Basic Dice Mechanics

>homebrewing an RPG
>without even having read enough RPGs to know about more than 3 core dice mechanics

Moving away from Dice entirely, there's also:

Resourec Management/Number Guessing: Where the GM basically thinks up a DC for task the PCs are doing and the PCs then say they'll spend X amount of some resource they get as a result of their stats and if they spend more/less than the DC the GM came up with they win - I'd include in this card based games that use Blackjack rather than poker as their basis - so GM picks a card or two (depending on whether it's an easy or hard challenge) and puts them face down and PCs can throw a card from their hand and if they get over 21 it's failure, less it's success and blackjack is a crit.
(Examples: Amberdiceless is the obvious one, but Fate points and a lot of the "resources" PCs get in WoD/Storyteller systems often also work like this, as in many ways does the entire idea of Vancian casting from D&D if you really wanna be pedantic)

That's 2 core mechanics more than most people know. At least they didn't assume making up anything not d20 is genius that has never before been done.

Ok, FFG Star Wars is an interesting case. It's essentially a dicepool system with degrees of success, where you're always rolling a contested roll. Instead of a number of successes required, the GM assigns dice for you to roll against, adjusting the odds of success rather than the target number. More successes means a higher degree of success.

Where it gets interesting is that the color coded die allow for a rather dynamic set of play.

Green and Yellow dice always represent the players inherent abilities.

Red and Purple dice represent difficulty of a task as well as an opposing enemies stats.

Black and Blue dice represent circumstantial penalties and bonuses, representing everything from player assistance, preparation, injuries, environmental effects

The thing is it's not just successes and failures one the dice, there's also the Threat/Advantage system, which runs perpendicular to the normal success/failure system. A success and an Advantage is something like "You Succeed, and..." while a success and a thread would be more "You succeed, but..." It also runs opposite, where you may fail a task, but gain an overwhelming benefit from the failure. It's highly narrativist in that respect. In fact, it's the one game I can think of where role-playing doesn't come to a screeching halt when combat starts.

For an example, try this: game2.ca/eote/

Set the Green die to two, a yellow die to 1, and the purple die to two. That's about an average roll with someone with the equivalent of a 14 in a Stat and a +2 bonus to a skill taking on a DC 10.

>Do you have an example because I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about.
Not that guy, but they're probably talking about Kamigakari's system. It's a Japanese TTRPG that an user posted translated the other day. Should still be in the archive.

Legends of the Wulin does rolling sets in a slightly different way to ORE. While in ORE the width and the height of the set are both distinct things, in LotW you evaluate each set as a number, so a roll of three sevens would be 37.

This has the really cool effect of letting you have multiple different values to make use of on each roll, letting you undertake multiple simultaneous actions on different values. It's really neat.

Oh I know plenty of systems, I'm talking about the very core of the way the dice are handled. And I was posting this to talk about the basic handling because I've read like 5-6 systems recently and haven't seen anything other than those first 2.

Thank you.

Interesting.

Really I'm just trying to learn as much as I can so I can use the right system or ideas for the right thing.

Think I have that sitting on my HD actually.

Reminds me of Don't Rest Your Head

People generally don't like homebrew systems, not cause they're bad or complicated, but cause people are dumb and require the validation of big companies that just shit in their mouth anyway.

I came up with a system that's literally just bare bones D&D and white wolf. Six attributes, all things derive from those six attributes even attack rolls depending on what weapon you're using. (Some guns use dex, some use cha... never know) you roll a certain amount of dice and certain type of dice.

You don't roll for high or low necessarily, you roll for max.

Say I have 3d10 in a stat. I need to get at least one 10 to succeed. On an enormously challenging feat, maybe two successes.

Thus lower dice are better. Obviously it'd be easier to roll a 4 on a d4 than a 10 on a d10. So the number of dice you roll would be luck and fate factors, the dice type is your actual talent and experience.

