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<blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7709692" data-attributes="member: 19857"><p>It's a style of mechanic that I actually quite liked back in the day. Success is tied to your ability scores, not to GM determined target numbers. If you beat your ability score you succeed, if you don't you fail. The better your roll the better your success. (Possibly the worse your roll the worse your success, but Alternity didn't really go there except for the "critical fail" rule). Your opposition takes the form of bonuses/penalties on the roll instead of an external target number you're rolling against. Usually its tied in with opposed contests being opposed rolls, though not always.</p><p></p><p>What was nice in the original Alternity (and in the 2nd edition Top Secret, where I suspect this mechanic was actually taken from in-house when Alternity was built) was the precomputed levels of victory right there on your character sheet. Having the Marginal/Good/Amazing or whatever categories made things less number-centric in a lot of ways - major calculations were done offline and just put into the character sheet and then when the roll happened you could just say "I got a Marginal" or "I failed" or "I got an Amazing". The only time numbers were mentioned is if someone got a 1 because they'd say "I rolled a 1 - I don't remember, is that good?" and then we'd have to remember if it was better to roll a 1 or to roll equal to your best success target number (there were games that went both ways - I want to say that in Alternity a roll of 1 was a critical success, but I can't remember if it was that or if you hit your Amazing target number exacty to be honest). Tying them to the ability score was nice because it meant that if you had a higher ability you had a bigger "spread" of target values. Someone with a 10 in a skill would have 10/5/2 (I think - it's been awhile) - meaning that if they rolled a 2 or less they had an Amazing success. Someone with an 18 in a skill would have an 18/9/4. Mathematically that's different from just having every 3 values be a better roll - it curves the successes out more so that the guy who has the higher skill isn't always off the chart. Half of the time his successes will still be average successes, it's just that he'll score his average successes almost twice as often than the guy with a 10 and will be more likely to get a success in the face of penalties. (And having it all precomputed on your character sheet meant that you weren't doing the math in your head either - so even though it looks weird, it plays pretty smoothly).</p><p></p><p>The roll under system in Top Secret 2e was actually quite nice, because it was just a percentile check. In Alternity it got weird because you had a bonus/penalty die to modify your die rolls and the bonus die subtracted from your die rolls while the penalty die added to your die rolls. The hard part of the system for new players in my eyes was teaching players to subtract when they had a bonus and add when they had a penalty. I tried to reverse it to a roll high system the way that Sasquatch is doing it here, but the game petered out as D&D 3e was coming out and we switched back to D&D and by the time we came back to revisiting Alternity we'd decided to try d20 modern instead. Plus reversing it makes it really weird in another way - now you're better at something if your skill level is lower, which my players also balked at. (They didn't like roll-low and they didn't like low-stat so .... d20 worked for them even if it made them do more math in their heads).</p><p></p><p>(All that said - I'm still looking forward to this revamp and I hope to get some of my players to give it another shot.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jer, post: 7709692, member: 19857"] It's a style of mechanic that I actually quite liked back in the day. Success is tied to your ability scores, not to GM determined target numbers. If you beat your ability score you succeed, if you don't you fail. The better your roll the better your success. (Possibly the worse your roll the worse your success, but Alternity didn't really go there except for the "critical fail" rule). Your opposition takes the form of bonuses/penalties on the roll instead of an external target number you're rolling against. Usually its tied in with opposed contests being opposed rolls, though not always. What was nice in the original Alternity (and in the 2nd edition Top Secret, where I suspect this mechanic was actually taken from in-house when Alternity was built) was the precomputed levels of victory right there on your character sheet. Having the Marginal/Good/Amazing or whatever categories made things less number-centric in a lot of ways - major calculations were done offline and just put into the character sheet and then when the roll happened you could just say "I got a Marginal" or "I failed" or "I got an Amazing". The only time numbers were mentioned is if someone got a 1 because they'd say "I rolled a 1 - I don't remember, is that good?" and then we'd have to remember if it was better to roll a 1 or to roll equal to your best success target number (there were games that went both ways - I want to say that in Alternity a roll of 1 was a critical success, but I can't remember if it was that or if you hit your Amazing target number exacty to be honest). Tying them to the ability score was nice because it meant that if you had a higher ability you had a bigger "spread" of target values. Someone with a 10 in a skill would have 10/5/2 (I think - it's been awhile) - meaning that if they rolled a 2 or less they had an Amazing success. Someone with an 18 in a skill would have an 18/9/4. Mathematically that's different from just having every 3 values be a better roll - it curves the successes out more so that the guy who has the higher skill isn't always off the chart. Half of the time his successes will still be average successes, it's just that he'll score his average successes almost twice as often than the guy with a 10 and will be more likely to get a success in the face of penalties. (And having it all precomputed on your character sheet meant that you weren't doing the math in your head either - so even though it looks weird, it plays pretty smoothly). The roll under system in Top Secret 2e was actually quite nice, because it was just a percentile check. In Alternity it got weird because you had a bonus/penalty die to modify your die rolls and the bonus die subtracted from your die rolls while the penalty die added to your die rolls. The hard part of the system for new players in my eyes was teaching players to subtract when they had a bonus and add when they had a penalty. I tried to reverse it to a roll high system the way that Sasquatch is doing it here, but the game petered out as D&D 3e was coming out and we switched back to D&D and by the time we came back to revisiting Alternity we'd decided to try d20 modern instead. Plus reversing it makes it really weird in another way - now you're better at something if your skill level is lower, which my players also balked at. (They didn't like roll-low and they didn't like low-stat so .... d20 worked for them even if it made them do more math in their heads). (All that said - I'm still looking forward to this revamp and I hope to get some of my players to give it another shot.) [/QUOTE]
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