Project ID: Core Mechanics.

[incomitatum]

Hello all,

   I have been lurking around the Forge and have learned quite a bit. I lurk around on some other forums and have learned much less from them (the advice is more critical and less constructive).
   Over at our forum www.azureproductions.com/phpbb2 , we have been going around and around until we have come up with what dice we would use. I was in a predominate gas station when I found some craps dice. 6D6 for abour three dollars. I figured that if they sold them in gas stations, then D6 really are that accesable. I want my system to appeal to as many people as possible.
   All that said we decided on the D6, and rather than roll a handful of dice we wanted to have some consistency. So, like in Craps, we are having the player roll just 2D6. They then add their Attribute and Skill to the total.

   
   A game system I loved in the past was the west end system. It gave the GM some ranges to use. Difficulty tables in which he could tell the player if it was an easy-difficult task.
   I am not a math genius, and other threads have been talking about reoccurring averages and bell-curves.

I think I have the difficulties figured out, but I would like someone more adept to look my work over.

Here are my notes, there are fairly easy to read. Included are a few notes on our two power stats, Spirit and Luck.

Thank you for your time, and help,

-Andrew B. Chason.


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We are trying to hammer out our system. In the idea we are toying with, the player rolls 2D6. They then add Their Attribute, and their applicable skill to achieve a target (difficulty) number.

We figure that a player will never have more than 7 in an Attribute and/or Skill (for a total of 14). They will never have less than a -1 in an Attribute and/or Skill (for a total of -2).

That give you a low of 1, and a high or 26. Where as Snake-Eyes is a Botch and BoxCars is the "Luck of the Gods".

● When rolling BoxCars, if your second roll is Snake-Eyes, the result is a 2, rather than a Botch.

Difficulties:

Simple: 3-7
Easy: 8-12
Moderate: 13-17
Hard: 18-22
Difficult: 23+


Spirit:
● Spirit will amplify any Lore you are using at the time.
● You can spend as many spirit as you like in a turn during your Lore or before your roll.
● If not used to amplify a Lore, but modify a Roll, Each Point of Spirit = +2 to the final result of your roll.

Luck:
● When a player rolls BoxCars they may either roll again, and add it to their first roll, or absorb a point of luck.
● A player does not start with any luck.
● A player may hoard up to seven luck at a time.
● A player may spend as much luck as they have at any time, after a roll.
● Luck is spend to reroll a roll. This can even be used to overcome Botches. The player feigns the botch and all those around him sees how lucky he is; having barely missed tripping or throwing the pin rather than the grenade..
● If on a reroll a player comes up with BoxCars, they may reroll and add it to their 12; but may NOT earn a point of luck.
● You may spend a point of luck to add +6 to your defense for one turn; on anyone's turn.
● If you invest spirit into your roll, roll poorly and spend Luck, the spirit invested is not lost, and is added to your reroll or eventual outcome.

[OddballE]

The game system seems simple enough and easy to understand.  I know alot of people on this site use the D6 as there die of choice,  so I am not sure if that will help or hinder you.  I used to play the west end games and liked them and your system is easier.  I like what you have done with the luck.  Good luck with your game.

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya,

Couple things.

1.  Do not assume that using a D6 automatically makes your game appeal to a lot of people.  It is not the resolution system or the die type that draws people to a game (although it can certainly drive them away).  It is how much fun the game is to play that will make your game appeal or not appeal to a broad range of players.

2.  If you're asking for an evaluation of your mechanics, they seem adequate enough.  But there's no real way to give any useful feed back IMO until you answer these two questions:

-What is your game about?

-What do the characters do?

Peace,

-Troy

[incomitatum]

Im not sure where my reply went, but I wrote one about an hour ago :S

Alright. I will in time (hopefully soon) let you all know what our game is about, we are well into developing the (Races and Classes). The storyline is coming along well too.

In THIS post my setting is less important though.

I am trying to wrap my head around these numbers. Does my logic seem sound? Are my difficulty tables off? I think I know how to calculate them, but am horrible at math; and I am sure there are things I have not accounted for. Is there a formula I need to follow? Do averages and Bell-Curves have ANYTHING to do with all this?

