Recent content by Thomas Shey

There are only two I can think of. 1. OD&D. This may be a case where I was already in my head moving out of D&D, and didn't see a reason to move over to B/X or AD&D when they weren't going to bring me to any of the things I was wanting that OD&D didn't anyway. Of course this was arguably a...

I'm not sure I ever felt that 4D3 didn't take it a bit too far. I did see 4D6 used as the core resolution system in one middlin' obscure game system, and it seemed to work okay.

That tends to be an artifact of games that assume every character will participate in ever zone of play. Combat is the common one, but I've seen games where they'd make sure people weren't too far apart in piloting for similar reasons.

Like I said, its much harder to tell with big linear rolls in the first place, because they're so all over the place.

The big problem they had in 1e is that they sometimes got carried away with additional attacks chained off that. That was the big problem with the original Huge Green Dragon. If the die rolls came up wrong, you could do a pretty ridiculous amount of damage, and that was assuming no crits...

Mostly, but you had things like the Shadow Thieves with the Shadow Dragon (don't remember which Bestiary that was with) that had problems too because of chained die riders. The standout was the 1e and 2e Huge Green Dragons, though, which were corebook monsters. Some of the giants weren't great...

There's also considerable changes in the monster design at the upper end. A lot of Epic and some Champion tier monsters were, to be charitable, overtuned.

I wanted to enlarge a bit on what I mean above. The two typical 3D6 systems I'm familiar are GURPS and Hero. In principal you have a 16 point range in resolution that means anything there, but in practice parts of that range aren't actually used, usually the bottom end of the range (rolls with...

I caught that, but I still maintain its going to be visible at some point more than others because *small discrepencies in roll" have more visible effects at some points than others with a 3D6 roll. If a 15% difference in the weighting doesn't actually change the output, it'll be invisible, but...

I think you're making a mistake thinking its going to only be a 15% there. As I noted, a 15% lands very differently in the point in the curve. At some levels people won't notice it because it won't even be a point on the roll. At others, it would be most of the range. Again, I think the...

Its not particularly bounded, but there's not really much in the way of modifiers, either; as @bsss above says, the GM sets one of a limited set of target numbers, and then you're adding a D20 roll, the Background value (which is normally going to be maybe a +6) the attribute bonus (maybe +5 at...

At which point I think people would have to be less sensitive to low rolls (since I'm assuming they can still see the totals) than any set of players I've ever seen. Its one thing to not be able to tell a +2 from a +5 in a D20 roll; its a very different thing pretty quickly to not tell it in a...

I'd argue its obvious in more games than not once you get away from the D20 and D100 systems. Unless the dominance of the D&D sphere makes the rest of those irrelevant, I don't think this is so much "crafting a scenario" as noting that its a point that makes no sense throughout much of the hobby.

As I noted, bonuses on 3D6 systems are not symmetrical throughout the range, and as such can end up playing a great degree of significance in a situation. For example, a +3 modifier on a roll-low 3D6 system like Hero or GURPS can turn an 8- roll into an 11_ roll. That may not look like a lot...

Well, I'm fortunate that I can't really run a combat in any system that cares at all about position without a map, so I never tried to do that. I just didn't use a grid.