What's your favorite dice mechanic, Veeky Forums? How come?

Don't have one for RPGs, but in board games I love Descent's "Die with multiple uses" method.

Roll and Keep or Alternity's Control Die + Situation Die system.

Not bell curves, not flat curves.

Exploding dice

Savage Worlds is fun

I don't like the game overall, but I like the Dragon Age TTRPG's system. 3d6+relevant bonuses vs. target number. The thing I like about it is you roll 2 dice of the same color and 1 of a different color. If you get doubles on any 2 of the dice, you get "stunt points" equal to the result of the odd-colored die to spend on special effects for the attack, like piercing through armor, adding extra damage, moving yourself of the target, etc. There are also non-combat "stunts" for non-combat situations.

So I like the 3d6 for a bell curve and the stunt system. Although I'd rather have it as part of a point buy system instead of class and levels.

I have no idea what I'm looking at

My favorite dice mechanic is the wager system in Dogs in the Vineyard. It's both narrative and mechanically robust, and brings a lot of strategy to social encounters.

For actual systems I play, I like BRP d100 roll under/adjust target by a multiplier. It keeps the rolls relatable and easily home brewed while the difficulty done as a multiplier means it's not a flat probability curve, the curve is driven by the target number and not the die. Simple and clean.

Any game that only uses only d6. Easy to get people to play some pen& paper games if they don't have to buy a bunch of dumbass polyhedral crap.

It seems to be a system where instead of difficulty being being the variable instead you add or subtract dice from your D20 to determine the DC.

That's Alternity's system for bonuses/penalties. The main mechanic of the game is that you want to roll under your Stat + Skill ranks to succeed at something. So if you're a guy with Dex 10 and 2 ranks in Modern Ranged Weapon: Rifle, you want to roll under a 12 to hit a guy. The control die is a d20, so that's what you'll be rolling in most situations. However, when you have penalties or bonuses, you don't just get flat +/-1's Instead, you roll an additional die alongside it, and either add the results if you're being penalized, or subtract them if you have a bonus (because roll under).

So say you're a soldier at close range, and the target isn't dodging at all. So you get a 1 step bonus for your soldier specialty being rifle, and a 1 step bonus for close range. That totals up to a 2-step bonus. You roll your d20, and roll a d6 alongside it, which you subtract from the d20 roll to get your final number.

as long as a game doesn't do anything like D&D it's probably pretty good/in the running for "favorite"

ORE uses d10s in every version I've seen, but that's mostly based on REIGN and NEMESIS, so others could work differently.

You rarely get as many as in Shadowrun, but Burning Wheel/Mouse Guard/Torchbearer are fun for the same reason.

I'm a sucker for dice pools. Ability 1 + Ability 2 = # of dice you roll.

Say what you will about WoD, but I love how simple the dice system is. Add your dots and then you just have to keep track of how many dice come up 8 or higher. There's nothing wrong with other systems, but the lack of any mental math where you're totaling multiple dice and then adding modifiers on top of that is really refreshing.

In addition I like how it can afford some flexibility because depending on the situation the stats used could change like in Engine Heart where, for example, you might add your Size to your Perception to see over tall grass.

I absolutely adore the ORE. It's fast. It's very low on math (you're mostly just matching numbers, not adding to or modifying them). You get all the tactile fun of rolling a handfull of dice without the threat of ending up rolling buckets of them (the systems I've seen usually have a hard cap on how many dice you can roll at a time).

I also really like D% roll-under. Just because the probabilities are so easy to grasp. Like, I want to succeed at X skill? It's at 45. I have a 45% chance of success. It feels so right.

I honestly have nothing against D20, but it's usually attached to systems that aren't my cup of tea.

Any roll-under with a wide but steep bell curve, like GURPS.

You have a lot of control over the odds of succeding your rolls. You know exactly how much of a skill is enough to be safe the majority of the time, and how much penalizers is your character able to handle.

You get immediate Alternity reference points. That game got me into roleplaying, so its multi-dice plateau-shaped probability curves still hold a special place in my heart. The Ordinary/Good/Amazing success system is also nice but most of the rest of that system is, unfortunately, not so great.

