d20 vs. 3d6 "dice heresy" by Chris Sims

[Quantum]

What he really wants to play is Gurps.

Or even Fantasy Hero.

 

[Ourph]

Why not just take ten?

I like the take 10 mechanic, but the OP didn't include that as an option. I can only work with what I'm given.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

His entire premise is flawed from the start.

D&D is not - and should never become - WoW. Aside from the emotional arguments that can be made, the games are just too drastically different. In fact, I'll even skip the number crunching, and instead say this:

You want to reduce grind in your game...so you're copying from an MMO?

Really?

There are two types of fights in WoW - trash mobs you steamroll, and non-trash mobs you get the wheel ready for. In a standard instance boss fight, it's typically a long ordeal that requires you to carefully whittle down the enemy's HP while doing whatever the particular gimmick of that fight is. Some fights have you running around a lot, some have you moving or attacking in patterns, others have classes do something special for it, etc, etc. But the main goal of the fight is the same - there's the boss, he has a giant amount of health, slowly bring him down.

That's not what D&D is - nor is it what D&D should be.

The heresy isn't the method of rolling. The heresy is the incredibly flawed - and, quite frankly, stupid - belief that D&D is supposed to be analogous to WoW. in the first place.

 

[awesomeocalypse]

The 60% to hit chance that he cites as the 4e standard seems a little low to me. I mean, maybe when the game was first made and if you weren't using a ton of synergy. These days though, its easy to optimize characters for a 70%+ base hit chance, and it is also easy to get massive synergy bonuses with even a modicum of thought. Plus, 4e characters often have a huge number of ways to make sure their most important attacks hit, e.g. action suge, lead the attack, elven accuracy, dark one's own luck. Point is, if the DM is designing fair encounters and the players are missing on their most important powers with any sort of consistency, there's a good chance they're either playing fairly suboptimal builds, or not using a lot of teamwork.

For my part, I'd say my characters hit about 75% of the time on ordinary attacks (higher if i'm playing a striker or going out of my way to optimize) and closer to 90% on really important attacks. To me that's basically ideal

 

[blargney the second]

Wonder if anyone ever tried replacing the d20 with 2d10 for to-hit and skill check rolls in D&D.

Yeah, I ran with that one for a few months. We ended up dropping it for several reasons, not least of which that it restricted the range of monsters that I could use. Easy monsters were easier and hard monsters were harder.

 

[Votan]

The 60% to hit chance that he cites as the 4e standard seems a little low to me. I mean, maybe when the game was first made and if you weren't using a ton of synergy. These days though, its easy to optimize characters for a 70%+ base hit chance, and it is also easy to get massive synergy bonuses with even a modicum of thought. Plus, 4e characters often have a huge number of ways to make sure their most important attacks hit, e.g. action suge, lead the attack, elven accuracy, dark one's own luck. Point is, if the DM is designing fair encounters and the players are missing on their most important powers with any sort of consistency, there's a good chance they're either playing fairly suboptimal builds, or not using a lot of teamwork.

For my part, I'd say my characters hit about 75% of the time on ordinary attacks (higher if i'm playing a striker or going out of my way to optimize) and closer to 90% on really important attacks. To me that's basically ideal

If you think that this is the central issue, wouldn't an easier fix be to subtract 3 from all monster defenses? It's easy to remember and it doesn't alter the general impact of bonuses on results.

In the same sense, if grind is a massive issue, dividing everyone's hit points by 2 seems to work surprisingly well (at least conceptually -- this has not been heavily playtested and some of the odd number rounding could create some unpleasant side effects).

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

His entire premise is flawed from the start.

D&D is not - and should never become - WoW. Aside from the emotional arguments that can be made, the games are just too drastically different. In fact, I'll even skip the number crunching, and instead say this:

You want to reduce grind in your game...so you're copying from an MMO?

Really?

There are two types of fights in WoW - trash mobs you steamroll, and non-trash mobs you get the wheel ready for. In a standard instance boss fight, it's typically a long ordeal that requires you to carefully whittle down the enemy's HP while doing whatever the particular gimmick of that fight is. Some fights have you running around a lot, some have you moving or attacking in patterns, others have classes do something special for it, etc, etc. But the main goal of the fight is the same - there's the boss, he has a giant amount of health, slowly bring him down.

