You ever sat back after a session one day and realized that you just fucking hate the d20 and any system that revolves...

>playing with anything below d100
Might as well grunt at each other like fucking cavemen

>He doesn't like my favorite
>Must be a child

Wew lad

I sat back after a session and decided that I should give another system a go, which didn't hinge so much on a d20, where every roll can go well or bad, depending on the luck you have that night.

So, right now, I'm going to play GURPS and see just how much I enjoy it.
So far, so good

Even something simple like the Apocalypse World rolling is good, because it offers a state between success and failure (a choice of partial success or success at a cost) and then the dice make that a very likely result (7-9 on 2d6) because that's probably the most interesting result.

The game wants characters to succeed by the skin of their teeth, and to have to make real sacrifices in order to get what they want. That's part and parcel to the post-apocalyptic theme, where every victory is hard won. So the dice are set up to encourage exactly that. There's room for variance, of course, because every story needs twists, sudden successes, tragic failures, but the game knows what it wants to happen and the way the dice are rolled makes that happen most of the time.

Meanwhile, what does the d20 encourage? A lot of randomness, mostly. An expert has a good chance to fail a moderately difficult task, because the player can roll so low. And a buffoon has a good chance to succeed at something very difficult, if the player gets lucky and rolls high. And there's nothing in between, and there's nothing either player can actually do about the die roll.

The best genre for a d20 is probably a comedy of errors.

I'm not a big fan of the range and randomness of it.

You have games like d&d 5e where someone skilled at something is just slightly better than someone who isn't. Like a trained swimmer is only slightly more capable of crossing a river than a guy who has never swam before. And if you want modifiers to stack to the point where you have meaningful differences you run into the 3e problem of dealing with severe power creep where people are rolling +35 to jump checks and blasting off to the moon. Sure, 5e doesn't run off the rails at very high level, but in exchange, low level play is based on luck.

I personally have a couple house rules to make the divide between skilled and unskilled more substantial. The players were not impressed at first glance (muh nerfs) but I think they've warmed to what it adds to the game.

I've also seen a couple interesting ways to deal with it by changing the dice. Like replacing any d20 roll with 2d10, or 3d6, or 3d20 take middle, to introduce some aspect of weighting while keeping the range fairly steady. I could see some problems with this though. Stuff intended to be unlikely becomes super-unlikely, and anything likely becomes almost trivial. You'd probably run into re-balancing issues at the extremes.

>all these people talking about the d20 system when OP is talking about the actual die
There's nothing inherently wrong with a given random number generator, it's up to the rest of the game to use it properly. Admittedly, the best example of a system that uses it in any major capacity is one that uses it poorly, but it's not because of the 20 sided die by itself, it's everything built around it.

The only d20 game I really dislike is 3.PF and mostly only because of its ubiquity and the people playing it.

Also
This. A d20 is just an RNG. I have come to prefer it over systems that use multiple dice for curves because of how consistent the bonuses are. It's basically just a 5 times less fiddly d100.

Don't blame the tool for the system's faults.
You could build a system around 2d20 rolls and just use bigger numbers than D&D uses, it would work fine.
The 20-sided die as a physical object is practical and satisfying to roll.

The d20 is so baked into d&d and the d&d culture, that they're almost indistinguishable now

Dice pools and exploding dice stunts, not to mention OGL, have ensured that no other major system is going to be d20 based

>He thinks someone bitching about a fucking dice is being childish
>clearly this means he's a d20 fanboy

I'm trying to build a system around just the d20, because I like the variance in rolls, but I'm averse to it for the same reason.

Yes. It happened a year and a half into a Pathfinder game I was running, and that broken-ass trash fire of a system nearly burned me out on tabletop RPGs altogether.

I had to take a break from running and even playing tabletop. D&D 5e has given me hope again, and I'm having fun running it, but I'm worried the same thing will happen again once I begin to notice the cracks that will inevitably show up in the system.

Hmm... glad to see you're branching out from the "Exact moment you realized D&D was bad" posts. Unfortunately, your ability to make decent threads is severely limited by your existence as an absolute retard.

Also, nice posting the first image that came up on Google for "d20."

>Implying your only choice for ttRPGs is d20 or narrative games
Was going to post this

It's a good thing that we have such dedicated board policemen who are willing to spend all day telling people to stop having fun.