My personal favorite dice-based system is rolling multiple dice and keeping the best however many. Even 2d6 -> 3d6 keep highest 2 really helps sway odds towards good (or bad, if you keep lowest 2) results without making it possible to do flatly BETTER than usual. Changing the curve without changing the bounds.

FFG Star Wars RPG and James Bond RPG (D100)

>FFG Star Wars RPG
Gross

This.

Though I home rule explosions to be capped per rank in my Savage Worlds games.

Doesn't ORE break down a little when handling very high skill actions? Also, it has a minor issue in its combat where the most damaging attacks are also the hardest to block, but that's an easy fix(just change the numbers assigned to hit locations).

The one where you can do a cool and useful and powerful thing, but each time you do it, it gets more difficult to pull off.

For example, the Relentless Rage feature of the barbarian class in D&D 5e
>Starting at 11th level, your rage can keep you fighting despite grievous wounds. If you drop to 0 hit points while you're raging and don't die outright, you can make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw. If you succeed, you drop to 1 hit point instead. Each time you use this feature after the first, the DC increases by 5. When you finish a short or long rest, the DC resets to 10.

I'm not even sure why I like it, but I do.

I really like when dice are replaced by the deck of cards

>but most of the rest of that system is, unfortunately, not so great.
There's considerably more in Alternity that's good, than just the roll probability and the success system, chum.

The wound system in Alternity remains the best damage tracking system for a modern game I've ever played. Star*Drive and Dark Matter were both extremely good campaign settings. It's Psionics system wasn't the best version I've ever seen, but remains head and shoulder above the Vancian shit that TSR was using in D&D at the time.

I'm not really a fan of it for rpgs, but cards are one of the reasons Malifaux is my favorite wargame.

It adds so much to the game in terms of strategy and mechanical depth to models that dick around with cards. Also I like being able to do a risky move and not get borked because my dice hate me how the fuck do I keep rolling less than 5 on 3d6

>Doesn't ORE break down a little when handling very high skill actions

I'm not sure what you mean. High-skill as in very difficult actions? It handles them in one of two broad ways:

>Difficulty
Doing hard things often means you're rolling against a Difficulty. This raises the minimum height required to succeed at it, making it so that--in addition to getting a match--you have to get a match that's above a certain number. Rolling a pair of 5s is a success if the action is Difficulty 4, and a failure if it's Difficulty 6.

>Penalty
Another pretty standard dice pool mechanic. Doing stuff while impaired robs you of dice. Less dice means less matches, which means less of a chance of success. ORE isn't afraid of combining difficulties and penalties.

I can't speak for the probabilities of it (other than to say that Penalties absolutely fuck you), but it's mechanically pretty simple. I might be talking about something completely different than what you meant though.

And yeah, reversing the hit-locations is a pretty common house-rule, for the reasons you mentioned.

>Like, I want to succeed at X skill? It's at 45. I have a 45% chance of success. It feels so right.
How do you come up with such number? And how do you apply and modify it for the different stats each of your party members have?

Also how do you do group rolls with a D100, and how do you do critical fails and success?

Yeah, Malifaux took as much as it can from card mechanics

>I'm not sure what you mean.
The amount of actions you can perform at once is effectively hardcapped by the system, unless this was tweaked in one of the later ORE systems.

>reversing the hit-locations is a pretty common house-rule, for the reasons you mentioned.
I would actually use a more complicated order rather than flat-out reversing it. The body would be the hardest area to defend while the legs would be the easiest.

I can't speak for every D100 system, but I'll do this based on Unknown Armies 3rd Ed, because that's the one I happen to be reading right now.

>How do you come up with such number?
So, my skill is 45 and I'm playing a roll-under system, so I want to get a random result out of 100 that's 45 or below. There is a 45 out of 100 chance that I get that result (and succeed at my action), giving me a 45% chance at success. Since the system is naturally done in units of 100, there's not really any math required to figure out what your odds are.

>And how do you apply and modify it for the different stats each of your party members have?
Different characters have different skill levels in different things. I might have a 45 in a given skill, but somebody else could have a 25 (and thusly a lower chance of success than I have), or a 75 (giving them a higher one). The default difficulty level is just "roll a number equal to or lower than whatever your skill is", so the better you are at a skill, the more likely you are to succeed at it.

