D&D General Who should roll the dice... in combat.

[AOieiosle]

Have you looked at the Black Hack? All player-facing rolls.

 

[Cadence]

Have you looked at the Black Hack? All player-facing rolls.

I need to check out both it and Cypher.

 

[overgeeked]

I need to check out both it and Cypher.

There's a lot of cool stuff in Cypher / Numenara, just don't expect things to be mechanically balanced. It's kinda old-school in that regard. There are explicitly broken builds and casters get most of the cool toys so are of course OP.

 

[Cadence]

There's a lot of cool stuff in Cypher / Numenara, just don't expect things to be mechanically balanced. It's kinda old-school in that regard. There are explicitly broken builds and casters get most of the cool toys so are of course OP.

I'm mostly picking up ideas for an e6/e8 mishmash of things I might write down some day, so a book of cool stuff to stretch beyond the things I'm familiar with sounds like a thing. Thanks for the rec!

Edit: Hard to argue with $7.99 for a pdf of the player's guide

 

[overgeeked]

I'm mostly picking up ideas for an e6/e8 mishmash of things I might write down some day, so a book of cool stuff to stretch beyond the things I'm familiar with sounds like a thing. Thanks for the rec!

Cool. They recently did a 2E of Numenara and went a little sideways with the books. Discovery is the new basebook with all the rules. Destiny is kinda a PHB2 and DMG2. If you're looking for bizarre science-fantasy stuff, you should also check out Worlds Without Number. Lots of great stuff for hexcrawls and world creation.

 

[DeviousQuail]

Does it feel "not D&D" to the players? Or does it feel that way to the DM because they aren't rolling? Or both?

I would say Cypher is close enough that it wasn't jarring to move between them. A lot of the gameplay was similar to what you'd expect from dnd with a few quirks instead of something that's entirely different. I still had fun as a DM even though I wasn't rolling dice.

As for damage everything had a flat number that you could increase by spending limited resources or by rolling high on the d20. When you roll a 17 on the d20 you get to add 1 damage, +2 for an 18, +3 for a 19, and +4 for a 20. It's pretty simple, rewards the highest attack rolls, and folds attack and damage into one roll.

If you do check out Cypher go in knowing it is less complex than dnd.

 

[the Jester]

The reason I don't like player-always-roll systems is that I, the DM, also like to roll dice.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Players Always Roll helps keep the narrative focus on the pc's, speeds up play by giving players stuff to do off-turn, and generally lets players feel more in control. It also expands the usefulness of meta-mechanincs like rerolls. The downsides are mostly just the inverses of this: npc's can feel like fodder, and the world can feel less real. It also removes fudging dice as a dm tool.

Even if I were to go with this, I would probably allow major npc's to roll, and make tests against them (and pvp) roll-offs, despite the change in odds from this.

Other options include Attacker Always Rolls (easy to grok), All Rolls Opposed (easy to grok, keeps players involved, twice as much rolling), Depends on the Mechanic in Use (what DnD actually does, makes magic more special, fiddly), DM Always Rolls (which could be interesting if all rolls were behind a screen), and Defender Always Rolls (I don't know why anyone would do this).

 

[Lyxen]

There was an UA for a ''players always roll'' rule a few years back. I seem to remember the maths were a little off, but I'm sure someone here would be able to give you the right calculation to implement such rule.

We did this in 3e at the start of a voluntarily brutal campaign, and it worked quite well, but we were amazed and a bit shocked when the option came out in UA and they got the math wrong (basically forgetting to reverse the success on "equal or greater").

In a sense, it's fun because it makes all players more active, but on the other hand our games work better when there is a bit of mystery about creatures, what they can do, and often the actual situation of the encounter that the PCs only see through the DM's descriptions. So we ended up dropping it.