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Message: <blockquote data-quote="5ekyu" data-source="post: 7419063" data-attributes="member: 6919838">Saelorn"A big problem with older editions of Shadowrun is that modifiers could either come in the form of having extra dice to roll, or in lowering the target number required for success"I was going to ref WoD as in,1st printing VtM.There things varied the number of dice rolled, the threshold needed on each die for success and the number of sux needed for "success" and it was obvious quite a few times the designers needed to have hired statisticians at least for one afternoon of review.I loved that game and got years of great play out of it but it was in spite of things like that.To the main question... Two points.1 False Precision - i have come to not be a fan of small modifiers and especially lotsa modifiers of different types and sizes. My position is simply thing, significant digits matter. You dont as a rule gain anything by reporting outcomes to the third decimal point when one of your measurements was "handfuls". RPGs tend to be working at the "handfulls" or "heaping spoonfull" level of precision at best and by the time you start pretending to be making choices at the "is it worth 1% or 3%" level, you are fooling yourself about the actual granularity cuz likely for every "one percent modifier" you sweated there will be a half dozen 10% sized swimgs you hand-waved or just ignored.2 Consistency in degree... A modifier to be useful needs to provide a rsther consistent pattern as far as "how much does it help" that both a gm and player can see. This is where to me things like roll 3d6 sum - HERO - fail with +2 or +5 etc... A +2 might only result in changing outcome so rarely it doesnt matter or may have a major impact on odds  (succeed on roll of 6+ instead of 4+ vs succeed on roll of 9+ vs 11+)  and that doesnt track or align with in game features like " difgicult task" vs "easy task." So to my way of thinking, a modofier system needs to work with not getting too hung up on minutae and to provide "consistent feeling" swings... It also needs to allow for changing the upper reach in some cases and just changing odds within the same reach in others.DnD 5e for instance has advantage but also a system built on situational DCs. So a gm can choose to lower a dc or raise it at the moment of assignment or change of circumstances ot to allow advantage (or both)But with there basic DC levels being 5 apart and the sizes of advantage and disadvantage - it seems a reasonable balance to me.</blockquote>

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