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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5799200" data-attributes="member: 4937">There are basically two mechanics upon which rest all of RPG diced based proposition resolution.  The first is as you put it "adding and subtracting numbers from some other numbers".  The idea is that you have to roll above (or below) some target number.  However, sometimes this is easier or harder than normal because of circumstances and you add or subtract from your roll.Is <fortune> + <modifier> >= <target>?   If so, say, "Yes."There are variations on this theme.  One common variation is that the target is also randomly determined by fortune.   This leads to greater unpredictability at the cost of an extra dice throw.   Another common variation is to standardize the modifier on the basis of subjective difficulty, so that for example an easy task requires beating a target of 10 while a hard task requires beating a target of 30 (equivalent to get a circumstantial -20 modifier on the task).   Some games, like D20, tend to do both which gives you a lot of granularity at the cost of being fiddly.  Another common variant is to throw more than one dice and then some up the results in order to obtain your fortune.  More dice gives you a more predictable result by producing a bell curve, but has the cost of more difficult math, additional effort to read the results, and can break the game by being too predictable at high levels of character power.  Mechanical RPG design in my opinion is largely a matter of figuring out which tradeoffs among the many variants are best for the particular game you are trying to make.  Do you want fast play or granularity?  Do you want unpredictable gritty random death and injury, or for the protagonists to tower over their foes in a predictable fashion?  Are you willing to tolerate are large amount of subjectivity, or do you want to encourage competitive play by making the system less open to interpretation?The other mechanic is basically a coin flip.  Flip X coins to obtain at least Y heads.  You can vary this quite a bit too, but oddly this mechanic tends to end up being more complicated than simply adding and subtracting numbers from other numbers.  For one thing, its not trivially obvious to most people what the odds of flipping at least 3 heads on eight coins is, especially if you've done anything wierd with the 'coins' so that 'heads' and 'tails' aren't the only outcomes.   In my experience, they tend to have all the problems of all the variants on "adding add subtracting numbers from other numbers" combined.  They are fiddly, require extra mental effort, have complicated math, are unpredictable and quickly break as the dice pools get large.  I've never liked them much, but I'll tolerate any system if the game is good enough and ran well enough.</blockquote>

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