Let's Talk About Core Game Mechanics

[Scott Christian]

Speaking of mechanics, a long time ago we greatly enjoyed the MERP systems style of combat. It was D100, but you could take your skill and subtract a portion of it to modify any attacks against you. For example, if I had a 55% in one handed weapons, I could just use 33% of it to add to my roll. The other 22% would be subtracted from my opponent's roll. I am not sure I would like it now, but we enjoyed it at that time in our lives.

 

[500 Toads]

Opposed rolls are probably more common than direct subtraction -- whether in terms of comparing degree of success such as how BRP-family systems tend to do it, or net successes in various die pool games such as Shadowrun -- but the current Runequest does use a skill subtraction method in a very particular scenario, where somebody who manages a weapon skill greater than 100% results in subtracting the excess from both his and his enemy's effective skills, making it that much harder for his opponent to attack or parry him. That system does get a bit fancy with >100% skills also enabling one to split the skill rating to make multiple attacks within the same round, too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'd argue that to the extent that is true, it's not at the resolution of the delta between linear and normal.

Maybe not, but again, something has to convey the degree of edge one (or one's opponent) has in a combat exchange, and that's one of the functions numbers convey.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Skill 80 = 80% doesn't take into account the difficulty (or armor class) of the challenge, nor situational modifiers. And personally I don't like RPGs that ignore those things.

Most percentile systems don't ignore those things (though baking in armor penetration into the to-hit is largely a conceit of D&D descended games) but the final result is still a percentage.

As I said above, I doubt even very educated guesses are at finer resolution than the difference between linear and normal distributions.

Eh. May still be a case that the actual differential is more pronounced, because things like 3D6 resolution don't feel the need to make sure that the failure chance is potentially high the way it seems like at least D20 based games do (probably in part because most of them as I mentioned don't feel a need to bake armor penetration into that roll).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Opposed rolls are probably more common than direct subtraction -- whether in terms of comparing degree of success such as how BRP-family systems tend to do it, or net successes in various die pool games such as Shadowrun -- but the current Runequest does use a skill subtraction method in a very particular scenario, where somebody who manages a weapon skill greater than 100% results in subtracting the excess from both his and his enemy's effective skills, making it that much harder for his opponent to attack or parry him. That system does get a bit fancy with >100% skills also enabling one to split the skill rating to make multiple attacks within the same round, too.

A functional but kind of klunky way to represent a way for post 100% skills to have function besides increased special and critical results.