Back when I was new and had only played/DMed D&D 3.5, I thought I'd try running Dark Heresy.

We had a combat situation. 3 PCs and 1 ally vs. 20 Antagonists
I thought the demo adventure was mad for suggesting such a battle. It would take hours!
After 25 minutes of awesomeness and drama, the battle was over.

I eschewed d20 altogether until D&D 5th.
5th restored my faith a bit. It could be better, but doing so would destroy some central tenants of d20.

yes, d20 system is shit, i sugest anything based on d10 or d100

>d100
>good
Fantasy Flight was the worst thing to ever happen to this board.

Herein lies the problem, you only see the system, you don't take into account that there is more to the game than the dice being used.

No matter how you try and spin it, no one random chance style is better than the other, everything has flaws and benefits, but it's what you choose to do with the narrative in the game.

FF is not the only system that uses d100, d100 is just the best imho

Not really, no. A d20 is a nice looking die, and it rolls in 5% increments well. I like it as a basis of success/failure results just fine.

i hate WoD's d10 system even worse.
You see, with d&d's d20 system, basically what the big range usually does is "if you suck at it, you still have a chance at succeeding" and "even if you're really good, something can go wrong"

now, WoD's d10 system ALWAYS made me feel like it's way too fucking random, having high points in a skill can mean jack shit because the dice can easily fuck you up with botches and shit.

2d6 master race. It's a shame so few games use what's objectively the best choice for discretely sized rolls. It's not like it's an accident that this is the go-to for gambling games.

Dice pool systems can theoretically work but the statistics involved are too complicated for most people to just grasp intuitively, so if the game designers are savants or spend a century tweaking tiny details then you get a system that works well but is fundamentally arcane (SoS), and they're not you get a broken mess (WoD et al)

>The best genre for a d20 is probably a comedy of errors.
This is consistent with the kind of stories people tell about D&D campaigns, generally. Lord knows it's consistent with the one I'm in, though accidentally burning down an enemy fortress full of war prisoners was not in any way the dice's fault.

>claim to have houserules which address a common problem
>say nothing further about them
Okay.

>how consistent the bonuses are
I don't understand what you mean by this.

>tenants
It would destroy people who rent property from the die?

Very worthwhile observations.

Though, I think there's a limitation if you're only using a single d20. A single die means uniform distribution and for this reason, I assume it's only sensible if you're measuring for a binary "pass" or "fail" check. It means that after you pass or fail, you'll need to, in the situation of combat, roll yet again to determine magnitude of stuff like damage.
I'm very enamored with shift-based (roll vs. roll) dice resolution. It means two people roll and then the difference becomes the magnitude. I'd imagine 1d20 - 1d20 (or even larger 2d20- 2d20 curves) would be too large in potential value to be of practical use, so I this why I think the die itself lacks some utility--it's a little too big for other purposes.

We could then disagree about the need to use a d20 when a smaller one could suffice but that's more of an aesthetic issue. d20 rolls really well.

Yes
It's why I play GURPS now. There are decent D20 systems, but most modern games use other dice systems for good reasons.

>You ever sat back after a session one day and realized that you just fucking hate the d20 and any system that revolves around the damn thing?

Not really, some of my best games were running 3.5 D&D at uni. Yeah it became a cluster fuck at the end but the good times far outweighed the bad even when it became stupid builds and splatbooks out the ass.

If anything D20 was the gateway to the RPG realm for all my normie friends. I've had much easier transitions to new and more interesting content having 'broken' them in on the easy stuff. The only other system I'd start people on is the Warhammer D100 system, but thats because that was my first system and I always want people to experience what I did.

I did, 10 years ago, when I stopped playing that game. Seriously, no one is forcing you to keep playing it either.

No, maybe you should try just having fun instead of REEEEE BALANCE REEEEEE!

A +1 on a d20 is always +5% "worth".

A +1 on a 2d6 may be worth... anything, depending on the target number and your other bonuses.

Basically, curves fuck up calculations with flat bonuses.

On the flipside, a +1 on a d20 is practically worthless because you're just as likely to roll a [1] as you are to roll a [20].

Meanwhile, a +1 to a dice pool gives an immediate benefit because you're either another die (which means that you have one more chance to get a successful outcome on the roll) or success will be easier to achieve since it's [result+1] which will help you out since the threshold is much lower.

