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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Starfox" data-source="post: 4632493" data-attributes="member: 2303">Exploding dice and similar open-ended die-rolling methods (my favorite is Feng Shui) work well to produce the occasional exceptional rolls. In a system that awards exceptional rolls, this adds fun and randomness to the story. For example, Feng Shui adds the margin of the attack roll to damage. If you hit exactly, you might only do a few points of damage, but with an exceptional (and rare) roll, you can do many times the normal damage, which is fun if sometimes a little anticlimactic. A similar result is achieved with the 3.0 and 3.5 critical mechanic - if you roll 20, you can roll against the normal difficulty to verify, and if this second roll succeeds you get an exceptional result. There was an optional rule to use this for skill rolls as well. This is a good way to include exceptional results - the critical success is rare, and the system allows for a reasonable basic chance to succeed. The way to do this with open-ended dice is of course to call any die roll that succeeds by a large margin - say by 20 points in "exploding d20", to count as a critical success.What this system does NOT do is allow the GM to set unreasonably high DC knowing the players always have a minimal chance to succeed. Having less than 5% chance to succeed at something does not make a good story. In fact, anything with less than a 25% chance to succeed is usually not very fun. In this case, the d20 mechanic works really well - the linear success chance insures there is generally a reasonable chance to both succeed or fail, or the roll is irrelevant and can be skipped altogether.</blockquote>

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