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<blockquote data-quote="ST" data-source="post: 5165917" data-attributes="member: 14053">I think that's a good point, but it's particular to GURPS. The HERO system also uses 3d6 roll under target number, but depending on the genre you can have fights that last quite a while. (Champions super-level fistfights between bricks, for example.) I do agree that a bell curve system does push more of the &quot;What happened&quot; part of resolution to the damage roll. Killing Attacks in HERO in particular are extremely swingy. Most of my teenage gaming was done in either HERO or GURPS, so I don't get personally worried about modifiers swinging the rolls off either side of the bell curve; typically those systems had lower modifiers as a result. That the traditional breakpoints (8-, 11-, 14-) roughly correspond to 20%, 50%, and 80% probability makes it pretty easy to eyeball, too. Heh, I guess I'm saying I don't necessarily disagree with you, even though I thought I did. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> It's totally true that keeping large modifiers a la 3e/4e would have some funky results on a 3d6 curve.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ST, post: 5165917, member: 14053"] I think that's a good point, but it's particular to GURPS. The HERO system also uses 3d6 roll under target number, but depending on the genre you can have fights that last quite a while. (Champions super-level fistfights between bricks, for example.) I do agree that a bell curve system does push more of the "What happened" part of resolution to the damage roll. Killing Attacks in HERO in particular are extremely swingy. Most of my teenage gaming was done in either HERO or GURPS, so I don't get personally worried about modifiers swinging the rolls off either side of the bell curve; typically those systems had lower modifiers as a result. That the traditional breakpoints (8-, 11-, 14-) roughly correspond to 20%, 50%, and 80% probability makes it pretty easy to eyeball, too. Heh, I guess I'm saying I don't necessarily disagree with you, even though I thought I did. :) It's totally true that keeping large modifiers a la 3e/4e would have some funky results on a 3d6 curve. [/QUOTE]

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