To put it another way.

d20 is [1+1d20] while a dice pool is either [+1 die] or [result+1 vs. threshold].

Yeah, +1 on a d20 is not worth much, but I only used it to illustrate why linear distribution is handy.

And how much is +1 dice worth?

Let's say I'm a game designer, and I want to be able to calculate the % chance of successes and the increase from bonuses. I'm basically up shit creek without a paddle with dicepools, and can guesstimate at best without some pretty involved calculations.

Or, you know, use Anydice, or any of the dozens of other tools and calculations already made for you.

"Statistics is hard" is not an excuse in this era.

Go back to vp furfag

The problem with 2d6 is that 5,6,7,8,9 make up 2/3 of the possible outcomes.
This makes a +2 modifier huge, if you have any kind of stacking you easily go from "impossible" to unstoppable"
It is almost like playing with a single d6

Yeah.

After playing Only War and the Solo Adventure for CoC I've found that d100 roll under is the best in my own opinion.

>tfw playing 5e because friends are casuals who like D&D.

Roll-under d100 systems are objectively the best.

+1 dice gives you an additional chance to roll a success while reducing the chance to roll a failure.

That's a simple way to explain why adding dice is useful but if you want numerical data then going on anydice or something similar is the way to go.

I didn't realize it until I read this, but this is exactly why I can't get into d20 games. I started roleplaying on Dark Heresy, but my friends have always been trying to get me into DnD, but something about it always felt too simplistic to me.

I prefer a stack of cards where you get to draw cards that have die rolls on them. You get to hold onto five cards and choose which one you roll.

My problem with D20's is you frequently run into weighted ones.

Cant be assed to give a shit really.

Pick a system and lets play.

I'd rather have that than 1d20 where your modifiers are basically placebos.

A level 1 scrub could walk up to a level 20 Fighter wearing full plate and still hit him if he rolls a [20] while a level 20 Fighter could miss a level 1 scrub because he rolled a [1].

>run from boulder
>terrible speed
>terrible athletics and acrobatics
>decide to polymorph into a cheetah
>still roll 3 1s and a 2 and get rolled over

Fuck this thing.

D20 is my one true love but there are some unconventional systems that are very underrated.

>A +1 on a d20 is always +5% "worth".

The value of a +1 bonus scales with how frequently you attempt the associated roll. Shit like Weapon Focus in 3.5/PF feels SO much better on TWF/archer characters than it does on two-handed or sword and board.

One solution to this problem is to build more "degrees of success"-type checks into your d20 game. I.E. more "if you succeed by 5 or more" and "if you fail by 5 or less". If you've got 3 target numbers that you care about hitting, that +1 is 3x more likely to have an impact.

>not using a "3D20perskill, roll each under corresponding attribute, use skillpoints to fix missing points for roll-under"-system

Noobs

It's still the same problem, either you hit with your attack and you do something or you fail and nothing important happens.

Degrees of success would help but at that point, why wouldn't I play a system that was already build around DoS being a thing?

... Huh. That sounds interesting.

I was like you once. Then I played Shadowrun, which led me to Burning Wheel.

Both systems you pick up a clutch of D6's. And I have never gone back.

...

Shadowrun a shit. Cyberpunk 2020 for life.

Ladies, you're both pretty.

>"roll for every projectile in a salvo" the game
>playable

stop meming your turd

Still better than the stupid abstractions that d20 uses in its design.

"Whenever you attack, you're actually just exploiting a hole in their defenses to get a clean shot off in, which reduces their HP, which represents their ability to dodge attacks, which is already covered by AC, which goes up if you wear heavy armor, yet has nothing to do with reflex, which in itself is a defense that only applies to certain effects."

Besides, the difference between SA and FA isn't really that big a deal.

>The problem with 2d6 is that 5,6,7,8,9 make up 2/3 of the possible outcomes.

I don't consider this a problem, at all. Yes, it makes modifiers more "powerful" in comparison to the same modifiers on a d20 roll, but that's something a 2d6 game should be built around (and Apocalypse World, for example, is).

>2d6, 1d10:
Range of possibility too small, a +1 bonus is a disproportionately huge modifier because the possible range of results is tiny.

