Symmetry: A Resolution Dicing Mechanism (long)

Heh, well, I usually prefer d4s for brain surgery because they're sharper.

Highest occurring value of pips on the marked sides is a good idea for a degree of success/failure mechanism.

It would still need a corresponding degree of failure/success mechanism for those occasions when no marked sides are rolled. Otherwise, only a minimal success could occur when the roll is negative, and only minimal failure when the roll is positive, which doesn't seem right when the odds can be close to 50% in either case. However, here's where it gets strange. You could put pips on the unmarked sides too, but for them you'd have to use lowest instead of highest rolled, or else for example a failure rolled at a high positive modifier (lots of dice all come up unmarked) would be most likely to result in a horrific failure level. (Or perhaps the unmarked-side pips could be on the base die only, but then it would be a fixed distribution of degrees of success/failure in those cases.)

The net result (not of your suggestion, but of my extrapolations of it) is increasing the complexity of interpreting the roll. It starts to look like a computer program with lots of if-then rules. "If any marked side is rolled, take the highest occurring pip value on a marked side but be sure to ignore the pip values that show on umarked sides. But if no marked sides are rolled, take the lowest occurring pip value..."

With the good suggestions that have been made so far on this thread to work with (and further suggestions are welcome, of course), I hope I can come up with something more streamlined but it looks like it will take some thought and testing. (It kind of reminds me of the earliest versions of the basic system, when I had success and failure represented by different colors, which required different dice for positive and negative modifiers/levels, and two additional colors on the base die that would indicate success or failure unless overruled by the level or modifier dice -- quite a mess, until I realized you could keep the dice the same and reverse the interpretation when modifiers are negative.)

- Walt