Dragonbane Announces Two New Books

The Soloist said:

Player: I’m an expert, I have 80% chance of success. I love roll under systems. Same player, 5 minutes later: I have no training in that skill. I have 20% chance of success. I hate roll under systems.

It’s the same math as D&D but because the odds are clearly spell out, many players hate seeing how inept their characters are at some tasks.

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It’s not quite the same math unless you make heavy use of bonuses and penalties for the roll-under system. Because in D&D, the GM can set the DC low, no matter how bad your skill level is.

One of the main things with roll-over systems is that you can often obscure the difficulty by not telling the players the target number. So you can get "I rolled a 5, plus my skill of 10 for a total of 15. Did I succeed?" With roll-under systems, there's a greater expectation that you'll be told the difficulty modifier up front so you can know right away if the roll succeeded. This means that it's harder for a GM to adjust things in the players' favor in roll-under systems.

Of course, these are generalities. Some roll-over systems have fixed target numbers and use modifiers that the players are supposed to know before rolling (e.g. Savage Worlds, mostly). You could also have the same effect in a roll-under system where the player'd say "I rolled 3 below my skill, do I succeed?" – but that of course runs the risk of creating serious feelbad situations where the player rolled below their skill and yet failed because of secret modifiers.

I'm always up for some more Dragonbane stuff, even if it's just for their artwork!

overgeeked said:

Here's a post I made on the Dragonbane general thread about flipping the math.

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That's very easy.

Feels like Free Leauge could easily redo the whole line for me .

sevenbastard said:

In one hand Free League does the best books. On the other hand it's a roll low system with ducks.....

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You say that like it's a bad thing. It's better than 5E, I'll tell you that. Nothing wrong with ducks. D&D has gnomes and hobbits.

Free League also consistently has the best art in the industry.

Dragonbane is good fun, new players I have ran it for like the roll under method as it is easier to pick up.

This system looks very deadly? Does this affect the type of adventures to be had?

Matrix Sorcica said:

This system looks very deadly? Does this affect the type of adventures to be had?

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You can't just go toe-to-toe with the monsters like in 5E, but it's more forgiving then early D&D.

Here's a free adventure by Free League you can look through to get an idea of what they're like.

Funnily enough, or maybe because my first RPG was a d100 based system (Top Secret), I totally am fine with roll low when using a percentile-based ruleset. 66% chance? Roll 66 or less? No problem!

Anything else though -- d6, d20, whatever -- and the aversion bites me hard as well. Actually, hold on... because I have no problem with it when playing Battletech. Huh, interesting. Exposure breeds familiarity which lessens aversion, I guess...

Kannik said:

Funnily enough, or maybe because my first RPG was a d100 based system (Top Secret), I totally am fine with roll low when using a percentile-based ruleset. 66% chance? Roll 66 or less? No problem!

Anything else though -- d6, d20, whatever -- and the aversion bites me hard as well. Actually, hold on... because I have no problem with it when playing Battletech. Huh, interesting. Exposure breeds familiarity which lessens aversion, I guess...

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Same here. I love roll-low d100 games: BRP, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer RPGs, etc, but for some reason I always had a hard time with d20 roll-low games (Pendragon, Dragonbane, Black Hack, etc).

But I think my aversion is more on rolling just 1 die instead of 2+ dice. I'm ok with GURPS' 3d6 roll-low system, for example. Funny how the mind works.