NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Werthead" data-source="post: 9408660" data-attributes="member: 7045643">I remember when Alternity rolled out with its always roll-under mechanic. It seemed to evolve from one of the 2E complaints, that you were rolling low one second (ability checks) and then high the next (for attacks) but trying to get as low an AC as possible but as high EXP as possible. It felt like a bit of a mess.One solution was to switch everything to "always roll low" which sounded great, but fans seemed to soon find the loss of "20 to crit, 1 to fumble" to be a bridge too far and there was a lot of complaining about it. I think WotC's research as they took over (they inherited the game from TSR but IIRC it launched on their watch) was that people were not keen on it.Incidentally it was interesting that Alternity basically had the Advantage/Disadvantage system backed in before 3E even launched, but they used a variant where the second die was a "control die" that added or subtracted an entire die depending on skill level and difficulty. One of those ideas that sounds great until you've done it a few times and then you're trying to roll as low as possible on 1d20 but adding 1d4 on top, which is actually making your score worse rather than better. It's like THAC0 in that it's absolutely simple as a concept, but the tiny amount of extra cognition it takes can be irritating, especially if gaming after a work day and you're looking to do less brainwork.I suspect the Alternity experience was why D&D 3E launched with "always roll high!" as the alternative mechanic. Which worked out well with the exception of ability scores, which since 3E have been vestigial and useless. Alternity at least made the 1-20 scale for ability scores make sense in itself.</blockquote>

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