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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 6873542" data-attributes="member: 9789">This is exactly how I feel.You have once again defined the problem pretty well.  I'm still not sure how to really fix it, though.I mean, you could easily transcribe skills into a Vampire-like d10 system:  abilities in D&D are secretly (shhh!) just -1 to 5, and skill bonuses are 0 to 6 (well, really 0 to 4 because who honestly gets to level 13+ ever?) so you could directly transpose skill checks as the Vampire skill check.(Sidebar:  for those unfamiliar, in Vampire you have attributes and skills in the exact same way; they are 0-5 for skills and 1-5 for attributes, and just like D&D you add those together for your total - in this case, your total is your dice pool, or number of dice you roll.  So the worst you could do is roll 1 die and the best is 10 dice.  Then you roll all those dice and count your successes.  What is a success is supposed to be set by the difficulty of a task - so an easy task means any die results of 3 or more is a success, and a very hard task means any dice that are 8 or higher are successes.  We houseruled this to 6 for everything because otherwise it's annoying and the practical effect is not changed much.  Then, the number of successes shows you how well you did:  1 means you barely made it and 3 means you did exactly what you wanted, and 5 successes is basically a "critical success."  No successes means you failed, and if you roll a 1 on a die and also get no successes, that means you critically failed.  Also, 1s cancel successes on a 1-to-1 basis.  We also houseruled in exploding 10s to counter the 1s bit, but that's the gist of it.  Also, you can do opposed rolls the exact same way - each opponent's successes cancel the other one's.)However this introduces a fair amount of complexity, especially since combat would be resolved so differently than everything else.  And while the skill / social system transposes easily, the combat system 100% does NOT.  Combat in D&D is hinged on the heavily modified d20 roll against the armor DC (or roll) and the whittling away of vast sums of HP.  Vampire combat is clunky but it is fast and brutal.  Combat is so serious you actually want to avoid it if possible, whereas in D&D it's considered the default action.  It's an entirely different set of assumptions.  (Sidebar:  it works like the skill system:  roll for successes, subtracted by opponent's defense - but most things have 7 HP, with a practical limit of 4, and damage types come much more into play.  Initiative is insanely important.)Thinking about it more, we might experiment with a d10-based dice pool for skill / social checks since it's so easy to transpose:  it's not complex to us since we're used to it and it does give a better range of outcomes.  If someone was a purist, it's pretty easy to transpose D&D DCs to d10 difficulties:  DC 5 = 3, 10 = 4, 13 = 5, 15 = 6, 18 = 7, 20 = 8, 23 = 9, 30 = 10.  Round down (so a DC 14 is 5).  (But "everything is 6" is much easier to remember.)Edit:  Just wanted to add that advantage/disadvantage could be achieved by increasing / decreasing the difficulty (so if the difficulty was 6, advantage could mean it's now 4, and disadvantage would mean it were now 8.)</blockquote>

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