D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants

[AbdulAlhazred]

I did consider rolling a die on the side. Do you mean that you take say a '+' to mean that a 1 or 20 is more severe? That would still be only 10% of the range. What's key I suspect, is to find a way to differentiate the meanings of broader parts of the range. Suggested in the DMG is that failing by <6 has no downside, and failing by >5 has a downside. And that is used in some published adventures. It's just fiddly to implement. With AW the result is a 5 and I know what that means. With the DMG method the result is a 5 and I have no idea what that means until I also recall the DC and subtract 5 from it. Locking the nuance to the result is far easier to apply than varying it by the DC!

Well, PbtA isn't measuring your chances of success. It is providing a randomized input to the story in order to generate tension and keep things moving in unexpected directions. The bonuses you can apply in PbtA do represent your ability to 'be in control' as a character though, which is similar to what they do in d20. Anyway, HoML uses the "5 more than required for success" option to give you 'Complete Success' which means you get to achieve the objective of your check without any downside. On a 'normal success' you haven't usually completely dealt with the situation, or it left some complication. I don't have a critical failure rule, doesn't seem needed, though I toyed with it a while back. I think 3 levels is enough, KISS.

Looking then at the result on the die. One might picture (for ability checks, not attack rolls) -

• die shows 5 or less, a failed check comes with a drawback
• die shows 15 or less, a successful check comes with a drawback, a failed check is just a fail (the fail is the drawback)
• die shows 19 or less, any success is just a success
• die shows 20, any success is an enhanced success

In this picture, there are no guaranteed successes or failures on ability checks (accords with PHB RAW), but when you do succeed or fail, that might come with nuance. A feature that might bug people is possibly a disconnect between character skill (its modifiers to the check) and the outcome. Say I am an expert tier 2 rogue, with +4 PB and +3 from my ability score. So I have +11. If the DC is 17 I can fail only on 5 or less. So if I fail at all, 100% of the time that comes with a drawback. Possibly that will drive dissonance. OTOH it makes Reliable Talent more worthwhile!

It isn't a bad idea, not sure it is less 'fiddly' than the 'succeed by N or more' way though.

EDIT Another method I thought of, drawing inspiration from Bushido, is that if die shows an odd number then the outcome includes a drawback. That naturally scales with character skill. In the case above, our rogue has a 15% chance of fail with drawback, 10% chance of straight fail, 35% chance of success with drawback, and 40% chance of straight success.

This always struck me as a pretty simple method. A few games have used it over the years. IIRC Bushido has some pretty ridiculous failure consequences though. lol. OTOH Samurai are like gods and get all sorts of crazy power ups. Combat was pretty much a bad idea in that game though unless you WERE a Samurai, it was stupid bloody.

 

[clearstream]

As a mathematician I would just point out that there's no reason you cannot emulate the behavior of 2d6 with a d20, it is just probabilities. obviously you could say 17+ total success, 8+ success with complication, otherwise complication without success. That emulates the PbtA 2d6 throw pretty accurately. Heck, you have more freedom, you can tweak those numbers in 5% increments, which is a lot easier. While bonuses/penalties will indeed 'stack' in a linear vs non-linear fashion, the difference is not HUGE and IMHO it is easier to deal with. You also have to consider (dis)advantage, which already hands you a non-linear mechanism to use. I like PbtA games, they have their virtues. I'm not totally in love with 2d6, nor necessarily the dice pool mechanics of FitD or similar engines. They can be convenient, but they tend to break down in unusual cases due to non-linear behavior. d20 offers BOTH types of options. Heck, you can always stack more than 2 dice on a 'take the best' mechanism if you want REALLY non-linear.

Absolutely agree. 2d6 is kind of neat, and also kind of clunky. I like normal distributions. I dislike the effect of modifiers. When it comes to dice pools, I love using them. I just dislike that it's hard to intuit what chance you have.

I hoped to suggest something like what you are saying here in post #715 - in the bullet points. Do you think it's okay to just consider the number rolled on the die?

Say I its DC 15 and I have +7, so I need 8. I'm guaranteed 8+ on the result (die+mod). In this case, unlike PbtA, I'm guaranteed at worst success with complication, and I enjoy about a coin-flip for total success. Or we can look at the number on the die (per my post #715). Or we can look at something about the die, like its parity.

 

[clearstream]

Well, PbtA isn't measuring your chances of success. It is providing a randomized input to the story in order to generate tension and keep things moving in unexpected directions. The bonuses you can apply in PbtA do represent your ability to 'be in control' as a character though, which is similar to what they do in d20. Anyway, HoML uses the "5 more than required for success" option to give you 'Complete Success' which means you get to achieve the objective of your check without any downside. On a 'normal success' you haven't usually completely dealt with the situation, or it left some complication. I don't have a critical failure rule, doesn't seem needed, though I toyed with it a while back. I think 3 levels is enough, KISS.

It isn't a bad idea, not sure it is less 'fiddly' than the 'succeed by N or more' way though.

Yup, its fiddly. What I fear most is the check - did I succeed or fail - and then the question - was that with complications? I suspect the added step - the tiers - will require enough parsing to cause hiccoughs in play.

This always struck me as a pretty simple method. A few games have used it over the years. IIRC Bushido has some pretty ridiculous failure consequences though. lol. OTOH Samurai are like gods and get all sorts of crazy power ups. Combat was pretty much a bad idea in that game though unless you WERE a Samurai, it was stupid bloody.

