The Gaming Den

Okay -- I'm ready for it. *(note: if you don't like dice pool mechanics, then you're probably not gonna like this -- can't please everybody)*
I had mentioned this briefly on the "search for resolution mechanic" thread; but I think it got lost in the raging battle of dice resolution times.

I've been hammering away on my own attempt at game design. And I'm ready to throw myself to the wolves -- just make sure to be specific in your criticism, if you please.
At the moment, I'm mainly concerned with just the resolution mechanic; but am happy to discuss other areas (though, be forewarned -- this is all still in the basic R&D phase, so I'm not sure how detailed I'll be able to be)

Well, HERE's an alpha-prototype of the proposed character sheet (I still have to finish up the margin info; but that's dependent upon finishing the product), to help give a visual off what I'm talking about.
The game is meant to revolve around "action/horror", with the PCs filling the role of "Action Survivor" (eventually leveling up to "Badass").

Oh, and this uses exclusively d12s. Why? Because I like them, and feel that they don't get enough love in RPGs.

Okay, so on to it .... here's how it works: (spoilered for space)

For the resolution mechanic, there are 3 main areas that you need to note: 1) Skills ; 2) Traits ; 3) Survivalism
The dice pool = general skill + specialty. Traits determine chance of success. Survivalism is related to exploding dice.

1) Skills:
Skills are broken down in to "general skills" (the bolded skills with the left-set rank boxes) and "specialties" (the un-bolded skills with the right-set rank boxes).
-- CharGen note: you can add ranks in a specialty only after first getting at least 1 rank in the relevant general skill. All skill rolls are linked to specific traits.
In the even that you have to roll a skill and you don't have any ranks at all in that skill, you default to a "chance die". A Chance Die is just 1 die, that can never explode, and if you get a "12", you severely fucked up. This is just a specific case of the general critical failure rule, which says that if all of your dice roll a 12, you just royally fucked up (and we're still working on what exactly a critical failure means mechanically)

2) Traits:
Your ranks in a trait determine your success range. If the # on the die is less than or equal to your ranks in the respective trait, it counts as a success. (Frank already chimed in on this a little on the other thread, and I will address this at the end of the post)

3) Survivalism:
Every 3 (or 4 -- still working that one out) ranks in Survivalism adds +1 to your explosion range (known as your "survivalism modifier"). Dice don't explode at all until you get your 3rd (or 4th) rank in Survivalism; at which point, 1s explode. So, at Survivalism 12, your dice explode on a 4- (or 3-, depending on how the final decision works out).
-- character note: Your actual ranks in Survivalism is your dice pool for "survival rolls" .... which is the equivalent of a "saving throw" or a "willpower roll" or whatnot.

Combat:
Your basic attack roll will be a normal weapon skill roll. Damage dice pools and success ranges will be determined strictly by the weapon (i.e., each weapon will have its own exclusive die pool and hit #); with attack successes counting as "auto successes".
Defense will subtract from attack dice pool, and Grit subtracts from damage hits.

Everything else on the character sheet is open to discussion as well; but like I said earlier, I'm probably only going to be able to give vague general answers. However, discussion of these areas will also do me a lot of good.

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So, there you go. Let me have it.


Now, I'd also like to take the opportunity to address this:

FrankTrollman wrote:So fixed TN 13, but you add bonuses to every die, and you're rolling a fuck tonne of d12s? What the fuck made you think that was a good idea? And the whole variable bonus dice thing is a non-starter because we already saw how shitty that was in nWoD.

-Username17

I've got a couple of questions and an observation:
Q1) At what point is a dice pool considered a "fuck tonne"? I was thinking that a max of 12 dice would stop just short of that particular unit of measure.
Q2) I have no clue what you mean by "variable bonus dice". Unless you're talking about the exploding dice thing .... ???

