/d20/ - Traditional Games

In my homebrew system, I use 3d6s for skill rolls and other bell curve rolls, and use pools of d4s, d6s, d8s, and d10s for combat. There's a d20 in there for initiative but I might take it out.

Depends what you want really. I like 3d6 roll-under. D6s are common, no inherent adds or anything.

However, I greatly admire 2d6 exploding dice on 6 with -1 for each die that explodes (so 5,6, 2 = 12), because there's the possibility for some real far fetched stuff there.

1d100 is also fine but I find that it can be quite hard to do skill difficulty with it.

>>561

I kinda liked how Dark Heresy did d100s

>>565

How did it do it?

I kinda like using 2d10's so I can get a slight bell curve but have a 2-20 range. Also with the two dice, I can have affects key off one dice rolling a 1 or a 10, and then make nat 2's and nat 20's super criticals.

>>592

>not using 5d4

enjoy your negative rolls

>>457

Don't know about best. I PREFER 3d6 +/- modifiers roll under.

>>630

Explain why roll under is better than roll over in ten words or less.

>>632

>in ten words or less.

>explain statistics to me in no more than ten words.

Mongoloid.

You roll against your ability to see if it works. Instead of various DCs specific to the situation, you roll against your skill level and add a modifier to that depending on how difficult the situation is. When combined with a bell curve roll, this has the effect where raising skill level tends to be more important than random chance as far as determining whether you succeed or fail. Under normal circumstances, someone good at something will almost always succeed, while an average person will fail about half the time. Under pressure, skilled people will succeed most of the time, but have a significant chance of failure while average people will fail the vast majority of the time. This is as opposed to having the same chance of wild success or wild failure no matter what, and no difference in probability between margin of success/failure 2 or margin of success/failure 5.

>>632

Like I said, faggot. It's the one I PREFER.

I've grown quite fond of fudge-dice. They allow you to increase the variability of a roll without having to adjust for averages.

>>655

What the fuck are fudge dice?

>>656

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge_%28role-playing_game_system%29#Fudge_dice

5 seconds on google

>>659

That's what those fucking things are. I've seen them around for ages but I had no idea what they were called or what they were supposed to do. People just kept rolling plusses and minuses.

>>573

d100 roll, less than your stat is a success, higher is a failure, with - or + modifiers to your base stat for difficulty or bonuses

>>659

I would play FATE, but the owner called me a rapist, so fuck FATE.

>>671

I don't play Fate either, starting with the devs being cancer I disagree with some design choices - starting with the use of fudge dice.

>>671

>>678

Play fate.

Just don't give them your money.

>>671

>the owner called me a rapist

Source?

>>678

655 here. I don't play FATE either, I just like the dice. I use them for my own shit. The FATE system itself seems flexible, but kinda bland IMO.

>>681

As I said, the cancerous devs are not the only reason, I disagree with some design choices.

Cancerous devs never stopped me from playing WoD (Hunter) for example - I just hoisted the flag and sailed the seas, if you know what I mean.

For pure mathematical elegance, I like GURPS' 3d6 system. Nice bell curve, each point up or down is close to a standard deviation, and it's not hard to get a target number.

For pure fun, I liked the original 7th Sea dice method. Roll a certain number of d10s and keep a certain number of d10s based on your stats. 10s explode.

>>869

More like we decide the degree of variation for certain actions, and that determines how many fudge dice we roll. The more dice in a roll, the more the check's result can deviate from it's base average, either positively or negatively.

Contrast this with increasing variability with bigger dice, or using more of regular dice. Either of those methods requires adjusting the static value, or else higher variation = higher average.

I like how Eclipse Phase did percentile

Roll under your percent skill, with doubles being a crit success or crit fail depending on your skill level (if you have 70 in a skill, 66,55,44,etc are all critical successes, while 77,88,99 are all crit fails.

in opposed checks you want to go as high as possible without going over your skill AND beat your opponents score if they didn't roll over their skill.

I enjoy a simple 2d6, it's outdated but works and I have the probabilities more or less memorized so fuck having to learn new things.

I like Dark Heresy's 2d10 system too, that was one of the better diceroll systems I've dealt with. Ironclaw's multiple die sides system looks really interesting as well, I'd like to try it.

>>938

>Roughly 10% of successes are crits

>Roughly 10% of failures are crits

That's really good.

>in opposed checks you want to go as high as possible without going over your skill AND beat your opponents score if they didn't roll over their skill.

Huh. So if your opponent has 25 and you have 50, there's a 75% chance the opponent fails completely and a 50% chance you fail completely, making for a 37.5% chance you both fail, a 87.5% chance at least one of you fails, a 50% chance exactly one of you fails, and a 12.5% chance you both succeed. Assuming you both succeed, there's a 50% chance you roll higher than your opponent could possibly roll, and below that it's 50/50 odds one way or the other, so a 75% chance you win if neither of you rolls over. The odds of that happening overall are 9.375%, while the chance of you rolling under while your opponent rolls over is 37.5%. All together, your chance of beating your opponent are 46.875%, a bit shy of 50%. Meanwhile your opponent has a 12.5% chance of rolling under while you roll over and a 25% chance of beating you if neither rolls over (3.125% overall) for a total of 15.625% chance of beating you. As stated above, there's a 37.5% chance you both fail, bringing the total to a nice even 100. You have exactly 3 times the chance your opponent does of winning and 1.25% the chance of neither winning. This gives us a whole ratio of you:them:neither 12:4:5 at skill level 50 and 25.

This sounds pretty great. I'm too tire to do it now, but I'd love to see how this works on non-flat distributions like 3d6.

I just use 3d6.