Why do many people prefer roll-high to roll-under?

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I’d say yes, more money, bigger house, higher score, I assume it is as simple as that

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

An oddity of my own: rolling under feels good to me with percentiles but bad or at least not so good with 1d20. Even though it is very much viciously the same math and I have so much experience multiplying a score by 5 or dividing it by 5. What the heck is up with that?

I don't know, but you're not alone. d100 roll-under feels more natural to me than d20 roll-under, despite having started roleplaying with OD&D and having played enough Rolemaster/Spacemaster that I should like high percentiles - but then again, I played a lot more Chaosium over the years, and started on them early so maybe that's it.

Suspect part of our preferences stem from the games you played when you were young, for the same reason that schools and sports teach us we want high scores rather than low. It would be interesting to study preferences in folks who started gaming later in life and see if the "this is my first game" effect manifests, and if so how strongly compared to folks who started in grade school.

 

[payn]

I prefer Mongoose Traveller 2E the most right now. Roll 2D6+mod+skill with a target of 8 (Ref discretion on making it easier or more difficult.) Whatever you miss or exceed the target by is your effect. PbtA uses this too. I prefer a degrees of success and failure over simple binary over/under. PF2 also tried for a degree of success but its woefully complicated and combat centric for my tastes. YMMV.

 

[TwoSix]

That. It's fundamental psychology drilled into us from when we're school children. You don't aim for lower numerical grades, after all. If there was a system that generated alphabetical results rather than numerical people would favor A over F - and I've actually heard people playing Rolemaster complain that A crits are less severe than F crits and that's backward.

I mean, I would say it's learned, not fundamental. You could have a numerical system where your score was the number of mistakes, and a 0 would be a perfect score.

The trick to using roll-under is to think of the numbers on the die as ordinals, not increments. You didn't roll a 1, you rolled "First". And First is best! Just like an A is the first letter, and that's the best. (Let's not investigate S-tier stuff. )

 

[Jack Daniel]

▯

 

[Reynard]

I was a big fan of the Fading Suns "Price is Right" style system: you need to roll under your stat/TN, but higher is still better. So, the better you are at a thing (higher value) the better your results ona success -- BUT you still fail if you roll too high.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

The trick to using roll-under is to think of the numbers on the die as ordinals, not increments. You didn't roll a 1, you rolled "First". And First is best! Just like an A is the first letter, and that's the best. (Let's not investigate S-tier stuff. )

Yep! When I'm playing a roll under system I try to shift into the same headspace as golf pars and race qualifying times.

 

[The Soloist]

The way I see it, it's not roll under, it's roll as high as possible without going over the target number.

 

[John Dallman]

The way I see it, it's not roll under, it's roll as high as possible without going over the target number.

Except that varies:

• In BRP-family systems, Hero and GURPS, the lower the better, in general.
• In Pendragon, it works as you say, and exact success is a critical success (until your skill exceeds 20, then you get more critical successes).

I agree that subtraction is slightly more effort than addition, but I find numeric comparison easier than addition. I may be unusual in this: numbers are more strongly and obviously ordered for me than letters of the alphabet.

 

[innerdude]

For me, "Roll Under" systems make it massively more difficult to establish the difficulty of the task at hand as something that's objectively part of the "game world" and not a mechanical artifact.

It's the big problem I always had with GURPS. It never felt like doing anything that happened was based on the situation my character was in, and more about, what does the number on my character sheet say the situation is.

It was an incredibly strange disconnect for me, having this supposedly ultra-realistic, highly granular "game world model" engine, yet the most basic of all mechanics -- a skill check -- is abstracted in a way that always felt weird and artificial, from the first time I played GURPS until the last time I played it after ~25 sessions.

It was so jarring and terrible that I'll never really consider a "roll under" system ever again.