O1) as noted earlier, I hadn't thought about things as "fixed TN 13"; and kinda liked that ... until I took the time to think about it a little more.
As I see it, it's a matter of player perspective, as well as a very important distinction as it relates to the time it takes to resolve a given dice roll. Here's the deal: when you think on it as "TN 13", you end up having to do up to 12 separate computations in a given roll (granted, it's only adding 2 1-digit numbers; but it's still 12 computations nonetheless). Thinking on it in terms of a success range changes things around, so that you determine what the "hit" number on the dice will be for the roll, and then just count the hits; thus saving loads of time.
anyways, just throwing that out there.
EDIT: with the changes made above, I'm not sure relevant Q2 or O1 are anymore.


Thanks.


EDIT: made appropriate changes as per tussock's recommendations.
EDIT: corrected how defenses work

Survivalism's exploding dice bonus stacks with itself exponentially, but very very slowly. A skill 4 trait 4 roll with no survivalism modifer gives you a mean of 1.33 hits. A surv. mod of +1 gives you 16/11ths of an extra hit, for an average of 2.78 hits. A surv. mod of +2 kicks this up to 2.93 hits. +3 is 3.11 hits. So, while your while your first point of surv. mod gives you +1.45 hits on every such roll you make, the next gives only 0.15 and the third only +0.18 hits.

12 dice is infact a fuck tonne for d12s because most people that own d12s at all have maybe 3 of them total.

Hey Grek,

HERE's a little spreadsheet that I was playing around with. You'll have to excuse some of the mess -- I was playing with some different ideas at the time, and this was just one of my brainstorming "drawing boards".
The way I've got it figured, each +1 survivalism modifier gets you and average of +1/12th of a die per die in your dice pool.

Hey, before I first played WoD, I didn't have a huge pile of d10s. Hell, I didn't own any non-d6s before I started playing RPGs.
Point being, people go buy the dice they need for the games they want to play. Besides, it's not like they're incredibly expensive -- they can easily be gotten for about $0.50 a piece.

d12 are really hard to come by in those numbers. Like, I literally don't know if anyone even physically HAS enough at their table to play your game. Is that a concern for you?

I have literally never sat at a gaming table where there were enough d12s to play this game.

Schwarzkopf wrote:d12 are really hard to come by in those numbers. Like, I literally don't know if anyone even physically HAS enough at their table to play your game. Is that a concern for you?

I have literally never sat at a gaming table where there were enough d12s to play this game.

I've 14 in my bag right now. One of my players has 10. All the other players in my group have close to that. and that's right now, without a game to use all of them.
Besides, they're cheap, and only a few clicks away; and that's if you don't just go down to the local gaming store.

The main complaint I have against the whole 'd12s are just a click away' is that this is only a fact you would know if you were a gamer already. If you intend this system to be something people who are new to gaming take up easily, this is actually a barrier to entry. d6s are much better this way.

Also, what was the reasoning for relying on a d12 based dicepool? Not necessarily a criticism, just curious on the thought process.

wotmaniac wrote:

Schwarzkopf wrote:d12 are really hard to come by in those numbers. Like, I literally don't know if anyone even physically HAS enough at their table to play your game. Is that a concern for you?

I have literally never sat at a gaming table where there were enough d12s to play this game.

I've 14 in my bag right now. One of my players has 10. All the other players in my group have close to that. and that's right now, without a game to use all of them.
Besides, they're cheap, and only a few clicks away; and that's if you don't just go down to the local gaming store.

Wow you guys have a lot of fucking d12. Have you been playing this game already or is this just some weird freak of nature?

Anyway I generally design my games to be played with d6, just because they're the most commonly available and numerous. I really, really like d12 (they're very aesthetically pleasing) but if I were to design a game around them, I'd want to only require like two per player.

My group of 8 has 13 d12's. We will compensate by replacing d12's with 2d6 in every place that you would have us roll d12's.

Schwarzkopf wrote:Wow you guys have a lot of fucking d12. Have you been playing this game already or is this just some weird freak of nature?

Anyway I generally design my games to be played with d6, just because they're the most commonly available and numerous. I really, really like d12 (they're very aesthetically pleasing) but if I were to design a game around them, I'd want to only require like two per player.

