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Matthias777
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Joined: 08 Aug 2007
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Location: North Carolina, USA
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 Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 2:45 pm Post subject: |
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| MacRauri wrote: | | Matthias777, I don't mind rolling a few more dice and this would certainly smooth out some of the variability on the low end. Would your suggested change also include a shift in the difficulty intervals? |
Absolutely. I don't want to make things easier for characters, I just want to add some flexibility to the system.
| MacRauri wrote: | | Or is it ok to allow 24D PCs routinely make D or VD checks perhaps without even being trained in the skill? |
Definitely not. I am also a proponent of unskilled penalties, perhaps letting PCs do something along the lines of listing a fixed/calculated number of unimproved skills under each attribute that they are not unfamiliar with.
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CRMcNeill
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 3:40 pm Post subject: |
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An idea that I had a while back for high dice level characters was, at a certain dice level, they could start to treat a certain portion of their dice as a flat number rather than a dice roll, sort of like taking a 10 in D20. Say if a character has 12D, he could choose to treat 6 of those dice as a static value of 3 (or whatever each, then roll the remaining 6 dice as normal, then total the two together. Alternately, if the player wanted to take the chance of rolling higher, he could roll all 12 dice as normal.
It never evolved beyond a concept, but the premise is still there...
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Grimace
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Location: Montana; Big Sky Country
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Yeah, that's one of those "work-arounds" I talked about. WEG-post Star Wars- came up with a similar idea. Unfortunately that's just a band-aid on the overall problem, but it doesn't actually fix the issue. You still end up with character skills that become 5D+18 or some such...meaning that no matter what, the character will always succeed at a Difficult or less skill check. |
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jmanski
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 5:10 pm Post subject: |
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Not with the wild die.
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cheshire
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 6:28 pm Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: | | Not with the wild die. |
Depends on how you run with Wild Dice. There's more than one option for that. I don't ever treat a 1 as an instant failure. Plot complication, yes. But a complication and a failure aren't synonymous.
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 7:17 pm Post subject: |
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Although, there are some instances where a zero chance of failure makes sense, like lifting for example where your strength is measurable and highly predictable in the real world, but where you might fail catastrophically on one turn in D6, and then succeed spectacularly the next. An average human has a one in 36 shot at failing a 10 kg lifting roll, but I could give my 9-year old sister a 10 kg weight and asker to lift it once every hour, 12 hours a day, for a month, and she'd never fail to lift it.
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CRMcNeill
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Joined: 05 Apr 2010
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 7:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Fallon Kell wrote: | | Although, there are some instances where a zero chance of failure makes sense, like lifting for example where your strength is measurable and highly predictable in the real world, but where you might fail catastrophically on one turn in D6, and then succeed spectacularly the next. An average human has a one in 36 shot at failing a 10 kg lifting roll, but I could give my 9-year old sister a 10 kg weight and asker to lift it once every hour, 12 hours a day, for a month, and she'd never fail to lift it. |
Except for that one time where she turns her head at the wrong moment and pulls a muscle in her shoulder as she is lifting it. Just a thought...
And that's what CPs are for...
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Guardian_A
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 7:33 pm Post subject: |
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We had a GM with our group for a while who used to 1/2 the total if you rolled a 1 on your Wild Dice.  |
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jmanski
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 7:40 pm Post subject: |
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| Fallon Kell wrote: | | Although, there are some instances where a zero chance of failure makes sense, like lifting for example where your strength is measurable and highly predictable in the real world, but where you might fail catastrophically on one turn in D6, and then succeed spectacularly the next. An average human has a one in 36 shot at failing a 10 kg lifting roll, but I could give my 9-year old sister a 10 kg weight and asker to lift it once every hour, 12 hours a day, for a month, and she'd never fail to lift it. |
You can't say never. There would be a time when she would drop it, either out of clumsiness, boredom, or whatever. Humans are not perfect, and cannot yield perfect results.
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 11:07 pm Post subject: |
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One idea I've had bouncing around in my head is, rather than using a level based system as a measurement of how powerful a character is, I would like to see a running total of the number of CPs required to bring a character to a their current stat level. That would give the GMs a guideline for gauging how fair an encounter will be by comparing CP totals for the various participants in the encounter. It would be something like the Challenge Rating on D20 stats, except with much larger numbers.
