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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tashtego" data-source="post: 6468313" data-attributes="member: 5373">I have a player who specialises in optimising and breaking systems!  His current character is:6d6 to stealth - 2 AGI (Starting), Felan (+2 AGI), Scavenger (+1 AGI), Street Thug (+1 AGI), Burglar (+2 AGI), Infiltrator (+1 AGI), Burglar (+2 AGI).So that's 11 AGI to start with, or 4d6,  and then getting 2d6 in Stealth through skill raises.  So he was rolling 6d6, trying to hit the Demanding difficulty.  The more dice you roll, the more variation you get in the rolls as the standard deviation increases.A lot of his builds were focused on raising a particular stat.  He's sent me some builds recently with 12 PSI, 16 Rep and so forth.  I haven't audited them yet, but you can make very pointy builds in the system. (I can put up these heavily optimised builds in another thread if you're interested.I've been using the table - 16 for difficult, 21, 25.  Day to day tasks (routine) tend to fail as a lot of the PCs, even in the unoptimised ones, will only get 1-2 dice in routine tasks.  They only started spending dice to for effects when they were confident that they could hit creatures in the system.  At low dice pools - 2 to 3, there's not much interest in spending dice as you don't get enough of them.  Aim and feint were very popular in combat.  A popular turn combo was aim/attack or feint/attack.Ok.I was doing it to simulate the PC's resistance to the virus and was doing a roll for each day of the infection.  We didn't have enough d6s to leave in front of each player to simulate the countdown going on, and given the gaps between each roll (each day of game time), they had to write it down, which could have contributed to the PCs misunderstanding the system or not making it clear.  What you describe only seems to work for 'sudden' countdowns in one scene, rather than a long, gradual illness.  Maybe I'll a shorter time frame countdown in the next session.  You should also make it clear that the countdown dice pool is based on the stat number.  It also seems odd to shift dice scales from the exponential one to the linear one!Yeah, I think you need something offset the volatility of high d6 pools. Have you thought about shifting from d6 additive pools to something with less of a high standard deviation? (e.g. 'success' based dice pools like WoD or Shadowrun, or even allowing pluses to a dice roll, like the d6 system?) Or maybe make everything opposed, so the GM rolls a dicepool against the player rather than using a standard difficulty table with set difficulties.  Just a random thought.Just being players! Beefing up their attack/violent skills and neglecting the rest. When I beef up the difficulty to challenge the players, others get penalised as they have low pools in other areas. As you move away from the career system to freeform XP, it doesn't seem to support well-rounded characters.I use flat XP (even in D&D) rather than monster-based fights.  I prefer to design encounters with different goals (e.g. get the space ship to work, survive the radiation exposure) and base these as being equivalent to each other, rather that just using monster-based XP.There wasn't a system for story rewards, or succeeding at encounters, or even a suggestion of how much to reward for an adventure or game session, so the 10K was a punt in that direction.It did! I would suggest tightening up on the core first (given how you can easily get pointy builds from the career system) before working on the other subsystems.</blockquote>

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