Yeah, we're probably some freaks. I don't know where all my dice come from -- I think I've like 5 complete sets of dice for D&D, plus about an additional 5 d8s, 4 d4s, 10 d6s and 30+ d10s. As far as d12s, I even have a couple of these nifty gems.
plus a bunch of weird oddball dice (d30, d24, d16, d14, d7, d5, zoccihedron, some weird special-use dice).

But yeah, there are a couple of games out there that use 2d12 as their base mechanic. oh well.

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Okay, we've established that needing a double fist-full of d12s may be a little inconvenient; so from this point on, let's just pretend that everybody already each has 12 d12s.

Ikeren wrote:We will compensate by replacing d12's with 2d6 in every place that you would have us roll d12's.

*wince*

I hope that was meant as sarcasm. Or a joke. Or something.

I can't say much abut the resolution mechanism. It will put out numbers, and those numbers might even be workable, but without know what an average character is supposed to be able to do, how easy it is for them to use the trait they want on a challenge, and the number of hits needed to succeed at those tasks are I have no idea if the numbers are good or not. There's apparently some probabilistic analysis in a sheet somewhere and Grek did a bit, but it's pretty meaningless without better context.

But I can say this - if you're going to have a thing called "survivalism", don't also have a skill named "survival". That shit is confusing. Go with "outdoorsmanship" for the skill or "plot forgiveness" for the exploding thing or whatever, but change one of them so there is no chance of people being confused over them.

You should also clarify "exploding", as it can be used to mean "roll another die and add it to the first" (not useful here) and straight up "roll another die and check for a hit". I imagine you mean the latter, but clarity is helpful. It would also be nice to know if your bonus dice from explosions can explode themselves or not. I didn't see anything one way or the other here, and that could change the output numbers a lot at high survivalism and dice pools.

Vebyast wrote:

Ikeren wrote:We will compensate by replacing d12's with 2d6 in every place that you would have us roll d12's.

*wince*

I hope that was meant as sarcasm. Or a joke. Or something.

But 1-12 and 2-12 are almost the same thing!

Hey come on guys. That's how 5E is going to work. It's called flexibility! We want to cater to everyone, regardless of what type of die they prefer. Consider these relative equivalencies:

1d20 = 5d4, 3d6, 3d8, 2d10, 2d12
1d12 = 3d4, 2d6, 2d8, 1d10
1d10 = 3d4, 2d6, 1d8, 1d12
1d8 = 2d4, 1d6, 1d10, 0.5d12
1d6 = 1d4, 1d8, 0.5d10

Just round!

OTL

@Traits: stop with the negative armour class thing.

1 rank means you succeed only on a 1. 3 ranks means your succeed on a 1-3. Up to 6 ranks, where you succeed on a 1-6. Obviously crit fails become 12's (or whatever's easiest to spot, maybe 10, it shouldn't matter).

@Survivalism: that's like you're rerolling failed checks or something? Might save you some dice that way at least. Any particular reason you don't make it triple cost rather than div3 for effect?

@weapon damage: STRONG MAN WANT DAMAGE BONUS IN MELEE! Oh, wait, he gets it from his extra attack successes. Cool.

@fuck tonne of dice: I could handle about 20d6 pretty well in shadowrun, though it's quite a bit slower than guys on 8d or 6d, but d12's have got to be much harder to read and pick through. Maybe 8 max?

You probably want a skill+special cap similar to your trait number for the probability to be intuitive (they're equally important in terms of successes). Well, how important do you want skills to be relative to traits?, I guess. For twice as important you'll need 12d12, which might be terribly annoying to roll and read.

TarkisFlux wrote:I can't say much abut the resolution mechanism. It will put out numbers, and those numbers might even be workable, but without know what an average character is supposed to be able to do, how easy it is for them to use the trait they want on a challenge, and the number of hits needed to succeed at those tasks are I have no idea if the numbers are good or not. There's apparently some probabilistic analysis in a sheet somewhere and Grek did a bit, but it's pretty meaningless without better context.

