...for the resolution mechanic I'm using. Here's the basics.

Skills (worst to best) defined as:
Horrendous, d4
Terrible, d6
Poor, d8
Mediocre, d10
Fair, d12
Good, d16
Great, d20
Superb, d24
Heroic, d30

The idea is that the GM says, "Bill, that lock's pretty tough. You'll need to do 'Great' to pick it." Bill then rolls his skill in "Lock lore", say, a d16, and needs to roll some number for it to qualify as "great". Probably a 12+ or some such.

The worse your skill, the worse the results that you're likely to get as well as having a limit as to how well you can do. The better you're skill, the better the results you're likely to get, as well as having a higher "minimum result level" and a higher "maximum result level". To look at the extremes, a player who's "Horrendous" (a d4) would get a "Horendous" result on a 1-2, "Terrible" on a 3 and "Poor" on a 4. He's just to darn lousy to get better than that (barring GM/divine intervention).

A "Heroic" skill otoh is going to do well almost no matter what, they are where they are because they have so much practice it's just engrained into them. So that "Heroic" skill (d30) is going to roll "Mediocre" on a 1-3, "Good" on 9-15, "Superb" on 23-27...etc.

Note that the numbers here (a "Superb" result on 23-27...) are used for illustrative purposes. This is what my question is asking: Can anyone help me "map out" what the numbers should be or what would work well?

A couple requests to any who would respond, please. I'd like to keep this thread narrow, in accordance with the "How to get people to respond..." thread. I'm not asking what anyone thinks of the mechanic, about the issues surrounding getting ahold of d16s/d24s/d30s, the sliding scale or the origins of the mechanic (off the top of my head I'd say it's original Sovereign Stone mixed with FUDGE). I am interested in people's opinions on these issues and in the future would like to hear that input, just not now.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone cares to offer.

I would love to find a use for those dice.
On the other hand it seems like you need to use a table to translate the results anyway with those differing result ranges by die. then you could get a finer distribution using a big dice and crosschecking with your table.

For the distribution, the words aren´t saying very much unconnected to skills and situation. Probably connect them to a description of competency which sets the upper limit (i.e nominal step +1) , fill the lower range up to the accident free lower limit with 1 point steps, give and the rest of the dice with equal spacing, in doubt increasing the range of the upper middle range of results.

i.e :

Fair: 1-horrendous, 2-terrible 3-4 poor 5-7 medicore 8-10 fair 11-12-good

Samael wrote: ...for the resolution mechanic I'm using. Here's the basics.

Skills (worst to best) defined as:
Horrendous, d4
Terrible, d6
Poor, d8
Mediocre, d10
Fair, d12
Good, d16
Great, d20
Superb, d24
Heroic, d30

The idea is that the GM says, "Bill, that lock's pretty tough. You'll need to do 'Great' to pick it." Bill then rolls his skill in "Lock lore", say, a d16, and needs to roll some number for it to qualify as "great". Probably a 12+ or some such.

As far as I can figure, yes, we'd need a table to work out what I had in mind. I apologize to everyone in advance to everyone that has to look at this. This is what I'm talking about. Find your skill level from the colum on the left. Roll its die. Whatever die you rolled is the column that you read. Cross the result you rolled to where it ends up on the left. Hope that made sense.

Skill Level......... |....d4....|.....d6....|.....d8....|.....d10....|....d12...|....d16....|....d20....|....d24....|....d30....|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d30 Heroic ........|.............|.............|..............|...............|...............|..............|.....20......|...23-24...|..28-30...|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d24 Superb.........|.............|.............|..............|...............|...............|.....16.....|...18-19...|...20-22...|..23-27...|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d20 Great...........|.............|..............|..............|...............|...11-12..|..14-15...|...15-17...|...15-19...|..16-22...|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d16 Good............|.............|..............|..............|......10.....|....9-10...|..11-13...|....7-14....|....9-14....|....9-15...|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d12 Fair.............|.............|..............|......8......|......8-9....|.....6-8....|....6-10...|....6-10....|.....5-8.....|....4-8.....|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d10 Mediocre.....|.............|......6.......|....6-7....|......5-7....|.....4-5....|....4-5.....|.....3-5.....|.....2-4.....|.....1-3....|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d8 Poor..............|......4.....|......5......|.....4-5....|.....3-4.....|.....2-3....|....2-3.....|.....1-2....|.......1......|...............|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d6 Terrible.........|......3.....|.....2-4....|.....2-3....|......2.......|......1......|......1......|...............|..............|..............|
______________________________________________________________________________________
d4 Horrendous...|....1-2....|......1......|......1......|......1.......|..............|..............|...............|..............|..............|

I'm "Good" (d16) with a 9mm. GM tells me I'll need a "Great" result to hit the tire of that speeding car. I roll and get a 9, a "Fair" shot. I miss the tire but probably still hit the car.