I want to have these numbers figured out long before we playtest, so we can focus on other things, and our playtesting doesn't have to us that they are wrong.

I hope my next thread here will be to unveil our setting.

Thank you for you help and understanding,

-Andrew B. Chason
[Founder of Azure Productions]

[Walt Freitag]

Hi Andrew, and welcome to the Forge!

One reason you may be getting confused is the concept of the "difficulty" of a task has several different meanings.

If I'm talking about a particular task being attempted at a particular time by a particular character, the difficulty of the task, in terms of game mechanics, is just another way of saying the probability of success. A lower probability of success means the task is more difficult. If the player needs to roll, say, 11 or higher total on the two dice to succeed, that's a difficult task for this character at this time. If the player will succeed as long as he rolls better than snake eyes, that's an easy task. If the player has to roll 7 or better to succeed, and so will succeed about 58% of the time, you might call it a moderate task.

When you talk about the inherent difficulty of a task, without knowing anything about the character attempting it, that's very different. In that case, the difficulty of the task means the amount of ability the character who eventually attempts it must have, in order to have some particular "reasonable" chance of success. Say you set the benchmark of "reasonable" to be "at least a 50-50 chance." If a character needs only a few attribute and/or skill points to have at least a 50-50 chance, then you might call it an easy task. If a character needs a high attribute + skill total to have at least a 50-50 chance, then you might call it a difficult task.

Without knowing the attribute + skill total of the characters who will be facing the task, though, there's no way to tell whether a task you've labeled "easy" or "difficult" in the second sense of "difficulty" will actually be "easy" or "difficult" in the first sense of "difficulty" (that is to say, likely to succeed or not) for the character attempting it. That's why it's a bad idea to put labels like "simple, " "easy," "hard," etc. on inherent difficulty numbers.

With your core mechanic, to find the minimum attribute + skill total that a character must have to have a better than 50-50 chance of success (without the use of Spirit or Luck points), subtract 7 from the difficulty number.

For instance, at difficulty 7 a character with attribute 0 and skill 0 will succeed on a roll of 7 or better, or 58% of the time. At difficulty 23, a character needs attribute + skill of 16 to succeed on a roll of 7 or better.

To find the minimum attribute + skill total that a character must have to have a longshot chance of success but not so longshot that rolling boxcars is the only way to succeed, that is on a roll of 11 or better (which is a 1 in 12 chance or about 8%), subtract 11 from the difficulty number. At dfficulty 7 a character with attribute + skill of -4 will succeed on a roll of 11 or better. (In other words, even a character with the minimum normal attribute + skill total of -2 will have a "better than longshot" chance of succeeding at difficulty 7). At difficulty 23, a character needs attribute + skill of 12 to succeed on a roll of 11 or better. (In other words, even a character with scores very close to the maximum your system allows will only have a longshot chance of success at difficulty 23).

To find the maximum attribute + skill total that a character can have and still have a chance to fail short of rolling snake eyes (that is, fail on a roll of 2 or 3), subtract 3 from the difficulty number. At difficulty 7 a character with attribute + skill of 4 will fail on a roll of 3; any character with a better attribute + skill than that can only fail by rolling snake eyes (a 1 in 36 chance). At difficulty 23, a character would have to have a superhuman attribute + skill total of 20 to be that confident of success.

What happens at difficulty 15? Simple.
15 - 7 = 8 is the attribute + skill total that gives a character just over a 50-50 chance of succceding (succeds on a roll of 7 or better).
15 - 11 = 4 is the attribute + skill total at which a character has a 1 in 12 chance of succeeding (only succeeds on 11 or boxcars)
15 - 3 = 12 is the attribute + skill total at which a character has an 11 in 12 chance of succeeding (only fails on 3 or snake eyes)

So whether the difficulty 15 task is a nearly sure thing, a 50-50 proposition, or a long shot depends on whether the character attempting it is more likely to have an attribute + skill total closer to 12, 8, or 4. Do you see why just calling that "Moderate" is misleading? Depending on what kind of attribute and skill numbers characters start out with, and whether and how those numbers advance, a difficulty of 17 (the top of the "Moderate" range) may be impossible for starting characters to overcome but all but a sure thing for experienced characters. I suggest doing away with the descriptive labels and just sticking to the difficulty numbers.

