Author Topic: Dice Pools  (Read 2431 times)

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Offline Erik L (OP)

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Dice Pools
« on: March 24, 2014, 06:55:28 PM »
I know we've got some fairly smart people around here, so I thought I'd throw this at y'all and see what sticks.

I have a fantasy RPG in the works, though the genre is irrelevant. It currently is pretty much a d20 clone. I'm working to change that. Dropping the classes in favor of skills. Skills. They currently are percentile based. There are six ranks of skill, Unskilled providing a -25% bane, Novice at 0%, Apprentice with +5% bonus, Journeyman with 10%, Master at 20% and Grandmaster at 30%. Target numbers are Trivial (25%), Easy (40%), Moderate (55%), Difficult (70%), Hard (85%), Challenging (100%), and Impossible (120%). So as you can see, you currently need to be a master or gmaster in a skill to hit an impossible task.

Now each skill has a stat associated to it. The stats run from 0 to 10. This will change to -5 to +5.

I'm looking at changing the core mechanic to a dice pool system. You get +1 die (1d10) for each rank in the skill plus one die per stat. But Erik you say, what about negative stats? Those provide bane dice. So if you are attempting a skill you are Journeyman in (3d10) and you have a stat of -2 for that skill, you'd roll 5 dice; 3 bonus dice and 2 bane dice. The bane dice trigger on the absolute value of the stat, or in this case a 2 or lower. Each bane die success negates a regular die success. Currently I'm thinking a Trivial task has a TN of 5, Easy is 8, Moderate is 10, Difficult is 10 with 2 successes, Hard is 10 with 4 successes, Challenging is 10 with 6 successes, and Impossible is 10 with 8 successes.

My issue stems from the fact that I am trying to keep relative percentages the same, but I'm not sure how to calculate percentages with a die pool.
 

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Dice Pools
« Reply #1 on: March 25, 2014, 03:54:23 PM »
Not particularly helpful, but I gotta pipe in anyway,   I hate dice pool systems!  (sure I loved Shadowrun and West Ends Star Wars, but definately not for the handfull of dice gameplay!)

Though something I always loved from Shadowrun, rather than having a flat unskilled penalty on skills have a skill web with connections between the skills and then apply a small penalty for each step away from an actual skill you do have.

Matt
The boggosity of the universe tends towards maximum.