Make sense?

That's an interesting idea, Andrew, and one that I've considered. Two points, though. First, as you say, it allows any skill level to succeed against any difficulty level (if the PC rolls well and the GM rolls poorly). That is something I don't want. Which leads to the second point:

/edited out 2nd point. It was said nice and politely and might keep the thread too narrow to actually be of use. So it got nuked. :)

Not sure if this helps, but have you considered inverting the system completely? Make a roll of 1 the greatest difficulty in tasks, and the d4 the greatest ability in skill. The higher the difficulty number, the easier the task is to do. Thus any task difficult of four or greater would be automatic for a character with d4 skill, but a character with d30 skill would have only 13.33% chance (I think--quick mental calculation) of doing the same thing.

It doesn't give you tasks in which only certain characters can achieve the result, but it does give you fairly quick handling time and strong distinction between difficulties and skill levels in a simple step-die system.

--M. J. Young

If you invert the system, you get something like The Window.

Have you considered a table of Skills versus Difficulties, and using a D100? Like ICE RoleMaster, but without using exploding dice. That way you can pretty much whatever number of skill level and difficulty levels you like, and it's a D100 roll and a table lookup.

Savage Worlds uses a similar sysem (without the non-standard dice), and basically sets 4 as the target number for a normal success, and 8 as the target number for a critical success.

They also have some additional complications ("exploding" dice, wild die) which improve the odds of a success for players, and to a lesser extent, for NPCs.

Never heard of "The Window" or "Savage Worlds". Depending on cost, maybe I'll check them out. I'm not too keen on buying a book just so I can read the rules. I have no intention of playing either, if for no other reason than I'm just too busy to add another game to the mix.

No, we don't want to use a d100.

All I'm asking is if someone can look at that table and say, "Yeah, that looks about right." or "No, the odds on each rung are way off, do this, do that, consider this, consider that." Hey, if it can't happen, it can't happen. :)

there is a test drive(free) version of Savage Worlds available on their website. www.peginc.com

Here(pdf) as it may be a bit hard to find otherwise ;)

Hi Samael,

I'm going to try to focus entirely on your original question here. What you have is a scale of Skill, with a series of descriptors ("Fair," "Good," etc.), and a scale of outcomes that uses the same series of descriptors. Also, from looking at your table, it appears that the general idea is that you want approximately a bell curve that makes the most likely outcome for the use of a given Skill be the outcome of the same descriptor -- so that a "Mediocre" Skill would most likely have a "Mediocre" result and so forth. For your table of example numbers, this holds true for Skills of Horrendous, Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, and Fair; it breaks down for higher skills, since the most likely outcome of a Good skill is Fair, the most likely outcome of a Great skill is Good, and so forth.

What might be happening is that you're running into a ceiling at "Heroic" -- for "Heroic" results to be the average outcome for "Heroic" skill, some results would have to be better than Heroic, which might not sound right to you, so at higher skills you start skewing the average result lower instead. But this isn't really necessary. Because in the end the results descriptors are not, it appears, trying to describe the "quality" of the results, but to judge whether they're sufficient to overcome the challenge. An easy task, presumably, is one that a character can get a result of, say, "Poor" and still succeed. That doesn't mean that such a success would indicate the task was actually done poorly, does it? If I'm a Poor chef, and I roll a d8 to see if I can boil a hot dog, and I get an average result of "Poor," does that mean I've done a poor job boiling the hot dog? (If so, then how is that different from having failed?) I would think it means that I've done well enough to be adequate to accomplish the task -- that is to say, success -- regardless of the adjective. Similarly, there's no reason why a person with Heroic skill couldn't get a Heroic outcome about half the time, meaning a success at a heroically difficult task -- and if the result were "more than heroic" that's still success at the heroically difficult task. Going "off the table" doesn't really matter.

For the same reason, there's no reason not to have a "worse than Horrendous" outcome possibility, representing an effort so bungled that it wouldn't succeed even at a "Horrendous" difficulty (that is to say, very very easy) task.