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S-Foil
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| Posted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 11:56 pm Post subject: |
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| crmcneill wrote: | | One idea I've had bouncing around in my head is, rather than using a level based system as a measurement of how powerful a character is, I would like to see a running total of the number of CPs required to bring a character to a their current stat level. That would give the GMs a guideline for gauging how fair an encounter will be by comparing CP totals for the various participants in the encounter. It would be something like the Challenge Rating on D20 stats, except with much larger numbers. |
Not all CP totals are created equal. For instance you can have two characters with similar point totals but with wildly different levels of lethality. For instance a character that sinks all their points into Blaster can be more effective than another balancing points between Blaster and Dodge. The Blaster-heavy character can hit the balanced character from farther away than the balanced guy can shoot back even assuming the same weapon.
You can also have a character that focuses on skills only useful in narrow circumstances. An expert pilot won't last long in a gun fight with a gunslinger even though they've got similar point totals. I don't think the harried nature of D6 characters lends itself to comparing any two with some abstract score. |
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2012 12:05 am Post subject: |
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Well, it's not perfect by any means. Maybe break the totals up by attribute, instead of a sum total?
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S-Foil
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| Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2012 1:32 am Post subject: |
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| crmcneill wrote: | | Well, it's not perfect by any means. Maybe break the totals up by attribute, instead of a sum total? |
There's still skills in the same attribute that aren't directly comparable. The character with lots of points sunk into Brawling Parry because they like up close fighting is still going to have a lot of trouble with the guy that sunk points into Blaster. Again even with the same point totals the characters would be hard to compare since their effectiveness will depend on the situation.
There's also the problem with equipment affecting characters' abilities. Some sort of CR would need to take into account armore or weapons with better range. Two characters with high blaster and dodge skills could vary in effectiveness if one has a holdout blaster and the other a blaster rifle.
Thinking about it a little more you might be able to have comparison categories. For instance "ranged combat" or "melee combat". Such a comparison would just look at a character's best ranged/melee and dodge/parry skills and compare the average rolls for each. Like I said before characters are so varied (or can be so varied) that many comparisons just don't work. GURPS has the same problem. Characters with the same point total can perform entirely differently depending on their traits. In D20 characters are far less mechanically varied so comparisons are much easier. |
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2012 1:49 am Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: | | Fallon Kell wrote: | | Although, there are some instances where a zero chance of failure makes sense, like lifting for example where your strength is measurable and highly predictable in the real world, but where you might fail catastrophically on one turn in D6, and then succeed spectacularly the next. An average human has a one in 36 shot at failing a 10 kg lifting roll, but I could give my 9-year old sister a 10 kg weight and asker to lift it once every hour, 12 hours a day, for a month, and she'd never fail to lift it. |
You can't say never. There would be a time when she would drop it, either out of clumsiness, boredom, or whatever. Humans are not perfect, and cannot yield perfect results. |
I had already defined a frequency and a time frame. Humans can be perfect at a limited task for a limited time. For example, our family goes through a lot of milk. It's not uncommon for me to walk in the door with a bag of groceries under one arm and two 1 gallon jugs of milk in the other hand. That's 16 lbs and a penalty for only using the off hand. I have never dropped that milk, and it wouldn't surprise me if I never did. There are just some skills where a greater degree of consistency than D6 provides could be warranted. In those instances, I think taking a 3 could be appropriate.
I personally just dispense with rolling in instances like that. My player's starfighter mounts a pair of Incom w34-t light turbolasers if he scores a direct hit on a TIE fighter, I just tell him it explodes, because that's what a TIE/ln hit by twin turbolaser blasts does.
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HACCP
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| Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2012 3:08 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | In D20 characters are far less mechanically varied so comparisons are much easier. |
That might be true with lower level characters but when reaching mid level and onwards, the sheer number of rule mechanics makes balancing opponents very difficult, not to say bogging down the game play.
I went from playing WEG 1ed > d20 core > d20 RCR > d20 saga and finally "back" to WEG 2ed R&E. It might no be perfect but compared to the d20 products 2ed R&E is smooth, fast and quite consistent. If I see something I don't like I can adjust it on the fly without having to leaf through five books comparing feats, talents, skills and other mechanics.
Are you troubled by game balance while playing? Is the system that broken? I'm asking because I want to get ahead of any eventual problem early in my campaign before having to revise entire chunks of rules later on. |
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