Fair enough. Sorry about that -- I tunnel-visioned and made too many assumptions. Let me go ahead and explicate:
For a basic action, the baseline # of hits required to succeed is 1 -- which can go up depending on circumstances. Having 5+ hits will typically result in some sort of "critical success" type thing.
In instances where an action is opposed by another's action, it will typically be a contested roll, the character with the most hits wins (tie goes to the defender).
There will be certain instances that add to the necessary # of hits ; and certain instances where there will be adjustments to trait scores and/or survivalism modifier ..... all of these circumstances will be specifically detailed under some codified methodology (still working on that at the moment).
Is that the type of thing that you're looking for?

But I can say this - if you're going to have a thing called "survivalism", don't also have a skill named "survival". That shit is confusing. Go with "outdoorsmanship" for the skill or "plot forgiveness" for the exploding thing or whatever, but change one of them so there is no chance of people being confused over them.

Good call. We had actually talked about this some, but were drawing a blank for what else to call "survival", and decided to just put it on the back burner for now. For right now, "outdoorsmanship" ought to work.

You should also clarify "exploding", as it can be used to mean "roll another die and add it to the first" (not useful here) and straight up "roll another die and check for a hit". I imagine you mean the latter, but clarity is helpful. It would also be nice to know if your bonus dice from explosions can explode themselves or not. I didn't see anything one way or the other here, and that could change the output numbers a lot at high survivalism and dice pools.

Yeah, I was talking about the latter -- it's pretty much the same way nWoD dice explode. Also, yes, exploded dice can also explode (and continue exploding, theoretically). The speadsheet takes that in to account.
I pretty much don't want the survivalism modifier to go above 3 or 4 -- mostly because if you go any higher, you start having dice rolling conventions just to resolve a single action.

tussock wrote:@Traits: stop with the negative armour class thing.

1 rank means you succeed only on a 1. 3 ranks means your succeed on a 1-3. Up to 6 ranks, where you succeed on a 1-6. Obviously crit fails become 12's (or whatever's easiest to spot, maybe 10, it shouldn't matter).

Wow -- how did I miss that? That actually would make things much simpler and quicker to resolve.
Consider this change made.

@Survivalism: that's like you're rerolling failed checks or something? Might save you some dice that way at least. Any particular reason you don't make it triple cost rather than div3 for effect?

Not sure exactly what you mean in that first part there -- please explain further.
Oh, and what do you mean by the cost? Do you mean about having to buy 3 ranks for each +1 modifier? If so, that's because the survivalism score is used for some other things.

You probably want a skill+special cap similar to your trait number for the probability to be intuitive (they're equally important in terms of successes). Well, how important do you want skills to be relative to traits?, I guess. For twice as important you'll need 12d12, which might be terribly annoying to roll and read.

I'll go ahead an talk about the design notes and philosophy on this one ....
1) we wanted the dice pool to be based solely on the skill -- representing your actual training in that skill (formal or otherwise). The trait being used in this way is basically your natural ability to actually utilize that training.
2) we've always felt that only 5 or 6 levels of skill training was just way too coarsely granulated. I mean, we're talking about measuring the range from complete novice to most-awesome-in-the-world. Extending it out to 12 gives fine enough granularity to actually demonstrate what we feel to be a proper spread. However, we feel that traits can be expressed well enough at 6. All in all, this is just what made sense to us as a RL analog. Oh, BTW -- for a scale perspective, a 3 in a trait is what we're considering human average.
3) We also wanted to represent the transferability of skills. hence the general->specialty break-down.
To answer your question -- we wanted the skills to play a bigger role than traits. We feel that it's a better representation than what you find in (for example) the likes of WW.

@: Survivalism. Ah, you do use the full score too, I see the note now. So that's good.

Otherwise, yeh, don't worry. When you roll, you could limit the exploding to only reroll failures, rather that adding more dice to the pool, but it wouldn't help anything in particular (other than limiting the infinitely unlikely possibility of rolling all night and hard-capping you at 'skill' successes).


