I really dig the Hero Wars resoution system. Having a non-asymptotic setup is appropriate for fairly cinematic settings, or any setting where you believe strongly that the right answer to the "Sir Gawain and the Peasant" problem is that the Peasant always gets spanked, period.

Note that many of the values here are kind of arbitrary and untested at the moment, since I only came up with this today after mulling it over for a couple weeks. Due credit: InSpectres for the great notion of just picking the highest die in a pool and having six degrees of success; Hero Wars for the whole "bump" idea (implemented here as an option).

So, like so many pool systems, abilities are an integer amount, and that amount translates to a number of d6. Roll InSpectres-style, picking the highest in the bunch. That's how well you did (possibly compared against another roll).

Now if your score is greater than 6, you cash in six of your dice and get a red one. So a score of 7 is one red die, a score of 8 is one red die plus one white, etc. If you have red dice, add 6 for each one. So a roll of a red die and a buncha white ones where the high die is a 1 is actually equal to a result of 7. When it's a competition between two people (or whatever) that both have red dice, they cancel, like masteries in HW.

"Bump" option: in addition to, or instead of, adding 6 for each red die, add 1 to the highest die result for each one. Now badasses with red dice have not only more powerful results, but more consistent ones on their own scale. If you use bumping only and don't do the +6 thing, there's more overlap, which is, I think, more like how HW does it.

You might also use a different kind of condition for adding red dice to a pool, and allow more white dice to accumulate, representing someone of merely earthly ability, but who is a highly consistent performer.

Comments are of course welcome.

--JB

Not bad, JB. I can see this working with multiple contributions to a single pool. (Assuming task resolution...) Frex, one character uses multiple abilities to attempt a task. Difficulty levels could cancel out success levels. This would mean that well-qualified characters are able to succeed at tasks that unqualified characters will unconditionally fail... but they won't do it as well as the could an easier task.

You might want to check the probabilities, but they feel about right to me. Six white dice don't assure you a result of 6, but it'll come up often enough to make rolling feel arbitrary (something like 86% of the time, IIRC, but it's been a while. :)

I'd go with less dice before converting to a red die. The results of rolling different amounts of dice look like this:

[code] Dice
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 16.67% 2.78% 0.46% 0.08% 0.01% 0.00%
2 16.67% 8.33% 3.24% 1.16% 0.40% 0.14%
3 16.67% 13.89% 8.80% 5.02% 2.71% 1.43%
4 16.67% 19.44% 17.13% 13.50% 10.04% 7.22%
5 16.67% 25.00% 28.24% 28.47% 27.02% 24.71%
6 16.67% 30.56% 42.13% 51.77% 59.81% 66.51%[/code]

The number of dice are across the top, and the chances of particular results are down the side. You'll note that 4-6 look pretty similar, all being pretty stacked at the high end. What if you went to three dice, and then gave a "mastery" die for the fourth? In fact, I'd just use one red die for every four dice. So:

[code]Lvl White Dice Red Dice
1 1 0
2 2 0
3 3 0
4 0 1
5 1 1
6 2 1
7 3 1
8 0 2
9 1 2
etc.[/code]

Check the red dice first for highest. If they tie, then check the white dice.

Or something like that. Similar in ways to Walts Symmetry system.

Mike