So, let’s look at some possible tables. Instead of a table showing the range of numbers on the die, I’m going to put it in terms of probabilities. This can easily be turned into the specific numbers later, as long as the probabilities are consistent with the number of sides on the die -- for instance, the probabilities in the d4 column have to be multiples of .25, the probabilities in the d6 column have to be multiples of .167, and so forth. Entering probabilities instead of numbers in the roll makes it a lot easier to compare along rows; for instance, to make sure that improving a Skill never makes it more likely to get a result worse than the Skill.

Here’s your initial table as probabilities:

[code]Skill Level | d4 | d6 | d8 | d10 | d12 | d16 | d20 | d24 | d30 |
RESULT
d30 Heroic | | | | | | | .05 | .083 | .1 |
d24 Superb | | | | | | .063 | .1 | .125 | .167 |
d20 Great | | | | | .167 | .125 | .15 | .208 | .233 |
d16 Good | | | | .1 | .167 | .188 | .2 | .25 | .233 |
d12 Fair | | | .125 | .2 | .25 | .313 | .25 | .167 | .167 |
d10 Mediocre | | .167 | .25 | .3 | .167 | .125 | .15 | .125 | .1 |
d8 Poor | .25 | .167 | .25 | .2 | .167 | .125 | .1 | .042 | |
d6 Terrible | .25 | .333 | .25 | .1 | .083 | .063 | | | |
d4 Horrendous | .5 | .167 | .125 | .1 | | | | | |[/code]

Here are some things I notice from these numbers:

1. There’s not much improvement from d24 to d30,

2. The most likely result for Horrendous, Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, and Fair are the same result as the Skill. For Good (d16) the most likely result is Fair (1 step below). For Great the most likely result is Fair (2 steps below -- however, this may just be a typo; the numbers in this column in your table are contradictory.) For Superb the most likely result is Good (2 steps below). For Heroic the most likely result is (equally) Good or Great (2-1/2 steps below). So the results at higher Skills seem depressed. If you want Heroic results to be rare, then why call the Skill Heroic?

3. The larger number of sides on the larger dice don’t make much difference in the outcome, because the larger the die range, the more numbers you’ve assigned to each result, so from d10 and higher, the outcome distribution is more or less the same. You’d have the same effect rolling, say, d16 for every Skill and adding a fixed offset to the outcome based on your Skill level, like this:

1 result is three steps worse than your Skill
2-3 result is two steps worse than your Skill
4-5 result is one step worse than your Skill
6-10 result is equal to your Skill
11-13 result is one step better than your Skill
14-15 result is two steps better than your Skill
16 result is three steps better than your Skill

This in turn would be an awful lot like FUDGE.

Now, I can modify your numbers a bit to avoid the diminishing returns and the creeping worsening of the result relative to the Skill at higher Skill levels. As I mentioned, because in the end you’re deciding success or failure rather than (it appears) the quality of the success, there’s no reason not to add a total failure row at the bottom, and no reason not to allow the pseudo-bell-curves of some columns’ outcome distribution to go off the top or bottom edges of the table. Also, you could make the distributions a bit less symmetrical and shift them down in the table so that while result = Skill is the most likely outcome (except in the d4 and d6 columns), the probability of getting result = Skill or better is always 50-50. That way, when you set the task difficulty equal to the skill, the chance of success is 50-50 (assuming that result = difficulty is counted as a success). This would give you:

[code]Skill Level | d4 | d6 | d8 | d10 | d12 | d16 | d20 | d24 | d30 |
RESULT
d30 Heroic | | | | | | | .05 | .25 | .5 |
d24 Superb | | | | | | .063 | .2 | .25 | .133 |
d20 Great | | | | | .083 | .188 | .25 | .167 | .1 |
d16 Good | | | | .1 | .167 | .25 | .15 | .125 | .1 |
d12 Fair | | | .125 | .1 | .25 | .188 | .15 | .083 | .067 |
d10 Mediocre | | | .125 | .3 | .167 | .125 | .1 | .083 | .067 |
d8 Poor | | .167 | .25 | .2 | .167 | .125 | .05 | .042 | .033 |
d6 Terrible | .25 | .333 | .25 | .2 | .083 | .063 | .05 | | |
d4 Horrendous | .25 | .333 | .125 | .1 | .083 | | | | |
total suckage | .5 | .167 | .125 | | | | | | |[/code]

Chances are, you won’t like these numbers because some of my assumptions about how you want the results to behave will be different than yours. But you should have no trouble filling in your own, once you decide a few key points about how you want your table to behave. Specifically:

- What probability do you want in the top right entry in the table (chance of Heroic result when using Heroic Skill?)

