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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7540902" data-attributes="member: 6775031">There's a lot that you can do with a d20. For example, you could calculate the distance between the pre-determined value and the actual value, giving specific degree of success or failure based on how far above or below you ended up rolling. Of course, doing so would mean sacrificing the greatest strength of the system, which is that it is fast and easy to determine a result.The part about undermining player choices is tangential to the dice mechanics. As far as 5E goes, I would blame that more on Bounded Accuracy than on the d20 system. It would be trivial to build a d20 system where the strength of your choice completely overpowered the randomness of the die, but it would involve letting a specialist character automatically succeed in situations where most characters would automatically fail.The part about it being a simple game of chance, well... I suppose, if you place the emphasis on the "simple". Every die mechanic is a game of chance, which will yield somewhere between 0% and 100% chance to accomplish any action. In that regard, the d20 system is notable because it's easy for a player to see exactly what those chances are (although the same is true for a simple percentile system).I think this is more on the mark. Because a d20 uses flat 5% granularity, either something will never happen, or it will happen at least 5% of the time; and you make a lot of checks in every session, which means you're going to roll a 1 or 20 multiple times per night. It's nice to be surprised, occasionally, but the d20 system makes those surprises far too frequent (if they happen at all).</blockquote>

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