Sauce on image?

Some Russian comic artist, I think.
Found it:
yuka-soemy.deviantart.com/art/Paladin-165713528

D6 like WEGs star wars system

Doesn't Noumenon use fucking dominoes for it's system?

A mechanic by which dice are thrown into a cup located on a coffee table 1-2 meters away from the game table. Only dice that land in the cup succeed, in which case the number on the die indicates quality of succeess. Higher trait means more dice.

For easier tasks, use a popcorn bowl.

One friend of mine hand crafted a system without ever knowing about tabletop gaming. Apparently he made it while deployed in Afghanistan. His system was a low numbers are good system with what die you roll determined by how good your stats were. Best being a d4, worst being a d20. You'd roll contested rolls or rolls against challenge levels trying to get the lowest number. Ones were critical successes

Good luck with that and the average neckbeard's physical coordination.

I think you just want free dice.

The dogs in the vineyard mechanic is interesting.

What's that got to do with anything?

Suppose a player loses a few dice under the couch or wherever due to a shit throw. Host wins.

You could achieve a similar effect by placing the cup in the middle of the game table. Nobody throws that bad.

This has got to be a thing. Hell, opening a thread for this.

That's some dream woman material right there

One that I came up with on my own but don't know if it's been done before is that you have an you roll your dice pool and have as many successes as you can fit with the total of any combination of dice falls under the number.
Example: Roll 6d6 and get 2, 1, 6, 3, 5, 5
You're doing something that uses Attribute which is 4
You could use 1,2,3, 1 and 2, 1 and 3 for a total of 5 potential combinations of success. Then combinations with more dice are a higher degree of success.
You might decide that you don't need an overwhelming success for what you're trying to do, so you use one of the single die success but if you needed a better result for the action you would use a combination with 2 dice and so on.

Yeah, very cool mechanic.

It's somewhat similar to Powered by the Apocalypse games, where any roll can result in "success", "partial success/success at a cost", or "failure".

But I like FFG SW's system more because it not only gives you an extra result (fail with a benefit), but it also gives you a degree of success/fail and a degree of threat/advantage. So you can be like "you got one threat, you make a deal but the price is 15% higher" or "you rolled 4 threat, he sells you the ship but neglects to tell you that it's missing an engine on the left side!"

Also, it works pretty well in combat, too. As a player, you can spend advantage to activate special weapon qualities, like lighting people on fire when using incendiary weapons. Or just use it to recover strain damage. As the GM, you can spend threat to deal strain damage, or do fun stuff like knock players prone or make them run out of ammo. I find this is a lot easier on players and GMs compared to a more freeform system like FATE or DW where you have to keep coming up with interesting "tags"/"fail forward"/"hard bargains"/etc. during combat.

we use a 2d10 x Stat model where the relation of the rolls count (something like roll higher than target saving roll to hit, roll double as high to get a bonus on damage or wound effect)

penalties/bonuses are directly added to the diceroll before calculating, to both give a roughly percentual bonus/penalty and to make it harder/easier to hit the lower numbers due to the bell curve probability. Stat ranges we use are usually between 8 and 20, so calculators are often used if the end results lie close to eachother

Drop the idea of using a single die as a 'i don't need to succeed really well'. Nobody wants to kinda succeed if they can totally succeed. The idea of 3 dice combined adding up to under the attribute being 3 degrees of success is cool though. If Attributes go to 5, though, you run into the problem of players always succeeding unless literally every die rolls a 6. Maybe d8s, Att cap at 5? Definitely needs balance testing, but sounds like a cool idea, I'm a sucker for interesting rolling schemes.

Yeah I wasn't thinking clearly where 1 die could still be a success.
Also the "attribute of 5 almost always succeeding" could be fixed by the total having to be Less than the attribute rather than less than or equal to.
Want to keep it d6 because those are the dice type everyone has and are most fun to roll a bunch at once of.
You might also change the success model itself
Instead of 1 dice = failure and 2 dice = success:
1 dice = Failure
2 = Success with a drawback
3 = Normal success.

