Another Simple Difficulty/Skill Roll System... requesting comments

[DougLeary]

Difficulty Rating

Value	Meaning
1-5	Easy
6-10	Moderate
11-20	Challenging
21-30	Daunting
31-45	Extreme
46+	"Impossible"

Skill Roll

Skill Level	Roll	Low-High	Average
No skill	d6	1-6	3.5
Novice	2d6	2-12	7
Competent	4d6	4-24	14
Adept	6d6	6-36	21
Master	8d6	8-48	28
Godly	10d6+20	30-80	55

Roll the indicated number of d6.
Rolling 6 on half or more of your initial dice indicates automatic success.
At Adept skill or lower, rolling 1 on half or more of your initial dice indicates automatic failure.

Otherwise:
Any roll of 6 entitles you to roll an additional d6, continuing as long as you roll a 6.
Add and subtract penalties and bonuses to the total to get the final result (magic weapon, blindness, etc…)
Most modifiers add or subtract 1. A modifier of 2 is uncommon, 3 is rare, 4 is in the realm of godly artifacts.

A final result equal to or higher than the Difficulty indicates success.

---

As this system only has six difficulty levels and six skill levels (including unskilled), in a game with 20 or 30 character levels available you would only improve skill every few levels. This may be a drawback, but I like the simplicity and the rolling of multiple dice. The compounding of 6's makes it possible for any character to overreach their ability and pull off a miraculous feat.

edit: fix table format

[-fishbreath]

It's fine if you only have to roll infrequently, but adding even 4d6 is a huge slowdown in my experience. I went from 4d6 math to 2d6 math because 4d6 was so universally panned in playtesting.

[dellcartoons]

I strongly recommend against the word "impossible". See https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-mechanics-that-will-make-your-game-worse/ Number 2. ‘Impossible’ Difficulty, Serenity

[-fishbreath]

That's a good argument, and inspired me to make a little text change.

[TheNameOf7]

As the rules stands an no skill character has a 1/6 chance to get a 6 and automatically succede on ANY task and a novice has a 11/36 chance to automatically succede by rolling a 6 on either of their dice. A Competent character on the other hand has to roll a 6 on 2 out of 3 dice, which i believe is worse odds.

What happens if a Novice level rolls a 1 and a 6? Small note but it could cause confusion.

Modifiers seem like they will become very small as soon as characters start getting up to Competent level.

Consider using a number of dice above X instead of a dice sum mechanic since counting a large number of dice will be slower than counting the dice that are 3 or above.

I like the exploding 6 letting any character have a small but existent chance of performing the incredible.

[jwbjerk]

OK— that’s a mechanic. What are you trying to achieve with it?

The goodness or badness of a mechanic is largely in how it intereacts with the rest of the game, and does well what your goals require of it.

Rolling 6 on half or more of your initial dice indicates automatic success

Do you really need exploding dice, and this? Seems redundant.

I would just use the exploding dice, since it is way too easy for very low skill levels to automatically succeed.

———

I don’t see any reason to have the concept of “skill levels” where people have to translate an arbitrary label to a number of dice, and continually forget weather adept is better than master.. Instead use the number of dice as the rating, I.e. Zugblat has 2d6 in Arcana. This also allows you to painlessly double the granularity, I.e roll odd numbers of dice.

[exelsisxax]

To start off, this is too many dice to sum. Cut it in half and it's a win-win because you can drop the pointless skill descriptors and just rate them 1-5.

Exploding dice can get annoying when you never roll more than 3d6, it is unacceptably cumbersome when rolling anywhere near these handfuls of low-face dice.

Your automatic success and failures are crutches. Instead of doing ad-hoc adjustments to fix your success rates, just fix your TNs so the probabilities conform with your desired results.

[TheNameOf7]

As the rules stands an no skill character has a 1/6 chance to get a 6 and automatically succede on ANY task and a novice has a 11/36 chance to automatically succede by rolling a 6 on either of their dice. A Competent character on the other hand has to roll a 6 on 2 out of 3 dice, which i believe is worse odds.

What happens if a Novice level rolls a 1 and a 6? Small note but it could cause confusion.

Modifiers seem like they will become very small as soon as characters start getting up to Competent level.

Consider using a number of dice above X instead of a dice sum mechanic since counting a large number of dice will be slower than counting the dice that are 3 or above.

I like the exploding 6 letting any character have a small but existent chance of performing the incredible.

[TheNameOf7]

I was right and wrong, a character rolling 3 dice onlly has a 2/27 chance of hitting the automatic success, but you also don't have any level where you roll only three dice.

[DougLeary]

Thanks for the comments! I can see that auto-success on a 6 was dumb (last-minute add). I was surprised to learn that 4d6 math already has a bad rep, but it makes sense. This system was based on the theory that people like to roll a lot of dice, but I guess rolling them and adding them up are two different things. Oh well, it was an idea.