What are you opinions on the d20 dice itself. Do you find that it creates too large of a spread? Do you dislike how most games use the 1 and the 20 for critical failures and successes? Do you swap it out for 3d6 or something else?
#3d6 #d20 #dnd #dnd5e #pathfinder #fallout #dnd35 #adnd #odnd #dice #dicegoblin #ttrpg #rpg #roleplaying #dicerolls
I like the d20 a lot. My only issue is a little bit with putting challenge ratings in the right range. I feel anything below 10 might as well not have a challenge rating and anything above 16 can be really insurmountable, especially for lower level groups.
But that's entirely subjective to me. More often these days, I simply wing it and go with "This should be a high result" and adjust the grade of success or failure according to the roll (which is sort of as intended)
@ChaskaTheMagicDog I used to think it has too large spread. But after playing with many other systems, I came to a conclusion that d20 is completely fine. Even great for more complex systems such as dnd or #pathfinder
The best part is that you can freely give all kinds of 5% micro bonuses without being afraid of disbalancing something.
@ChaskaTheMagicDog I think it's fine. It's a little too round and tends to roll off of tables, but other than that, it's perfectly serviceable.
Personally I prefer 3d6 or other multi-die combinations because I like bell curves. The preference isn't strong enough to mess with the math of another system, but it's something I keep in mind when I'm homebrewing.
@ChaskaTheMagicDog my thing with the d20 (or any single die system really) is the swingy-ness. Any result is equally as likely as any other result. And of course that means that anything you do has a 5% chance of critical failure.
I prefer the feeling of competence that multiple dice bring, but I wouldn't change a systems resolution mechanic.
@ChaskaTheMagicDog Depends on the game. Mostly I'd prefer d100 for skills/tasks, because it lets you be more fine-grained, and 3d6 resource units (stats) are easier to add/multiply up to it (like, Dodge starts at DEX x 2%). In heroic/fun games I tend to like 2d6 task systems.
d20's too wide a result scale, especially when bonuses tend to be in the 1-10 range like D&D, and too grainy compared to d100.
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@ChaskaTheMagicDog
3d6 is SO center-heavy it's not fun, that's why I only use it in my horror games, where death spirals quickly take you from "I have a good chance of success" to "I cannot succeed, I will be eaten".
Dice pools get even worse, they're basically diceless determinism once you get past 3 or 4 dice.
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@ChaskaTheMagicDog I used to do math to figure those out, and it's just unintuitive, but I think they're very very similar depending on what TNs you pick.
1-2 dice is a crap shoot (literally), 3-4 is 70-80%, 5+ is 95+%. So you just make sure you die mod them up or down to get the result you want.
@ChaskaTheMagicDog I've played games with d100 before, and the range doesn't really matter awfully much. At the end of the day it is all interpreted relatively (from 0% success to 100%) anyway.
It's more about what the smallest increment of chance is, 1% in the case of d100, 5% for a d20. The less granular your attributes/skill stats, the more each individual point matters.
A d20 is perfectly fine, a d100 has the advantage of hiding the numbers a little less, since you can read % directly.
@ChaskaTheMagicDog I've been playing around with the bones of a system based on TriStat DX, so the only stats are Body, Mind, and Soul. I use 1-3 d10 for attack rolls, 0 is an automatic disarm, two zeroes disables that limb, three zeroes cripple the target limb.
I've been working up O2DRT (offense to defense ratio ten) where base armor is 10, highest armor is 30, and lowest armor is 0. No negative numbers. Class hit point rolls based on armor are cloth 1d10, leather 2d10, metal 3d10.
It's all rough and untested, just a bunch of barely cohesive and sometimes contradictory notes right now. I wanted a passable roleplaying framework for a fictional tabletop rpg setting, and just kept adding more details to everything.
Biggest pain was the magic system, a reason for dungeons and mazes to exist, and a reason why multiple sentient races would share a single world, took two years of work building on systems I've cobbled together before, and I am finally happy with it.
I've been thinking of just dumping all 35 Google Keep notes into a document dump or wiki for anyone to use with the CC BY or ORC licenses attached.
@ChaskaTheMagicDog The nice thing about 3d6 is you can have results with an Extremely Small Likelihood, because sometimes 5% is far too often for a thing to really work.
It does mean that small bonuses or penalties can be extremely significant though.
@ChaskaTheMagicDog While I do love 3.5 best of games that actually exist and the range of a d20 is part of that, a 1d20 is *still* just a little too swingy. The thing is, 3d6 and even 2d10 aren't swingy enough for me.
As such, my thoughts have made their way to middle-of-3d20, with doubles leading to but/and results and triples leading to absurd results. The trick is just building the rest of the system...
Chaska the Magic Dog 
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