D&D 5E Is the d20 sacred?

[Sunseeker]

Unified mechanics are important for ease of play.

This. It's good for a game to have a standard, repeatable, core mechanic(roll a d20) to it. I'm teaching a guy the ropes of the game ATM and I can tell that "roll a d20" as a core mechanic is helping him.

I like rolling dice, but I am no fan of the d4 or the d10, their shapes lead to poor rolling.

 

[TerraDave]

The d20 and d6 have always gotten more love.

You could always play Savage Worlds.

Also, I like the d12. Just saying.

 

[Argyle King]

In the past, I've had pretty good results with using 2d10 instead of a d20.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I also quite like dice pools, when used reasonably. I like the core d20 mechanic too though. At its heart, it's just a way of resolving a percentage chance of something succeeding, and it's the way that bonuses interact that always cause problems with it.Take the simplest possible check, you flip a coin and want to know if it lands head or tails - roll a d20 and beat DC 11 to land heads. The problem comes when we start to scale things up - if you make a strength check with d20+3, you can't get less than a 4 and you can now reach 21-23, and we give this meaning.

We could consider limiting all DC/AC/etc in the range 1-20 - now there are no special numbers that can't be reached by people with very high skill checks and we can give out all the bonuses and penalties we want, your chance of success remains between 0 and 100% in 5% increments. This is unnatural at the ends of the distribution though, we always want a chance of success and a chance of failure, and you can't do that so well with a single dice plus modifiers. No, a bell curve is more natural to us because most things happen within the range of a single standard deviation. Could we mimic this with a d20? With exploding dice perhaps, since each 1 or 20 takes you further outside the first standard deviation in a strange discretised version of the distribution. We might also want to consider other ways to modify what we actually roll - advantage/disadvantage changes the shape of the distribution but doesn't recentre it, whereas say, halving the modifier you add to the check equally affects two different bonuses in a way that applying a -2 to both doesn't.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Looking through the old modules at dndclassics.com and going through the rulebooks for all the editions I realized that somewhere along the line the d20 have taken supremacy around the gaming table and the rest of the dice hardly ever get used any more.

Why is that?

3E and the d20 system which intentionally moved everything it could to d20 rolls instead of various other dice. The intent was to make it easy to learn the system by not having to know that this ability is a d10 roll, that one is d%, this one is roll high, that one is roll low. Just roll d20 for anything you try to do and high result is always better than low.

Is that a good thing?

It does make it easier to learn how to play when you have all these different dice in front of you for the first time. I have personally known people who really did have problems learning what dice to use and how under earlier systems. However, it was really no more difficult than learning that the square orange peg doesn't go in the blue round hole. While it has mechanical advantages for game design the downside of using the d20 for everything is that it eliminates variety from the game. Doing anything becomes too much like doing anything else and that can seem quite boring.

From a design standpoint it also discounts the idea that not everything SHOULD use the same dice because you don't need or necessarily want the same range of possibilities applying to EVERYTHING. Sometimes you may actually want the finer degree of adjustments that come with % rolls. Sometimes you don't need more than 1-10 and one or two adjustments. Not everything needs to be a d20 roll that is then modified all to hell.

The irony is that they eliminated a lot of use of all these different dice from the game to make it simpler - but then built into the game the notion of "system mastery" where learning the fiddley details of the game was supposed to be a lot of the fun.

MHO

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I don't know about that. I mean, nature does love the bell curve, so I think that 3d6 is definitely more realistic, but for a game I think that having a 1 in 20 chance of getting the best outcome (as opposed to 1 in 216) is more dramatic and more fun.

A fair point. I prefer a more realistic mechanic, but it's not the one true way. Strangely enough, the d20 mechanic is straightforward enough to let you switch between 1d20, 2d10, and 3d6 with only minimal effort.

 

[Ahnehnois]

A fair point. I prefer a more realistic mechanic, but it's not the one true way. Strangely enough, the d20 mechanic is straightforward enough to let you switch between 1d20, 2d10, and 3d6 with only minimal effort.

And indeed, we've seen some of those variants presented officially. I'm all for that really, but I do think that the best starting point is the d20, because it's easier for beginners to just track the one die. It doesn't bother be to read Unearthed Arcana and see the 3d6 rules there.

 

[WhimsyTheFae]

I <3 d20

I've been drawn to other systems with more "realistic" and less "realistic" rolling mechanics, but in the end I do prefer the simplicity and range of the d20. It's swingy, yet not as swingy as a larger flat range. It's limited, but not as limited as a smaller flat range.

The fact that it is flat is the only thing that has made me question it, but I've come to realize that I'm okay with it and find the swinginess to be exciting.

Mutants and Masterminds is one of my top three systems and the sole use of a d20 is part of the reason.

 

[The Human Target]

Yeah, its a question without a right answer really.

I'd like to see the other die used more in 5E, but that would be as simple as increasing the differences in damage dice.

Why can't a greatsword do 1d8 plus 1d4 damage?

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Its too darn swingy. I'd much prefer a D10 or D12, or even better, 2D6. But it ain't gonna happen. No way, no how. Darn!

But to answer the question the OP actually asked, yeah, one die to rule them all just makes too much sense to go back to using everything. The price of 'progress', I suppose.