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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8979473" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Oh, certainly. I mostly said that because the most commonly claimed benefits of things like Advantage (binary, non-stacking) are:A) it's impossible for stacking to get out of control if things simply can't stack,B) all the time that would be spent tracking and tallying bonuses now goes to other gameplay, andC) if there's only three states (bonus, penalty, standard), players can intuitively know what they're getting out of various buffs or risk-taking maneuvers.I consider the "cancellation stacking" format (my term, meaning "tally up your buffs and debuffs, whichever is greater is what you have") to be a poor compromise that often ends up being the worst of both worlds. It has, by design, all the limitations of the "no stacking at all" rules (lacks nuance, can't represent degrees of benefit/detriment, easy to overuse and thus make worthless, etc.) But it gives up point C entirely (not that, IMO, Advantage was actually that intuitive to begin with; it's easy to know that it's good, but not how good it is), and weakens point B, possibly to the point of not actually saving any meaningful amount of time.And that's...sort of the rub for this thing. We want to find something that preserves most of the speed, simplicity, and intuitive effect of the "no stacking" method, while regaining some of the nuances, degrees-of-effect, depth of design space, and room to grow so bonuses are at least almost always actually bonuses and not wasted. But I find instead that sacrifices are made on both ends, giving us more than half of the problems and less than half of the benefits of both approaches.And, to be clear, I don't consider my proposed solution very clever either. It's just trying to...sort of play the weaknesses of the two methods against one another so they end up cancelling out and thus being a minor improvement on most fronts. It's still pretty simple (either ±4, ±2, or 0; either best/worst of 3d20, best/worst of 2d20, or just 1d20), but not quite the ur-simplicity of "nothing stacks." It's nuanced enough to cover unusual situations (like having Super-Disadvantage and Super-Boost, meaning you have a very high floor but it's very unlikely that you'll do much better, or the reverse, where you're likely to get a high roll but you have a small chance of utterly bombing) without being a sprawling morass of modifiers. It allows for at least some design depth, but prevents things going off the deep end. And it should still be fairly quick and not particularly counter-intuitive, though it might still take some time to get used to.It's just not really all that elegant, and still leaves things fairly shallow in terms of design space.</blockquote>

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