>d20:
No consistency, but a good range of results. Good for people who are too dumb to add multiple dice numbers together. Unfortunately saddled to possibly the 2nd-worst RPG system to exist in the last 20 years (between Synnibar and FATAL)

>1d100:
Same consistency issues and range of result benefits as the d20, since in 9 of 10 systems everything works on multiples of 5s. Unfortunately a meme systems because of poorly-edited FFG products; works just fine for Call of Cthulhu, tho.

>Additive Dice Pools:
Always shit, simply because people are too stupid to be able to add results together. Does do some wierd shit with probability and bonuses.

>Success-based Dice Pools:
Always shit, because they're shit. Counting successes is dumb on its face, and on top of that bonuses to dice pools are either huge or pointless (need 6s on d10s, a +1 bonus to your results doesn't make much difference; while a +2 is huge). A minimum number of success also sucks because it discounts all the other amazing rolls you might get.

>2d10, 3d6 systems.
First, while GURPS may be a 3d6 system, it is still shit. Fuck GURPS, and fuck your Vehicle rules. With that said, a 2d10 or 3d6 system are the best dice systems because they give both consistency AND a good range of results AND because they work on a bell curve, a +1 bonus actually matters, but even something like a +3-4 bonus is still not an effective guarantee of success the way it can be in a 2d6 or 1d10 system. All RNG systems suck to a certain degree, but the 2d10/3d6 range sucks the least.

Also, static modifiers are cancer. Rolling AdB against a TN of Z doesn't mean a fucking thing when you have a static modifier of +(10*Z) because of all the shit you stacked onto the roll.

Yeah, but I got tired of system elitists even faster so I just play 5e. You can only get somebody jacking off about GURPs so many times before I just wanna play the fucking game.

I don't entirely mind the d20 has a deciding dice, though it can get frustrating sometimes if a supposed expert character can consistently fail to do what they're good at solely because of random chance (which is why I prefer dice pools or multiple dice leading to a bell curve)
What I despise though is GMs that take great glee is fucking people over thanks to a natural 1

This is by far the smartest post in thread.

Are there even any 2d10 games?

Very, very few.

Mechwarrior 3e used a 2d10+exploding mechanic. MEGS games (DC Heroes, Underworld, Blood of Heroes) uses 2d10, though you have to run it through a chart system as well. The sort of 2d10 vs TN system (over or under) described is probably most commonly played by SLA Industries, Shatterzone, TORG, Degenesis, the Mongoose version of Traveller, and Unisystem.

With that said, none of those are especially popular. The 2d10 roll over/under mechanic is probably the single least-developed "common" die mechanic out there. For no especially good reason as far as I can tell.

Saying that something is worth a percentage value is meaningless, though. When you roll dice, you're not adding up percentages. You've got a range of possibilities, each one with a certain percent chance of occurring. Getting a plus one shifts that chance. And +1 shifts it exactly the same regardless of what the dice are: It shifts it by one. The probabilities are exactly the same, the only difference is what proportion of your capability it impacts, which you usually measure using average roll.

As for the chance of hitting any given target, it's true that you have to use your brain a bit more if you don't use a calculator, but how often do you really compare possible actions and evaluate percent chance increase on a single roll when making your decisions? Nobody does that because it's analytical to the point of being un-fun, and if you think about ease of use intuitively, a normal distribution is way easier than a flat curve. Hell, even D&D players think of a natural 20 or natural 1 as being special, despite the fact that they have the same probability as a natural 12, 8, 4, or any other number.

I am a fan of Burning Wheel's d6 success pool system. Asking if you can add extra dice, getting help from your party, negotiating the outcome of your success or failure is tons of fun.

Yeah, variable dice pools are a pain in the ass to balance for.

Basic statistical stuff (the kind done in anydice) is super easy. But once we're looking at variable dice pools, it gets hard to compare because the range of mathematical possibilities becomes huge (without a commensurate increase in gameplay depth). Balancing a game takes a hell of a lot more than just some basic probability calculations already, it's easy to accidentally make an unbalanced game even if you calculate the percent chance to succeed on a vast range of actions, because games are just so complicated that sometimes things will fall through the cracks, and not everything that impacts gameplay is meaningfully reducible to numbers anyway. Sure, paying attention to this stuff will stop you from making major Scion-level blunders, but there's still a huge potential range of possibilities, and having a mechanic that's easy to work with and understand can help you be on the right side of that bell curve.

