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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ashkhar Ben" data-source="post: 6168908" data-attributes="member: 6749162">Hey Mike! I've looked over your system as well on your blog, very clean and easy to understand. Thanks for the feedback and compliments, always highly appreciated. Long AnswerThe three different levels of success came about during when I was making, believe it or not, a system for Adventure Time (an awesome show, by the way.) I had a few of my friends and their kids come over and play, as they're all huge fans of the show. I wanted character creation to be very quick and easy for the kiddies to understand. In my AT RPG, there were no skills. Instead, there was just Body, Mind, and Spirit actions. Traits were included, but you only got to pick one, and your species (candy person, marauder, human, animal, robot, etc) got an extra trait as well. So for example Marauders got a bonus to melee fighting, and got to use Body for other actions that some of the other races had to use Spirit for. This created enough mechanical complexity, and a binary success system. You rolled 1d6-3d6 (depending on traits and species), and if any of the dice came up as a success, then your character succeeded. After that short campaign ended (which was a blast to play) the adults and some of the older kids were interested in expanding options. I had my regular game going at the time using a heavily hacked version of PF in Ashkhar, and I was in the process of making my sci fi rules. So, I started making Ashkhar from the ground up for fantasy. When I went back a year or so later to start implementing Ashkhar Basic, I returned back to the Adventure Time RPG I had made and started building off of that. What it does mechanically is that it allows players to have less skill investment, but still be better than other players at the same task. For example, a character with Great Spirit will be twice as likely to succeed at a Resistance roll than someone with Okay Spirit. Even if the guy with Okay spirit has 3d6 into Resistance, the guy with great spirit is about on even footing. This creates a nice dichotomy and complementary system between innate abilities and training, which ties into the character's personality. Also, as most tasks in Ashkhar are between 1 and 3 Difficulty, and it is assumed that the average character will have between 2d6-6d6 in every Skill after a few levels, it would be pretty easy to just smash through everything if it was all 4+ or 3+. Using only three attributes has its own difficulties (the tradeoffs are still very positive in my opinion) and so making them feel different was important to me mechanically. Short AnswerAttributes create mechanical advantages for players that have the same amount of investment into a dice pool. 3+ on a 1d6 roll is about equal to a 5+ on a 2d6-3d6 roll; this makes it important to differentiate between innate ability/talent and training. Re: confusing dice mechanicThe reason for dice pool mechanics is to nearly eliminate any math. I have a lot of playtesters for the Ashkhar Complete system, and many close friends who have played various d20/d100 games with me over the last decade, and there are a surprisingly large number of very intelligent people who find multiple number arithmetic very challenging. In Ashkhar complete, it uses a 3d6 (in place of d20) + modifier. So a common roll is 3d6 (sum) + Skill mod + Specialty mod + Assets + Techniques + Weapon + Misc/Circumstances. For the average player, this isn't a problem, but I'd say anywhere between 10-20% get near paralysis when adding these numbers. Even just 3d6 + mod. While I'm sort of inclined to say "tough" to these people, even I have a hard time keeping all of the numbers straight after playing a few hours (and arithmetic is something I have no problem with.)Thus, using a d6 dice pool does two things: eliminates any math beyond counting and create pretty easy to understand probability. Trying to explain to a 12 year old that a +1 bonus on 3d6 + mod nearly doubles that character's chance of success against a specific TN is confusing to them, as it doesn't feel like that much. But saying you get to roll 2d6 instead of 1d6, they get it. Inherently. Being able to simply say "roll these five dice, and anything higher than a 3 is good" makes it a lot easier to explain the rules and easier for the GM to keep track of everything.</blockquote>

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