>Also how do you do group rolls with a D100, and how do you do critical fails and success?
Everybody just rolls a d100 when they do stuff. Just like if they were each rolling a d20 in a game of D&D, or their own swimming pool of d6s in Shadowrun. Different games handle "crits" differently, but Unknown Armies treats 01s and critical successes and 00s as critical fumbles. It also cares about "Matched" successes and fumbles (getting a matching result like "11" or "66" is extra good if that's a success, or extra bad if it's a failure).

Oh yeah, at least in REIGN it's pretty much impossible to do more than 5 things at once in a fight. I mean, there's some magic shit that lets you roll more than 10 dice at a time, but outside of that you literally can't go above 10 (which means it's impossible to get more than 5 matches). Even if you do manage to roll more than 10 dice, the odds of every one of those being a part of a match are pretty damn slim.

That being said, if we compare it to something like Pathfinder, a 20th-level Fighter is only swinging four times in a fight, so five is a pretty generous cap (even if it is almost impossible to actually do).

Once you add in things that offset penalties under certain conditions (a lot of Martial Techniques do this for multiple attacks), Multiple Actions pretty much become the standard.

Depends on system. I am only very familiar with RuneQuest 6.

RuneQuest 6 has two stats added together for the base skill level (for example all Combat Styles are STR+DEX) or the same stat doubled (Evade is 2xDEX), and then you invest in a skill to increase the base value. Normally at character creation you are at 50% on stuff you invested some on at 70% for things you focused on, 40% for stuff covered by your background alone, and between 15-30% on everything else. It's a decent mix.

Critical rolls are 1/10 the skill value - so a base of 67% means 1-7 is a critical roll. 95-100 is an automatic failure (even of the skill is over 95%), and 98-100 is a fumble.

The skill target is adjusted by condition. An easy check multiplies the target to roll under by 1.5, while a hard check is multiplied by 2/3. Anything easy than easy is automatic while things can get two steps harder before being impossible.

There are several ways to roll with or against other characters. There is a degrees of success table for direct confrontations (say one character is attacking and another is defending, or one is trying to negotiate a price with another), ways to group rolls together to determine a group success, and rolls where one has to roll agonist the dice result of another (let's say you try to trip an opponent with a successful attack, they have to succeed a save versus the attack roll you rolled).

Skills over 100 impose disadvantages on anyone will a skill under 100 opposing or assisting in that check. A warrior with 112% combat fighting the 67% combat warrior makes the lesser warrior roll against 55%.

These seem unintuitive on paper, but I find it actually flows really well the way they work with the system. It even really helps when modeling some more tricky social situations. You can have a group roll courtesy to make it easier for one PC to use deception against a noble and then when the PC succeeds In the contest the noble can save to see how well the lie holds.

>red
>white
>blue
RULE BRITANNIA

I was thinking that a solution to this would be to have a property you can buy for your dice that multiples the amount of effective sets you get from them, and you can buy it any number of times. So at the cost of making your dice more expensive, each set is actually worth two sets or more.

The issue here though is that this is the kind of thing you really want to do using the penalty system instead, but it won't scale right if you do that because the dice value way accounts for special dice.

Dieing

best d6 pool system?

Dice pools of different colours, different values needed for successes depending on colour, different results depending on numbers of successes.

So if you're really strong, but shitty at fighting, lets say you have 4 strength dice, but they're white, and white dice are successes on 5 and 6.

But someone who's about as strong as you but more skilled and experienced, might roll 4 black dice, that hit on 3, 4, 5 and 6.

So on a good day, the person who has all the physical potential to punch your face in, totally might do that. He just won't do it as often as the more skilled guy. I find it's great for stuff like skirmish or war games, where you want things to be easy to work out, but still have some granularity without rolling like 3 rounds of dice to do one thing.

