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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8808400" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes.I sometimes make reference to &quot;Celebrim's World Simplest RPG&quot; which has an apparently complete rule set that involves flipping a coin for everything.&nbsp; The mental toy is intended to explain why RPGs have rules in the first place, and why RPG rules tend to become heavy over time.The problem with flipping a coin for everything is that there is no verisimilitude.&nbsp; Jumping over a puddle and jumping over the Atlantic Ocean are equally difficult and equally easy.&nbsp; So you immediately find that you have the need for more granular rules if you don't want your game to be absurd and potentially meaningless.&nbsp; You can attempt to achieve granularity by flipping multiple coins, but this turns out not to work very well because of the limited sorts of probabilities you can generate.&nbsp; Yes, you can generate easily the 3 most essential probabilities in most RPG systems - 50/50, 75/25, and 25/75.&nbsp; And it turns out that having things like 95/5 and 5/95, which you can simulate with 5 coins, needing at least 1 or else all 5 successes, are really nice as well.&nbsp; But the problem gets to be with coin-based systems the shifts between difficulties when you modify chances based on character skill or circumstance.&nbsp; Not only are they not intuitive, but small shifts can great large impacts on the actual chances of success or failure that aren't intended.&nbsp; A good example of this in an actual published system were the actual odds of success on the original Skill Challenge framework published for 4e that was hidden beneath the intuitive layers of coin tosses that hid unintuitive math.&nbsp; So no, you need more than 1 d2, and if you try to write a system that depends on nothing but d2's it turns out to be harder than it looks.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8808400, member: 4937"] Yes. I sometimes make reference to "Celebrim's World Simplest RPG" which has an apparently complete rule set that involves flipping a coin for everything. The mental toy is intended to explain why RPGs have rules in the first place, and why RPG rules tend to become heavy over time. The problem with flipping a coin for everything is that there is no verisimilitude. Jumping over a puddle and jumping over the Atlantic Ocean are equally difficult and equally easy. So you immediately find that you have the need for more granular rules if you don't want your game to be absurd and potentially meaningless. You can attempt to achieve granularity by flipping multiple coins, but this turns out not to work very well because of the limited sorts of probabilities you can generate. Yes, you can generate easily the 3 most essential probabilities in most RPG systems - 50/50, 75/25, and 25/75. And it turns out that having things like 95/5 and 5/95, which you can simulate with 5 coins, needing at least 1 or else all 5 successes, are really nice as well. But the problem gets to be with coin-based systems the shifts between difficulties when you modify chances based on character skill or circumstance. Not only are they not intuitive, but small shifts can great large impacts on the actual chances of success or failure that aren't intended. A good example of this in an actual published system were the actual odds of success on the original Skill Challenge framework published for 4e that was hidden beneath the intuitive layers of coin tosses that hid unintuitive math. So no, you need more than 1 d2, and if you try to write a system that depends on nothing but d2's it turns out to be harder than it looks. [/QUOTE]

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