So far, it looks most promising to me. With a few tweaks such as 20 being an enhanced success. Some people feel nervous about parity, it seems. Again there is the question - parity of result, or parity on die. I suspect result will flow best in play.

In other news, what I liked about Bushido was that combat was such a bad idea, unless you were samurai (well, you could make some decent budoka and there were some neat things you could do with sai). Twin swords, piercing attacks, and iajutsu, were all terrific! Bows were decent. To me its combat had a superb feel.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As a mathematician I would just point out that there's no reason you cannot emulate the behavior of 2d6 with a d20, it is just probabilities.

You'd have to have repeated die rolls to do so completely, and it might well be tricky to rework the modifiers so it produced an equivalent result since their effect on 2D6 isn't linear.

It also depends on how fussy you are, of course; if you consider "close enough good enough" its much easier.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yup, its fiddly. What I fear most is the check - did I succeed or fail - and then the question - was that with complications? I suspect the added step - the tiers - will require enough parsing to cause hiccoughs in play.

Well, Dungeon World feels pretty 'light weight'. There is NO CASE where the numbers are not 6-, 7+, and 10+, so you never have to go look anything up, there's no 'DC', nothing. You may have modifiers, they tend to be in the range of say -1 to +3. There are very few other mechanics to the game, and all of them relate to these rolls (hold and forward basically) or to damage. So things move right along.

So far, it looks most promising to me. With a few tweaks such as 20 being an enhanced success. Some people feel nervous about parity, it seems. Again there is the question - parity of result, or parity on die. I suspect result will flow best in play.

Well, parity is parity, mathematically.

In other news, what I liked about Bushido was that combat was such a bad idea, unless you were samurai (well, you could make some decent budoka and there were some neat things you could do with sai). Twin swords, piercing attacks, and iajutsu, were all terrific! Bows were decent. To me its combat had a superb feel.

The problem was character lifespan was brutally short. At some point in any story arc violence ensued and 90% of the PCs got turned into dissected character bits. There wasn't some sort of magic to fix that either! IIRC that was basically the rock upon which the Bushido campaign finally sank. That and the fact that the rules were so monumentally obtuse that only the GM understood even 1/2 of them (if that, I suspect he just made up a lot of it on the fly). Well, it was an early RPG, such things were par for the course back then.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's kind of odd. I was aware of at least two Bushido campaigns back in the day, and the PCs didn't seem to die exceptionally often, certainly nothing like 90% per fight.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's kind of odd. I was aware of at least two Bushido campaigns back in the day, and the PCs didn't seem to die exceptionally often, certainly nothing like 90% per fight.

Well, honestly, it was the 1970's. I would be hard-pressed to recall much of the details of any given session of play. I remember playing a Ninja, which was cool, but no match for any of the bushi types (but good at running away!). The trend was that PC attrition was pretty high. The game seemed to miss that what was considered COOL about 'Japan stuff' back in the day was basically Martial Arts and sword fighting, not obscure tenets of Buddhism. So, players WANTED to fight it out, but then they died, a lot. OA, for all its faults, was closer to the mark, though certainly vastly less flavorful. Bushido was fun, and we liked it, but it was more DESPITE the mechanics than because of them!

 

[clearstream]

Well, honestly, it was the 1970's. I would be hard-pressed to recall much of the details of any given session of play. I remember playing a Ninja, which was cool, but no match for any of the bushi types (but good at running away!). The trend was that PC attrition was pretty high. The game seemed to miss that what was considered COOL about 'Japan stuff' back in the day was basically Martial Arts and sword fighting, not obscure tenets of Buddhism. So, players WANTED to fight it out, but then they died, a lot. OA, for all its faults, was closer to the mark, though certainly vastly less flavorful. Bushido was fun, and we liked it, but it was more DESPITE the mechanics than because of them!

We were able to make some very effective budoka. My strongest bushi used sword (piercing) and sai. I must go along with @Thomas Shey in saying that our campaigns were nowhere near as lethal as yours seem to have been.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

We were able to make some very effective budoka. My strongest bushi used sword (piercing) and sai. I must go along with @Thomas Shey in saying that our campaigns were nowhere near as lethal as yours seem to have been.

Well, it is quite possible that we were using different interpretations of the rules too. They are VERY complex and quite obtuse. I don't think there was much editing and when I go back and look at them there's a lot of stuff that I'm just like "I have no idea how this is supposed to work." It is kind of on a par with original D&D in that sense, and there aren't a lot of explanations of how the whole combat process as a whole WORKS. Clearly the author assumed readers would "just know" a lot of stuff!

So, it is quite possible you guys have interpreted things in a really different way than the GM (IIRC his name was 'Bill') did way back in 1978. I can say that in his interpretation it was QUITE common for a Samurai to get so many bonus actions right off the start line to just murderize the whole party before they even got their turns.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, I neither played nor ran those campaigns (though I wouldn't have hesitated if someone was interested in the latter), but those that did didn't seem to think the mortality rate was excessive. Mind you, we were also playing RuneQuest in that period, so our expectations were set by that more than by D&D.

But the third and fourth level characters people apparently had by the time those campaigns ended must have survived somehow, and I know there were no lack of bushi among them, so...