From the above, you should be able to fill in additional cases yourself, following the general rule: with stat + skill total of S, at difficulty D, the character will succeed on a roll of D - S or higher. The only other thing you have to know is the chance of rolling each possible number or higher on 2d6. Here it is:

2 or better: always, or 100%
3 or better: 35/36, or about 97%
4 or better: 11/12, or about 92%
5 or better: 5/6, or about 83%
6 or better: 13/18, or about 72%
7 or better: 7/12, or about 58%
8 or better: 5/12, or about 42%
9 or better: 5/18, or about 28%
10 or better: 1/6, or about 17%
11 or better: 1/12, or about 8%
12: 1/36, or about 3%

"Bell curve" is just a description of some tables of probabilities similar to the one above, which have certain properties that come about naturally from rolling multiple dice and adding their totals. You're more likely to roll a 7 on 2d6 than any other total, and the farther the total is from 7 in either direction the less likely you are to roll it. That's why the cumulative probabilities, of rolling each number "or better," increase by large amounts at each step near the middle of the table but only by smaller amounts at each step near the top and bottom.

Andrew, please don't take this the wrong way, but the level of math anxiety you're exhibiting here makes me wonder why you would choose to take up designing role playing game mechanics as part of your hobby. "I want to be a verterinarian, but I'm terrified of animals, what should I do?" From what I could tell at your forum (I couldn't read any of the posts without registering -- what's up with that?) the parts of your project you seem to enjoy most and regard as most important are inventing the setting and creating artwork for it. Why are you designing your own system instead of creating a setting using one of the many already developed open game systems out there? That would let you concentrate on the parts you enjoy and get the additional advantages of existing audience base, rule books already written, and completed examples for you to work from.

- Walt

[incomitatum]

I belive (and I could be very wrong) that the stats of the character are not important when building the Difficulty Table, so long as you know the range of POSSIBLE stats. For which, we are going to be setting the bar (at the various Difficulty Milestones) and weather they can reach the bar or not is based on their stats (and/or) where the GM sets the bar for their roll.

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In our sytem the lowest Attribute a character can have is -1, the lowest skill a character can have is -1.

In our system the hights Attribute a character can have is 7, the lowest Skill a character can have is 7.

-1: is Cursed.
0: is Handicapped.
3: is average
7: is God Like

Without Rolling BoxCars or SnakeEyes, I figgure the lowest a Cursed character could roll is a 1 (3-2=1).
Without Rolling BoxCars or SnakeEyes, I figgure the highest a Godlike Character could rolll is a  25(11+14=25) .

So then I figgure my whole range and break it into percentages? Where upon my average Attribute (3) and Skill (3) combo is 6?

(-1)--(6)--(25)? or, counting zero and (-1) my range is (27), rounded down is (26). Whereupon my median is (13)?
(-1)--(13)--(26) This looks like a much better range.

So I would then have to decide how many levels I want this scale to have. If it's 3 that's real easy right?

3-13
14-24
25+

But for variety I would probably want 5-7 levels of difficulty.

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No, math is not my strong point. But we also have a system that runs off D6, they allow you to have a visual representation of your first total; from there it is simple addition (or subtraction).

We have not gone public with our game. There is still alot we need to keep under lock and key for now untill I work out some legal issues (Copyrights, NDAs and soforth).

I do love the artistic side, I also love the entropic side, I love the story side most of all, that is why we are making an RPG, and we want it to be -mostly- original.

I do thank you for you help, and no offence to you, I am going to need to read it a few times before I get it all. I do thank you for taking the time to write all that, and explain it, it will not fall on deaf eyes. :D

-Andrew B. Chason
[Founder of Azure Productions]

[incomitatum]

Shameless bump.