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Masterbook EZ Debuts On The Lighter Side of Gaming
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<blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7697031" data-attributes="member: 19857"><p>As an old TORG/Masterbook GM and player, there's one thing about the system that is unclear from your review (and I suspect given how you speak about it that you aren't doing by the book): Raw die rolls are never used in these systems. Instead, the process for resolving a task is always:</p><p></p><p>* Roll the dice, exploding on 10s and 20s (TORG) or 10s (Masterbook/Shatterzone). Get the final die total.</p><p>* Read the die total on the Bonus Chart to get your actual Bonus Value</p><p>* Add the Bonus Value to your Skill + Attribute to get your final total</p><p></p><p>You never add the die roll directly - you always go through the Bonus Chart. Note that for Masterbook this gives a range of -10 (if you roll a 2) to +9 (if you roll a 20) for non-exploding dice. Adding the exploding dice into the mix skews this because the high end of the tail theoretically goes off to infinity if you keep rolling 10s. But this "infinity" grows more slowly than the die totals because once you hit 20 on the die roll you only get an additional +1 bonus for each 5 over 20. </p><p></p><p>As to why we did it this way - well, it was the early 90s. We were trying all sorts of die-rolling conventions in the 90s and seeing what would happen. And we had been using a number of chart-based games for a while (see the original Marvel Superheroes RPG, Mayfair's DC RPG, all of Pacesetter's output like Chill, and TSR's experiments with Gamma World and Star Frontiers around this time for examples). This one was designed (by Greg Gorden for TORG) to be able to model exponential differences using a linear scale for a cross-genre mashup game so that you could have superheroes and elven wizards flinging around fireballs on the same team as an Indiana Jones or an American Ninja and the numbers would never be too ridiculous (in practice the superheroes never really got more powerful than the Rocketeer or Doc Savage in the game world, so the flexibility of that system never really got pushed). When they ported the system to Shatterzone they moved it to 2d10 instead of 1d20 and the bonus chart is a bit different when you use a bell curve instead of a linear distribution with it, though I think it mostly has the impact of making wild results less likely.</p><p></p><p>If I were going to try to get rid of the bonus chart, I would likely start by taking a leaf from the Feng Shui or Icons die-rolling conventions - roll 2d10 with one marked as negative and the other as positive. Subtract the negative from the positive and that's your bonus. To keep the spirit of Masterbook allow only the positive die to be exploded. (There are other ways you could do this, but I suspect this would be the easiest for keeping the published DNs as is).</p><p></p><p>(Gorden was the lead designer on Mayfair's DC Roleplaying Game and I've long suspected that a lot of the "lessons learned" from that game ended up in TORG. It and its descendant Masterbook were as far as I know the "last gasp" of chart-based games in the playing field.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jer, post: 7697031, member: 19857"] As an old TORG/Masterbook GM and player, there's one thing about the system that is unclear from your review (and I suspect given how you speak about it that you aren't doing by the book): Raw die rolls are never used in these systems. Instead, the process for resolving a task is always: * Roll the dice, exploding on 10s and 20s (TORG) or 10s (Masterbook/Shatterzone). Get the final die total. * Read the die total on the Bonus Chart to get your actual Bonus Value * Add the Bonus Value to your Skill + Attribute to get your final total You never add the die roll directly - you always go through the Bonus Chart. Note that for Masterbook this gives a range of -10 (if you roll a 2) to +9 (if you roll a 20) for non-exploding dice. Adding the exploding dice into the mix skews this because the high end of the tail theoretically goes off to infinity if you keep rolling 10s. But this "infinity" grows more slowly than the die totals because once you hit 20 on the die roll you only get an additional +1 bonus for each 5 over 20. As to why we did it this way - well, it was the early 90s. We were trying all sorts of die-rolling conventions in the 90s and seeing what would happen. And we had been using a number of chart-based games for a while (see the original Marvel Superheroes RPG, Mayfair's DC RPG, all of Pacesetter's output like Chill, and TSR's experiments with Gamma World and Star Frontiers around this time for examples). This one was designed (by Greg Gorden for TORG) to be able to model exponential differences using a linear scale for a cross-genre mashup game so that you could have superheroes and elven wizards flinging around fireballs on the same team as an Indiana Jones or an American Ninja and the numbers would never be too ridiculous (in practice the superheroes never really got more powerful than the Rocketeer or Doc Savage in the game world, so the flexibility of that system never really got pushed). When they ported the system to Shatterzone they moved it to 2d10 instead of 1d20 and the bonus chart is a bit different when you use a bell curve instead of a linear distribution with it, though I think it mostly has the impact of making wild results less likely. If I were going to try to get rid of the bonus chart, I would likely start by taking a leaf from the Feng Shui or Icons die-rolling conventions - roll 2d10 with one marked as negative and the other as positive. Subtract the negative from the positive and that's your bonus. To keep the spirit of Masterbook allow only the positive die to be exploded. (There are other ways you could do this, but I suspect this would be the easiest for keeping the published DNs as is). (Gorden was the lead designer on Mayfair's DC Roleplaying Game and I've long suspected that a lot of the "lessons learned" from that game ended up in TORG. It and its descendant Masterbook were as far as I know the "last gasp" of chart-based games in the playing field.) [/QUOTE]
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