That's not what D&D is - nor is it what D&D should be.

The heresy isn't the method of rolling. The heresy is the incredibly flawed - and, quite frankly, stupid - belief that D&D is supposed to be analogous to WoW. in the first place.

Way to miss the forest for the trees. The meat of the argument is about the feel of misses and their relative importance. He could have chosen any number of examples, but chose WoW because it's a very stark difference from D&D in action economy. It is also a modern example that everyone is likely to have some familiarity with.

That has nothing to do with "making D&D into WoW." Making that claim about his argument is a strawman, at best.

If you want to critique the actual argument, do that, but fixating on the window-dressing isn't helpful.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Way to miss the forest for the trees. The meat of the argument is about the feel of misses and their relative importance. He could have chosen any number of examples, but chose WoW because it's a very stark difference from D&D in action economy. It is also a modern example that everyone is likely to have some familiarity with.

That has nothing to do with "making D&D into WoW." Making that claim about his argument is a strawman, at best.

If you want to critique the actual argument, do that, but fixating on the window-dressing isn't helpful.

Except his entire argument is built on "This isn't fun - take WoW for example."

He wants to kill swinginess even more. Fine. I think it's the stupidest thing he could do, changing the dice rolling, but fine. His call. The issue is when his reasons for it are basically "Look at WoW, where you never miss. That's fun." How about later, when he says "Look at WoW, where you do static damage. That's fun."

You can't compare the two, and that is his argument. "Missing isn't fun, unlike WoW." You can't ignore that second part when he spends just as much time talking about WoW as he does D&D - especially when his prime reason for making this change was "this isn't fun - look at WoW"

What he's advocating is more or less greatly altering the way the game works in order to make sure the player almost always hits and almost always does good damage, and his entire purpose of doing so is because "It's not fun, like a video game." Even if you strip out the WoW part, his whole argument is still built on this statement: "Video games that use die-roll-like mechanics have high hit rates."

Again, that's the heresy. The idea that you need to eliminate chance, make things static, and, want to directly copy the design philosophies of video games. I don't care if someone takes a few hints from video games, but when you want to take the design philosophies from it, there can be an issue - and there is an issue when those philosophies run counter to tabletop game philosophies, such as trying to eliminate chance.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Except his entire argument is built on "This isn't fun - take WoW for example."

That's not what he was saying. You are blowing "take this example from WoW" completely out of proportion.

He was saying that the time cost for missing is disproportionately high given how long it takes before you get to act again. Which can be farking forever in 3.x and 4e. This contrasts perfectly with WoW, where you get to act every 1.5 seconds or less.

Both are ludicrous extremes.

In WoW, you act every 1.5 seconds, but they've set the game up so that nearly every action (and your passive damage!!) have a positive consequence. This is extreme. It's actually not defensible as a reward system for average people, but is catered to a high end optimizer in the raid game.

4e is built expecting a 60% hit rate, give or take. And missing means you have had minimal or no impact for... what? 10-20 minutes, depending on nature of the combat and the table. You get to spend 40% of that time as a failure. Good on ya. There is a fair case to be made that that is not fun, that has nothing to do with WoW.

He mentioned WoW because it is a familiar example to people, but he still comes down on a system that is far closer to baseline D&D. There are about 50 iterative steps between where 4e is on these lines and where WoW is. He takes maybe 1 step, and if you read his actual argument, it is informed by statistics, not WoW.

He made one aspect of his game 1% more like WoW. The blasphemer. That's not even enough to call it convergent evolution, much less "inspired by WoW."

There is a difference between "using as a contrasting illustration" and "inspired by."

 

[amerigoV]

On the 3d6 action - I was looking over DragonAge RPG, which uses that mechanic. They did some cool things with the multiple dice. For example, if you rolled doubles, then you could pull some special maneuvers. How many maneuvers as based on the result of one of the 3 dice (the dragon die). As PCs leveled, each class got their own special maneuvers.

I think the hard side would be balancing the opposition. I have played as much for 4e, but for 3.5 you need some swing to hit some critters. As others have said, you are pushing results to the norm, so lower defense critters are almost always hit and hit ones are not.


"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing"