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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 9864364" data-attributes="member: 75787">For any dice mechanic, there is the distribution of the dice results, which typically are linear (e.g. d100), bell-curve (e.g. 3d6) , or some form of long-tailed (e.g. exploding dice). And then there is the mapping of numeric results to the game-world results, which can be varied, but generally look a bit like this<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">target number is all you care about</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">target number with a potential critical success</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">target number with critical success / fumbles</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">various target numbers determining degree of success.</li> </ul>d20 is one of the simplest systems - linear results, target number + criticals. That's why it's  good default. The bad thing is that everything is linear, so your chance of a critical is independent of your chance of success, which is not tremendously realistic.BRP's d100 has a linear rolling distribution, but has non-linear degrees of success depending on your skill, so your chances of good or extreme success are proportional to your skill. Very reasonable, with the only bad side being that you can end up dividing 67 by 5 in your head to work out if you got an extreme result. Rolemaster used a table (of course!) for results, so the mostly linear dice with rare exploding dice mechanic had highly non-linear results.Pendragon uses the "blackjack" - roll as high as possible but don't exceed - system, which has the same issue as d20, but has a nice feature that you can directly compare the dice rolls to resolve contests, whereas in a d20 system if you wanted to do that, both sides would need to calculate the amount they exceeded their target by -- slowing the game down a little.The One Ring is an odd example where there are two separate systems being used at the same time with the same dice roll. One is a simple bell curve where you roll a bunch of dice and compare to a target number to determine success, and the second is where you count the number of 6's rolled on the 6-sided die to determine degree of success, conditional on the first evaluation being a success (there are some extra fiddly bits with rolling 1's and 12's). It should be annoying, but in play I've been quite happy with it, even though I have little intuition on what a likely outcome is.The above are examples of fairly standard systems. In general, linear dice + linear results are simple, but not terribly realistic (d20). Next step up is non-linear dice + linear results or linear dice and non-linear results. The latter I find the sweet spot -- it's easy to know your chances of basic success, and on the relatively infrequent occasions where you roll well, you do a little math based on your skills to see if you get a better than normal success.If you go for non-linear rolls + non-linear results, it's hard for people to get a feel for what the expected outcome is likely to be, and that is an immersion-breaker as we'd expect our characters to have that knowledge.And then there are the oddball systems where which do weird things like collecting sets of similar dice (Outgunned,  One Roll Engine). For me, they have to be very thematic to overcome the annoyance of not having a feel for what's going on. So the Classic Deadlands mechanic where you roll dice to see how many cards you get and then assemble your best poker hand is an insane, unpredictable, bonkers mechanic -- and I love it for the theme!d20 and Fate are the only two systems I play regularly that are all linear. Like [USER=7031982]@Bill Zebub[/USER] I do like to see non-linearity in results, but I also like the simplicity of linear dice rolling, so for me the sweet spot is a linear dice roll and non-linear results -- and I think BRP has the best approach I have seen for that. Anything more complicated, and there has to be a big thematic payoff for me, otherwise it feels like the system is trying to obscure its mechanics.</blockquote>

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