d20 PTA: a dice mechanic variation

[Thomas D]

Oh, and just because this might have been missed by some people interested in PTA that don't read the Actual Play forum, here's a bit on a d20 dice mechanic for PTA that went over well with my group.  Comments taken from an AP post:

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At our next game session (D&D), I gave an overview of PTA, but using dice instead of cards.  (It would have been an impossible sell to throw up this strange new game and tell them "oh, and I'll be taking your dice away too".)  The dice mechanic worked out rather well.  My thought from this game is if you want to transition gamers from D&D-like games, use dice instead of cards.  I've seen the first edition rules where Matt used d10s, where you count odds as successes.  From what I understood, picking out odds from evens slowed the game down too much; it was easier and faster to distinguish between red and black cards.  But the problem really isn't picking out odds and evens, it's the die that Matt suggested to play with.

We went with d20s.  1-10 was a hit, 11-20 was a miss.  Picking out the single digit hits on a mass of rolled d20s was superfast.  There was no noticeable lag when rolls of 10 showed up.  If the producer and protagonist tied for hits, we'd compare the hit dice for odds/evens, with most odds getting the win.  If we're still tied, we start looking for the lowest odd die (and then the next if that was a tie) and then have a roll-off if we can't determine a winner at that point.  With about six to eight conflicts, we had to look for the lowest odd die only twice.  On one of those times, the lowest was tied, so we looked at the next-lowest die.  This didn't seem to impede play.

For fan mail, we just checked to see if the roll was odd or even to determine if it was removed from the game or returned to the director's budget.

My players loved rolling dice.

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DAudy replied with "...the dice idea is gold, people get really funny sometimes if you ask them to put the dice away.  This deals very cleverly with this problem and avoids the seek time issues that first edition PTA had."

REkz also mentioned that he prefers rolling dice instead of drawing cards.

[Chris Goodwin]

I bought d20's marked 0-9 twice, with + and - signs on them, just for this.

[Vaxalon]

Isn't that how the original version worked, except with D6's?

[Thomas D]

The orignal version used d10s, where odds counted as hits and evens were misses.   The slowdown using this system is separating all the evens from odds.  With d20s, it was faster visually to separate single digit hits from double digit misses.  There's the issue of the 10 being a hit, but the round zero seemed easy to detect in my group.

[Mychal]

I know you can buy blank d20's, then you can color red and black sides... just a thought.

[Jhulae]

Since it's a 50/50 for hits and misses, I'd think Ubiquity dice would be perfect.