That's not an inherent property of the systems, but of the scale of the numbers. A +1 on a 1d20 roll is worth more than another die if you're rolling 100d6 already. This may sound like a pointless thing to say, but it can be relevant if you're comparing a 2d6 to big dice pool games like Shadowrun, for example.

>that have die rolls on them
What? Why not just use cards that have numbers on them?

>>Additive Dice Pools:
>Always shit, simply because people are too stupid to be able to add results together. Does do some weird shit with probability and bonuses.

don't call something shit just because the retards trying to infest our hobby are too stupid to deal with it

>a +1 bonus is a disproportionately huge modifier
What do you mean by that? Isn't the proportion that it should be more or less subjective?

>the 2nd-worst RPG system to exist in the last 20 years
You really think FATAL is the only thing out there worse? Boy, you ain't seen nothing yet.

>Rolling AdB against a TN of Z doesn't mean a fucking thing when you have a static modifier of +(10*Z) because of all the shit you stacked onto the roll.
This isn't a problem with static modifiers. The problem here is that the target number isn't in the range of possible outputs, which happens because the static modifiers in this case are poorly thought out. Assuming, of course, that the TN is supposed to be something that could challenge the character. If the character is supposed to not care about it, then it's fine to auto-succeed without needing a roll. There are cases where this can be fucked up (D&D diplomancy) but there's nothing inherently wrong with having, say, a 2d6 mechanic with a range of possible modifiers from 0 to 12 and possible TNs from 5 to 20 if the TN 5 tasks are ones that a skill 12 godling would never reasonably fail at.

>This is by far the smartest post in thread.
Yours is by far the dumbest.

Games are meant to be played, so it's a valid point. Being convenient to use is a virtue for a system.

>What do you mean by that? Isn't the proportion that it should be more or less subjective?

Probably he means that it's huge because the GM can't give anything smaller. Take a 1d6 system; if the GM wants to give out any bonus at all, no matter what he does, the bonus will never be smaller than a ~16% bonus. Imagine it like a d20 system where you can only give out modifiers in increments of 3; the +1 and +2 bonuses are completely lost. It's a fair point.

The other two, I agree with you on. I do also think that games which let you stack static modifiers so far that there's never even a point in rolling the dice in the area of your specialty need to be reigned in as well. You argue that TNs should be adjusted to that rolling the dice is always relevant regardless of the static numbers, and that's true. But that's also demonstrably not how the vast majority of the games out there actually work, so it's understandable user is mad. Rolling 1d20+80 when your TNs are limited to 10, 15, 20, and 25 is a pretty stupid game setup, regardless of what we might think it should actually be.

>Yours is by far the dumbest.

But wait! A challenger appears!

>You argue that TNs should be adjusted
Ah, well, not exactly. Rather, they should be planned, when designing the game, so that they're appropriate to the range of potential numerical outputs that a player can generate. But the TN for any single given action shouldn't change according to player skill. Rather, if the TN is too low for the player to ever fail it, you should just skip the roll.

>Rolling 1d20+80 when your TNs are limited to 10, 15, 20, and 25 is a pretty stupid game setup
I agree of course. But regarding TN limits, I'd like to point out that these limits aren't exactly hard limits, but they're limits only in the sense that those are the TNs for which content has been developed. Theoretically, there's no reason that additional content couldn't be made such that those TNs become perfectly usable, despite the fact that the lower number TNs are all instant success rather than rolling. Practically, such attempts to add additional content tend to be shitty and poorly balanced in their own right, and starved for conceptual richness by the lower level stuff, because that's what happens if you tack a whole level of play on to a game after the fact. But for something like Scion where you ascend tiers of existence, such a system where advancement and specialization obviate most mundane difficulties (but open new possibilities) could make a great deal of sense. Of course, Scion instead found a way to surpass d20 in completely broken and nonsensical base mechanic instead.

Not exactly.
I dislike systems like D&D that use the D20 for its only roll, but I really like getting to roll lots of different dice for different things. Rolling d6s just isn't the same, somehow.
It's really a minor annoyance. I want to branch out more from D&D but I also want my dice to be worth pulling out besides the d6 cubes. Maybe I'm in purgatory or something.

