D&D 5E Surprisingly, nothing breaks when switching D&D to 2d10 instead of d20

Charlaquin said:

I would argue that seriously reducing σ is breaking the game. The game was designed around the σ it has, reducing it is by definition breaking that design conceit. Now, that may be a desirable thing for you, in which case, awesome! I’m glad you found a way to achieve that without significant undesirable side-effects. But I don’t think it’s accurate to say nothing breaks. You’re literally breaking some of the most fundamental underlying assumptions of the game’s math. But if that improves the game experience for you, have fun!

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DEFCON 1 said:

I would suggest they are bending the math. not breaking it.

Can you actually run the game almost completely as-is using 2d10 rather than 1d20? Yup. Some special rules might need to be edited, and any mathematical proportions will be slightly different... but the game itself doesn't stop working. So I wouldn't say it was broken by any means. Different? Yes. Requiring more work to figure out the highs and lows and averages for encounter building and the like? Yes. Unable to be played as a game? Nope. It can play just the same more or less.

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loverdrive said:

Since I've started using fixed DC (10- fail, 11-17 partial success, 18+ full success), I was playing around with various ways to shift the numbers to generate more partial successes on average, while still allowing +0 characters to achieve full success. The most radical solution I had in my list was to switch to 2d10, which I recently tested, just as a joke.

But, to my surprise, it worked. Like, worked very well. It breaks nothing, while seriously reducing σ. The only bug I've encountered is that automatic misses just never happen, but I'm honestly fine with that.


I guess it's not something I'll be more than experimenting (it'd be hard to explain people why in the nine hells am I using 2d10 instead of d20), but that's still some food for thoughts.

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Crit said:

I'm interested, but what will I do with my D20's!?

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clearstream said:

And critical hits are going to be far less common (1:100 instead of 1:20). Maybe make 2s auto-fails, and 19-20 criticals?

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loverdrive said:

Just to clarify: my definition of "nothing breaks" isn't "nothing changes" (at which case, what's even the point?), it's "the game still works without tons of ad-hoc patches". So, something like reintroducing THAC0 or d6 skill checks or active defenses I'm using in my separate hack would count as breaking changes in my book, but 2d10 remains compatible with all the content that exists for 5e without any additional rewriting, with two (at least, to my knowledge) exception: aforementioned halflings' luck and critical misses.

And, again, this wasn't a serious design work, it was just a little fun thing we've tried as a joke, which, to my surprise, worked reasonably well.

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TiwazTyrsfist said:

So Green Ronin has this lovely thing called the AGE system that uses 3d6 instead of d20, and they've already done all the math and playtested it so, while I'm sure you don't want to switch the game entirely, you could life a lot of the system from there instead of having to reinvent the wheel.

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