TSOY owners' survey

[Trevis Martin]

Well if you want a similar odds curve you can roll two dice, one considered positive and one negative and take the lowest number showing.  Ties are 0.

best

Trevis

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I'd be happy to see the ability range change, and scrapping ability groupings is a great idea, but please, please, please, no Fudge dice.  There just has to be a way to stick with standard dice.

I keep hearing this, but I never hear why. So, if you're going to make this complaint, please let me know why. Otherwise, I'll chalk it up to gamer-think.

Thanks,
Clinton

[Kaare Berg]

Fudge dice are nice if you have them, an inconvinience when you don't.

It makes the game a little less accessable. IMO.

And yes, you can use d6s and just badger your FLGS to take them in. And yes they are very intuitive. But in the end it makes the game just that little bit less . . . easy to simply pick up and go.

[Trevis Martin]

I like the fudge dice myself.  

But I think, Clintion, if you want, you could include something like my suggestion above in a sidebar, in case people only have normal six siders available.

Trevis.

[Bill Cook]

Fudge dice are weird. Got a friend who raves about them. GM's a Fudge group every week. So I've been exposed to them, but they're still .. inaccessible. Just like the Heroquest Boardgame dice. In fact, more so. (But probably less than Dragon Dice.)

d6 is my favorite, and that makes TSOY v1.0 attractive to me.

As a point of comparison, I adore the move in DitV to create heterogenous pools. Higher maximums = better performance. I get it. And the funky, non-cube shapes don't bother me at all. But once you start changing the symbols on the die face .. [rubs forehead in frustration] .. it breaks some aesthetic I can't express.

[KingstonC]

Trevis-

How would you combine positive/negitive dice rolls with bonus & penalty die? Could you do it without a number of color coded dice to keep the positives and negitives appart?


-K

[Jeffrey Straszheim]

Regarding my dislike of Fudge dice,

I keep hearing this, but I never hear why. So, if you're going to make this complaint, please let me know why. Otherwise, I'll chalk it up to gamer-think.

I can't give some logical, discursive reason to avoid Fudge dice, but I've just never like them, nor Fudge in general.  Put it this way, say you were going to change the art in the game and pointed us to a site of some guy's art.  Say I hated it, and said so.  This is more or less the same thing.

That being said, Fudge dice won't stop me from buying or playing the game.

[Trevis Martin]

Looking at it my instinct would be to say that since you can't have both bonus and penalty dice that you use a neutral color for the bonus dice (or just roll them in a different spot) and if you know they are positive or negative you read them like you read the roll now.

i.e. my character has an ability roll with penalty dice so I roll my two main dice and two penalty dice and you take the highest number of the penalty dice as the negative.

The disadvantage is you couldn't use the 'read lowest die' method.  You'd actually have to do the addition of the positive and negative dice.  A mental shift but not too hard to pick up. It's not the most elegant solution for sure.

It would change the odds somewhat.  I mean I don't know what the mechanism Clintion is planning to use is.  Assuming that it is like the current one, and if you are using Fudge dice, then the most additional dice could do is a 33% chance of lowering the score by 1 per penalty die (or add by 1 for bonus die.)  The range of variance would be greater with the method above.  

But the core mechanic may change so much as to make this speculation worthless.

Trevis

[Darcy Burgess]

To add some fuel to the fire against Fudge dice, it really comes down to:

The probability curve on a 4dF is so heavily centered, you might as well not bother rolling the dice.

In fact, I'd argue that Fudge is one of the closest things you can get to a Karma system that involves a randomizer.

Assuming that each new level of skill (journeyman, etc) gives you 1dF, have you thought about the fact that your skill level has a roughly flat effect on your result, regardless of your skill level?

Whereas, basing your system on a 2d6 curve + skill level, that gives you a nice spread -- still relatively centered, but with good variation.

IMHO, leave well enough alone.

[Darcy Burgess]

Just had another thought as I hit "post".

I understand your desire to reduce the number of skill steps.  This is cool.

Why not do that, but keep the old 2d6 system...just tweak it a bit.

Now, each rank of skill grants a +1 die mod and a bonus die.  Then, you don't need any fancy rules to deal with unskilled actions -- 2d6 no bonus, no help.

Seems elegant enough to me (and it gets more dice hitting the table -- which is always good in my books).

For what it's worth.

[dyjoots]

Assuming that each new level of skill (journeyman, etc) gives you 1dF, have you thought about the fact that your skill level has a roughly flat effect on your result, regardless of your skill level?

based on the probabilities in the other thread, i highly doubt that this is the case.  because you're right, it doesn't do much other than increase the spread.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I'm not sure what you guys are smoking in regards to system. It's the same thing as before - just with less steps on the skills and dice.

I could type it all out now, but just read this:

http://www.anvilwerks.com/src/tsoy2/solar_system.html

The only part of the above stuff that was right at all is the fact that Fudge dice - when using 4dF, as in Fudge - are heavily centered. I use 3dF, de-centering it some. It's still more center-focused than 2d6, which I like - bonus and penalty dice are more necessary now.

[Darcy Burgess]

Geeze, big "C".  That link might have been helpful earlier. ;)

Makes sense now that you sort things out for us.  Puts a stronger focus on in-game play (as in playing hard, or working, or giving 110% or whatever other sports euphemism we could use).

Have you considered that with the increased impact of bonus/penalty dice that this will to a degree degrade the value of "skills"?

Just an open question.

[dyjoots]

Should we start a new thread as discussion for the Solar System?

(edit: I like it, and want to discuss, but I didn't know if there was a better place...  After a quick overview, it looks good.  I'm probably starting a game soon, and I'll definitely consider giving these a try.)

Also, I *love* Shin Qui.  That is a great non-fantasy example, and set my firefly-sense tingling.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

We should start a new thread - I'll do that now.