But then the probabilities are still a problem but this can still be solved with a sufficiently large dice pool being rolled. For this I use Anydice to keep the probabilities sane.

While my game is theoretically just flip-flopped roll-under system, it also makes the game flow very differently.

The thing is that Stats are called weaknesses, and are negative aspects (naivete, clumsiness) rather than positive ones (strength, willpower etc).

Also the tone of the game becomes noticeably different when instead of trying to think what your character is good at, you gotta think what your character is bad at and what they're less bad at.

Why does no one ever fucking mention D100. It's the most straight forward shit on the planet. A toddler could grasp the concept.

How hard is it to hit that guy with my sword? well given all my bonuses and penalties I have a 70% chance to hit him. Roll 70 or under.

Fuck it get deep with it and start assigning degrees of success for each 10% the test was passed by.

Umm, you read the OP, right?

> You have a number and you have to roll under it. GURPS is like this.

D100 is the most common type of roll under, with to d20 roll under and 3d6 roll under coming behind.

Too granular, so simple it's boring.
Also with increased granularity it puts more pressure on the DM.
Imagine some powergamer wanting to maximize his roll bonuses
>d6
Obviously a no, he probably wouldn't try because it's easy to tell how big a +1 effects the outcome.
>d20
Asks for situational +1s and +2s occasionally gets them and it's an annoying burden on the DM
>d100
Suddenly you're playing haggle simulator with all the players bargaining for a several +1,+2,+3 either requiring you to add a ton of wasted time debating or consult several dozens of charts multiple times any time anyone wants anything done. If not, you're using huge chunks of bonuses from a small quantity of modifiers and you might as well be using a smaller dice size anyways.

...

jesus christ this looks like the most complicated shit ever. why play this? GURPS is more straightforward.

Neat. Reading about this now. Never heard of this before. This is the first really new dice mechanic I've heard of in a while. (Not OP but think it's an interesting question.)

Because it's really not. Once you roll and have the result(which is the easiest part) it's more a matter of interpreting the dice. I've taken to having the whole group look at the results and throw suggestions around, which keeps everyone engaged even when it's not their turn, and makes my life as a GM easier. It's a highly narrativist system

It's a system where narrative and roleplay don't come to a screeching halt when combat starts.

Most of the time in combat you just need a copy of that table handy and just pick and choose. It's surprisingly quick, because you don't need additional rolls for it, you just pick one or two of the options and get on with it.

The first few rounds in the first fight will take a bit when people get used to the table, but after that, it doesn't take longer than two seconds to figure the thing you want (usually blue or black dice), unless you can go for a crit.

In out-of-combat context, the threat-advantage is just treated as an additional layer on the roll, and if the GM can't think of anything fancy for the moment, you get Strain (or sweat as we call it).

Also not that guy but made me think of roll for the galaxy. Not an RPG though

Mechanics are interesting to me on their own, but there's a definite opportunity cost. Even a game as simple as RISUS requires that I teach a group of normies a new set of rules. With rare exceptions, I find my players care very little about rules, and only really care about the results. Make them learn something too new and different and they'll get all antsy unless it really delivers on the thrills.

It isn't helped by the fact that many indie games have fairly mediocre mechanics, or the theme of the game is so narrowly hardwired into the rules that it becomes trite
>this is a game about a stressful quest for survival
>you have a stress bar. If it gets too high bad things happen
>uh oh, you have a 7 on your stress bar... can't you feel the STRESS???

This is one of the unsung advantages of old school D&D?
>roll these numbers. Nah, you don't really need to know what they do
>Ok, you wanna be a wizard, a warrior, a sneaky guy, or a holy man who heals people and stuff?

In my system you have to match the numbers.

However it also uses the stat mod buff, so I'd say it more resembles roll over.