As opposed to switching those two I mean.

This has been my big internal debate (both within my own head and among the players I am play testing with): what is the exemplar skill rank? It is basically down to between 1d10 and 2d10 and there are good arguments for both. If we take the 2d10 rank as the exemplar, then that gives TN 4 at 91 percent for EASY, TN 7 at 64 percent for CHALLENGING, and 36 percent for HARD (those numbers line up with my sense of what is easy and hard for a decently skilled person to do). Also for thoroughness that leaves the TN 6 at 75% for the DEFAULT (and again I am not in love with the imbalance of default being one slot away from Challenging but I do like the probability gap between 64 percent and 75 percent for that: a default task succeeding 75 percent of the time for a medium skilled character makes sense to me. Also when you shift it down to a 1d10 rank character the numbers still make some kind of sense I feel.

Another thing probably worth mentioning, this isn't a game where you make a Drive skill roll every time you drive. So those probabilities are only going to matter if there is an important reason to make a roll.

 

[Fenris-77]

This has been my big internal debate (both within my own head and among the players I am play testing with): what is the exemplar skill rank? It is basically down to between 1d10 and 2d10 and there are good arguments for both. If we take the 2d10 rank as the exemplar, then that gives TN 4 at 91 percent for EASY, TN 7 at 64 percent for CHALLENGING, and 36 percent for HARD (those numbers line up with my sense of what is easy and hard for a decently skilled person to do). Also for thoroughness that leaves the TN 6 at 75% for the DEFAULT (and again I am not in love with the imbalance of default being one slot away from Challenging but I do like the probability gap between 64 percent and 75 percent for that: a default task succeeding 75 percent of the time for a medium skilled character makes sense to me. Also when you shift it down to a 1d10 rank character the numbers still make some kind of sense I feel.

Another thing probably worth mentioning, this isn't a game where you make a Drive skill roll every time you drive. So those probabilities are only going to matter if there is an important reason to make a roll.

I can't see you writing a game where you roll to drive every time you turn the key.

Those numbers work for me. It's more a feel thing than a numbers thing of course, as much as we all like to run the numbers when we're scribbling in our design notebook (IMO anyway)

 

[JAMUMU]

From what I'm reading here, it sort of looks like (when I squint):

Easy: 90% chance to run away from the monster
Moderate: 60% chance to escape after inflicting some damage/complication to the monster
Difficult: 36% chance to destroy/imprison the monster

 

[Fenris-77]

From what I'm reading here, it sort of looks like (when I squint):

Easy: 90% chance to run away from the monster
Moderate: 60% chance to escape after inflicting some damage/complication to the monster
Difficult: 36% chance to destroy/imprison the monster

You've conflated two ideas in an interesting way there.