RULE Australia, Cambodia, Chile, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Faroe Islands, France, Haiti, Iceland, North Korea, Laos, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, Samoa, Schleswig-Holstein, Serbia, Sint Maarten, Slovakia, Slovenia, Taiwan, Thailand, United States

I liked Warhammer Fantasy's power dice mechanic

The way trying to harness more magic increased the chances of some catastrophe happening

Oh, look.

>>gross

Hasn't played.

See also Dark Heresy and its infamous Perils of the Warp table.

>The wound system in Alternity remains the best damage tracking system for a modern game I've ever played.
Do tell, I love the idea of wound systems but have found them all to be needlessly bloated.

I haven't played Edge of the Empire, but I've been listening to an actual play podcast and it sounds amazing. I am seriously digging the narrative style of the dice, and how you can succeed at something but still have it screw you over.

GURPS is preferrable for me

GURPS is terrifying

>ORE uses d10s in every version I've seen, but that's mostly based on REIGN and NEMESIS, so others could work differently.
Monsters & Other Childish Things here, it doesn't.

What about 2d6?

D100 roll under. I am a lazy man.

When you are already going 2d6, you might as well go 3d6. It adds a lot of granularity, because it mitigates the impact modifiers have. +1 or -1 on 3D6 is already significant, on 2d6 +1 is huge.

basically the more dice you add, the more you decrease variance

1000d4 will role consistently in the 2200-2800 range, while 4d1000 will not

I'm making a game right now that uses 3d6 vs TN 1 to 6. Count the number of dice that exceed the TN; if it's more than fail, you succeed. As you get better you can add more die to your roll that ignore failure (so improving your skills really can only help you).

This.
It just works?
Nothing complicated, explained in a few minutes to even the dullest rock.

Stats above 100 are a problem, though.
As a DM who used a homebrew D100 system once put it:
>If humans go from 1-100, the strength of a good horse is already a problem.

I really appreciate the simplicity of it. But something about it doesn't click with me for some reason. I have no idea why, it just feels... Wrong?

Anyone else have this problem, or am I just an autist?

Also, roll and keep is my favorite. I love the relative simplicity, pool of dice, and fun sort of meta quality to it. Plus it represents potential vs consistency very well. It's just fun.

Simple, humans only go 10-20.

Then you have to start flinging around a lot of huge situational modifiers. How do you pull a wagon that is heavy, but not impossible to pull. A strong man could do it and a horse can do out no problem.

percentile dice, I like to know my chances without any math or looking up charts involved.
and before any of you sperg out again: d20 doesn't require math, it's like percentile in 5% steps, i know, i know...

Why do people use 3d6 as a replacement for a d20, wouldn't 4d6 make more sense? the minnimum roll of 3d6 is 3, and the max is eighteen, making for 15 possible outcomes. on 4d6 the minimum roll is 4 and the maximum 24, making for 20 possible outcomes, a much better parallel to a d20 while also maintaining the bell curve.

I'm taking the 3d6 rolling method from GURPS and only the rolling method, while keeping everything else relatively freeform.
Have I missed the point or is that an okay thing to do?

>if we compare it to something like Pathfinder, a 20th-level Fighter is only swinging four times in a fight
Unless he has something with Haste, which he should by L20.

That's one of the reasons I like FFRPG. Characters are expected to reach legendary levels of being good at thing.

A horse has about 40-50 STR. Sabin has 90-100.

it k lil nig

4d6 makes for a very pointy curve. Personally, I'm in favour of 2d10.

my friends of african american heritage

If you're listening to Kat Kuhl & co, know that they're playing the game pretty wrong, and are not representative of how the average EotE game is going to go.

Very entertaining, though. I've listened through their campaign twice.

Personally, I have no real favourites, but exploding dice is easily the worst die mechanic ever.

I don't care what dice I'm using as long as the rolls are opposed by either more rolls or external hidden numbers.

GURPS and it's "I have to roll under my number regardless of the challenge" design bugs me.

I've gotta agree on DitV's system. It's not for every style of gameplay but it's a very neat system once you wrap your head around it.
I especially like the fact that Reversing thr Blow means that you "critically defend", rather than critically attack.

It's k as long as you have fun.

Not at all. I thought about doing that once. But I ended up stripping so much away that it didn't even matter anymore. So I just wound up switching to Fate anyway, which is usually what happens.