>Theoretically, there's no reason that additional content couldn't be made such that those TNs become perfectly usable, despite the fact that the lower number TNs are all instant success rather than rolling.

Wouldn't it be much simpler and smarter to put a boundary on static modifiers instead of having to design new tiers of play like that (which you point out are almost always totally shit)? In a d20 system, cap static modifiers at +10-ish, and the roll will almost always matter. It also avoids the issue of completely invalidating lower TNs and thus lower-level persons.

I have to agree with user's first statement, with one major exception. I would phrase it like this: "unbounded static modifiers are cancer", instead of how it was actually given.

>Wouldn't it be much simpler and smarter to put a boundary on static modifiers instead of having to design new tiers of play like that
Yes, but it's better for practical reasons, not theoretical reasons. A system that could fluidly handle any power level up to and surpassing the gods would theoretically be great.

>In a d20 system, cap static modifiers at +10-ish
Regardless of where you put the caps, it's gonna be hard to get a system that works nicely because... of the reasons stated in each of the first fifty posts in this thread.

>cap
Although it's easier, just tacking a hard cap onto the game is a relatively lazy and unfulfilling way to do this, assuming you mean it's a player-facing cap (a cap that you tell the players exist and they're responsible for not putting the number over that). The better way to go about it is to moderate possible sources of new modifiers, and keep track of them as designing the game, so that no (non-mutually exclusive) options provide more than their category is allowed to (so, for example, five possible from stats, five from skills, five from items: Leveling up doesn't raise your stats or skills more than five times, and there aren't other sources which do either, and no item gives more than five). Of course, this gets exponentially harder the more options and types of option your game has.

By that logic, I could say that a +1 bonus means less to you the more levels you receive.

At least if you add another die, that's another opportunity to get a success.

That's inherent to DcD but not every system using a d20 has to be D&D (for the record, the level 20 fighter would still hit a lvl1 foe on a 1 in the modern editions either way).

That is what I mean.

You can't quickly calculate the worth of bonuses. You can't quickly calculate difficulty, or adjust the difficulty of your rolls easily when using a multi-dice system.

If I want to make an enemy that's twice as hard to hit as other enemies, in multi-dice systems I have take out a calculator or spend my time fidgeting on anydice, and in the end I will have to settle for "good enough". In a d20 system, I look at the average miss chance of the player, divide it by 5 and I'm done.

For players, they have no idea how much a bonus dice or a +1 bonus (or -1 penalty, for that matter) is worth, aside from it being a nebulous amount of "better", unless they are really good with statistics math. This makes evaluating how much you are worth willing to sacrifice for extra dice hard.

Now, a d20 has a large range, which makes small bonuses less meaningful. If you like small bonuses using a smaller dice instead of a d20 when designing a game is prudent. But if that does not concern you (and heaven knows, people somehow manage to tolerate playing d100 games, which are like, 5 tmes worse about this) a d20 is a perfectly fine RNG to base your game around.

>literally everything is shit

No because I am not an autist that hates games because of their dice resolution mechanic.

It means less proportionate to your total, but it doesn't mean less statistically. If the game is designed to scale (like D&D, the numbers all get bigger as you go) then +1 still makes a difference because it moves you up within the range of expected difficulties. If it's not designed to scale, then the decease in potency is a subset of the unbounded modifier problem discussed directly above this post. It matters less not due to dice probabilities but simply because there are less situations where that +1 is, practically, necessary to achieve your goals. Adding another die works the same way, though. In fact, it works that way even more, because the possible results fall on more or less a bell curve. If the broadest range of possible results (the middle of the bell curve) is less than what you need to succeed, then each additional die is adding an absolutely tiny amount of additional success chance. If the difficulty is near the middle, it makes a huge difference.

You should try GURPS; only ever use d6's and the type of roll determines if high or low numbers are good.

>If I want to make an enemy that's [exactly] twice as hard to hit as other enemies
Why would you ever do that, though?

>the type of roll determines if high or low numbers are good.
>implying this is good design

t. Nobilisfag

It was an example number, but let's say that because you want to make a dodgy enemy with half HP and double the chance to not get hit.

Nope, rolling a [1] is always an auto-miss.