- What is the minimum Skill you want to be capable of a Heroic result? How about a Superb result? What is the maximum Skill you want to still have a chance of a Horrendous result? How about a Terrible result?

- Paying close attention to the "diagonal" entries where the result equals the Skill Level. What total do you want the probabilities below the diagonal entry in each column to add up to? What total do you want the probabilities above the diagonal entry in each column to add up to? (Do you want to count the diagonal entry itself in one or the other of those totals?) Do you care whether or not the diagonal entry itself is the most likely result (the highest probability in that column)?

Think these points through, and actually filling in the numbers in the table should take care of itself with a minimum of math.

- Walt

Thanks Walt. That's exactly what I'm looking for. And I actually like the range in your version of the graft (just a basic prerusal).

Couple points.

The graft I supplied was only meant to be for illustrative purposes because I know the type of result I want, just not the specific.

I do actually want "quality" of success. To use your "boiling the hot dog" example, you may only need a "Poor" result to actually boil it (You could leave it in waaaaay too long or not nearly long enough). That "Poor" result means you can eat the hot dog w/o getting sick, a "Heroic" result on this menial task would indicate it was cooked to perfection.

I'm going to go back and re-read your post a few times, then sit and think on it for a while. Thanks again, that's exactly the style of response I was looking for.

Oh, yeah. I pretty much a "Horrendous" result *was* the botch. (Careful using that word; you're not going to cut your own head off with a sword. I don't care how much you suck at sword-play, it ain't happening. Not to mention "Botch" results affect the PCs much more frequently than a given antagonist. Sorry, off topic)

No, we don't want to use a d100.

Since you're rethinking everything, this might not be relevant any more, but the issue of absolute quality of success versus quality of success relative to the difficulty of the task seems to be an issue here.

The hot dog example was supposed to show that even a person with a low (e.g. "poor") skill should be able to succeed well at an easy task.

The problem is actually more likely to come up for difficult tasks. Suppose a character is trying to jump a very wide chasm. (I've gotta write that Chasms & Cottages game someday!) To reflect the difficulty of the task, the difficulty is set at "Superb," meaning you need a "Superb" or better result to succeed. Suppose the character has "Great" Skill and manages to roll a "Superb" result. The character makes it across. But does the "Superb" outcome mean that the character makes it across "Superbly?" What result, if any, would indicate that the character just barely makes it across, just managing to grab the far edge with their fingers and frantically haul themselves up to safety? Is there any middle ground between leaping across gracefully, and falling in?

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting how task difficulty is represented. For instance, if the task difficulty were an upward or downward modification of the character's skill prior to the roll, then it would make more sense for the result from the table to be the absolute quality of the result. The easiness of the hot dog cooking task would turn the Poor chef into a perhaps Good for this particular task, with the chance of then getting a Great result (though a Horrendous result is also possible). The difficulty of jumping the chasm would turn the Superb leaper into perhaps Good for the particular task, with the chance of then getting a Fair, Poor, or even Terrible result (though a Great result is also possible).

- Walt

Well, as a GM, I would not set jumping a chasm as a set "you need to get a Superb result to succeed" because as you pointed out, there are varying degrees of success. I would instead say something like "Superb to get across unharmed and vertical; Great to get across and stumbling, now make a Dex check to keep from losing your footing and falling over backwards; Good to get most of the way across but now you're clinging like Indiana Jones, make Str & Dex checks to pull yourself up." Also, I probably wouldn't even tell the PC what he needs to roll. Just have him roll and let me interpret the result (based on the chart and circumstances). (I hope that didn't come across as challenging another GMs style, wasn't the intent)

On the surface, keeping the PCs skill level static and changing the difficulty seems to be the same as keeping the difficulty level static and changing the PCs effective skill. I think you're a lot better at working with odds/probabilities so could point out where and why I'm wrong.

Definitely something to think about.

Personally, I think that skill level is static. The knowledge &/or muscle memory is there, it's just a matter of tapping it. How successfully you tap it will be based on all sorts of other factors.

I have a 20' horizontal long jump. It's 20' whether there's a chasm below me or just a sand trap. The chasm might effect me psychologically, but that's still an external factor. There might be a wind, same thing. Neither of these change the fact that I can jump 20', they're just making it more difficult (higher "target number") for me to do so.