The game simply titled CAMPAIGN? What are they doing wrong?

I'm wrapping up my one and only campaign of about a year.

I like systems that try to maximise the data you can pull out of a single roll, like ORE or Profit.

In ORE, you roll a fuck-ton of D10s and try to make matching sets. (So, two 3's, five 1's) The size of the set determines "speed" whilst the number of the set makes "power", so you can determine initiative order dynamically instead of a set list.

Profit uses 2d10's, one black and one red. The conflict resolution is basically "is black higher than red? if yes, hooray, if no, boo." (Where your character's skills and gear can boost the black dice and enemy skills can boost the red) The system uses that in place of the GM rolling dice most often; you set your own difficulty, have to risk your resources so there's tension - it's also used to determine supply/demand on goods, to generate mobs of enemies (size/distance from you) and so on..

Yes, it's just CAMPAIGN because it's the long-form sister to ONE-SHOT (which is a series of, you guessed it, one-shots)

As to what they do wrong, I dont really know the rules of Edge of the Empire but they SUPER wing it because they're all improv actors and just YES AND all over the place.

>As to what they do wrong, I dont really know the rules of Edge of the Empire but they SUPER wing it because they're all improv actors and just YES AND all over the place.
Oh, that's not so bad in fact, that's half the reason I like them so much

Alternity gives every character 4 damage tracks - Stun, Wound, Fatigue and Mortal. You have points in Stun and Wound equal to your Contitution and points in Mortal and Fatigue equal to half your Con.

Stuns are bruises, Wounds are glancing hits that do damage but are not life-threatening, and Mortals are serious, life threatening blows. Fatigue is exactly what it sounds like - getting tired. No penalty for operating with stun points, having any amount of wounds means you operate at a 1 step penalty, Fatigue and Mortal points incur a 1 step penalty per point the character has, and doing any strenuous action with Mortal points forces a skill check or get more wounds/mortals. Fill up on Mortal points and you're dead.

Of course, this system also tracks these things seperately because amazing hits or high quality weapons will do damage straight to Mortals. So it's fully possible to just get shot in the eye and die with no other wounds.

Oh The things exploading duce have done for me in brigades.

JAGS uses 4d6 treat 6 as 0, so it normalises the curve around 10 with minimum 0 and maximum 20.

Then again, it also has 300 pages of mostly rules, but that's what you get for playing a generic system, I guess.

Does it make more sense for skills to be better when they're higher or lower? Plus, roll under allows for skills to be arbitrarily good while roll over allows for skills to be arbitrarily bad, which isn't really conducive to interesting roleplaying.

Exploding 6s in combat (using a d6 system). Increases the swingy-ness of luck a bit but that rare game where a a couple of frigates happen to cripple cripple a battleship is worth it.

Roll-under always rubs me the wrong way. I mean, I know that this is a silly opinion to have, but I can't help it. The idea that you're looking for low numbers in order to do better seems backwards.

>Age of Sigmar
>Stormcast Eternals
>4D6 attacks hitting on 3's and wounding on 3's with the best save armor (3+) in the game and bullshit battalion rules, I forgot they can also toss their fucking melee weapon screaming across the battlefield like a flying tree made of metal.

Well then, what don't you like about EotE?

I really like the gear dice from Formula D. Seems like a neat concept that makes sense thematically and makes sense from a gameplay perspective.

One thing about multiple actions in ORE is how multi-skill actions are capped by the lower proficiency. Do any of the later systems find a different way to do that? I want to say the solution has something to do with spray dice.

Well the dice, the books, obligation, the combat (starship or not), the health system (both wounds and strain has issues), the attributes, the balance, the force powers, and it's generally really boring without being a massive Star Wars fag. I *really like* Star Wars but I don't obsess over the lore and the game really caters to that fan base. I also hate how nit picky the rules get for such a narrative core mechanic (and how nonexistent or hidden rules are in the book), and how little the meta-currency matters despite being a really good meta-currency.

It's just not a very well made game, it's just different from what's out there. An powered by the apocalypse hack would literally accomplish the exact same game(s) and be stronger than the stupid, swingy dice pool they use.