So. Mr Amazing on 12d pool with trait 6 gets 6 successes on average with no explode, 9 average when chain-exploding on 1-4. Mr Average on 4d pool and trait 3 has 1 success. I suppose I need to work out what all the defences are and get them at 12x6 so no one ordinary can expect to hurt me. Obviously we max out just the one attack form similarly.

How does task cooperation work? Say on a science research project to make some anti-zombie poison. Mr Science can get 4+ successes (whatever that means), but can others boost that? I guess flat adding successes would be fine when any botch with ruin the whole project.

tussock wrote:Otherwise, yeh, don't worry. When you roll, you could limit the exploding to only reroll failures, rather that adding more dice to the pool, but it wouldn't help anything in particular (other than limiting the infinitely unlikely possibility of rolling all night and hard-capping you at 'skill' successes).

Interesting. We'll explore this idea more.

I suppose I need to work out what all the defences are and get them at 12x6 so no one ordinary can expect to hurt me.

I need to correct something about the combat defense. Your Defense does subtract attack dice; but it is your Grit that offsets damage hits.
Additionally, certain weapons will have an armor piercing rating, which can reduce an armor's effect on your defense.

How does task cooperation work? Say on a science research project to make some anti-zombie poison. Mr Science can get 4+ successes (whatever that means), but can others boost that? I guess flat adding successes would be fine when any botch with ruin the whole project.

This is something that we've been struggling with. We like the idea of having helpers roll, and have their hits add to your dice pool; but then that becomes an instance where your dice pool can exceed 12, which we don't like at all. Sure, you could hard-cap it at 12, but then you run in to the situation where a character is "just too good to need help".
An alternative could be to just have everybody's hits to accumulate; but I don't really like that because there's no sense of diminishing returns ... also, how do you determine who's the "helper" and who's the "main actor"?
Another alternative would be to have helpers add to your trait score or your survivalism score; but that's just right out because it destroys the functionality of the system.
What I've come up with is to just have the helper roll, and if they succeed, that adds 1 auto-hit to your result; and if they get 5+ hits, that adds 2 auto-hits; if they botch, that will subtract from your hits (or something like that).

Mister_Sinister wrote:Also, what was the reasoning for relying on a d12 based dicepool? Not necessarily a criticism, just curious on the thought process.

We just really like d12s -- it's like a d10, but 20% better. We also felt that it just doesn't get enough love in RPGs.
It's large enough to allow for some decent granularity (twice as much as a d6); but not so big as to have large areas be completely meaningless (which sometimes happens with a d20).

Consequently, we decided to take "12" and max it out, so to speak. Everything about the game revolves around the # 12 -- (mechanically speaking) everything is either a factor or a multiple of the # 12. If you look, there are even 12 general skills (that's on purpose).
We're even aiming for a release date of 12/12/2012.

On Cooperation: you could have a team success count, your first guy subtracts 1 hit to add to it, the next subtracts 2, the third subtracts 3, and so on. If guy 4 can't get at least 5 hits he's not adding anything.

Maybe they're fetching coffee, busywork to keep them out of the way. Managers.

I think I like that. We'll give it a good examination this weekend. Thanks.

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Okay, one of the areas that we're a little slow moving on is powers. We've decided that we want to break these things down in to 2 categories: abilities and talents.
Talents will be just one-time things, kinda like feats.
Abilities need to be things that can scale, or otherwise can be built on (hence the boxes for "ranks").
The thing is, we're running in to the problem of : what should be considered a power, and what should be just a normal skill roll? Personally, I'm fairly minimalist, having trouble seeing any action as being anything other than just a skill roll; my co-designers want to make every kind of action a power. Sure, I can crank out combat powers all day long -- that's easy -- but we're at a wall trying to come up with non-combat stuff.

So, I'm fully open to suggestions as to what kind of things people generally expect in the way of powers (I guess you could consider this an open survey).
*note: "power" is just anything that isn't a basic action (seeing as this whole game is fairly mundane -- in other words, mystical stuff isn't appropriate .... well, not right now). stuff like "sniper" or "called shot" would be some examples of combat powers.
One of the things that I've already thought of is something that lets you further specialize in a skill specialty .... like maybe an effective +1 to your trait or survivalism modifier for the purposes of using a specific skill in a certain circumstance. We've also come up with a few "cross-training" or "synergy" powers; but those only go so far.

So, I'm all ears.

bump

I finally got around to looking at your spreadsheet, and the probabilities look right (for the non-exploding cases, anyway), but they're sort of misleading. By focusing on just the average rolls, you don't have a good sense of what the actual odds of people with various dice pools and attributes are for succeeding in a particular way. Yes, if you have an attribute of 1 and a pool of 9 you have an average of 1 hit, but you have a 47% chance of not getting it, a 37% chance of getting it, an almost 14% chance of getting 2, and a 3% chance of getting 3. I assume that an attribute of 3 and a pool of 8 would be more common, and there you do have an average of 2 hits with the following breakdown: 10% for 0, 27% for 1, 31% for 2, 21% for 3, 9% for 4, and 2% for 5. So 90% of the time you succeed at basic tasks. Since I still don't know what an average character looks like or what odds of success you're looking for, I don't know if those numbers fit with your goals or not, but those are the numbers you should be looking at instead of the average hits. I'd recommend that you split them out.

Still double checking the exploding ones, as they requires lots and lots of extra cases and nonsense. There's basically 3 possibilities that have to be solved for: attrib > survivalism mod, attrib = survivalism mod, and attrib < survivalism mod. Each one generates bonus dice and hits in a way that requires different sets of simplification. It's... not pretty.

That's an area of # analysis that I've only tangentially thought about, but wasn't sure was worth the effort to fully break it out -- since you put it like that, I guess I need to go ahead and do it ..... I'll have to hash that out this weekend -- I'll post the results when I'm done.
I'll also post a couple of sample characters sometime this weekend as well (maybe 1 starting character and 1 fairly advanced character).

Exploding dice does really complicate the math (e.g., lots of internal referencing of the base equation, etc.). Of course, once I got the base exploding function (1/11th), it's just more tedious than anything.
On the other hand, now that I think about it ..... goddamn, this is gonna be a real headache. Oh well, there's nothin' like just doin' it, I guess.

Thank you.

You can make it a lot nicer by restricting the exploding range to your success range, or to only strictly less than your success range (though in this case you never explode when you have an attribute of 1, which may or may not be desirable). It's still a pain, but it's a significantly smaller one. I'd actually start with exploding < attrib, then add in exploding = attrib, and finally add in exploding > attrib if you're still not happy with the numbers.

You may also want to consider adding in hit buying rules, to eliminate small failure chances for non-critical checks. You'd probably want to do variable costs based on attribute though. Trading in one more than whatever number of dice would give you an average of 1 hit for the given attribute is probably reasonable.

The general case for exploding dice in dice pools is:

H/(D-X) = Average Hits per starting die

Where H is the number of numbers you score a hit on, X is the number of numbers you get a bonus die on, and D is the number of numbers on each die. So if you hit on a 5, explode on a 6 and roll a d6, your average hits per die are 2/5. If you hit on a 7, explode on a 6, and roll a d8, your average hits are still 2/5 per die.

That being said, variable Target Numbers is still shit. Varying the target number changes the value of a bonus or penalty die. Varying the number of dice changes the value of a bonus or penalty to the target number. In the last quarter century of making dice pool games, no one has made a game that was actually improved by having the target number vary. There has been not one game in all of human history wherein the game was actually better because of the variable target number mechanic. And that is why Shadowrun and even World of Fucking Darkness abandoned it for (relatively) fixed target numbers. And the few legacy mechanics wherein the target numbers can (at least effectively) still change, are the worst parts of those games.

-Username17