ENTRY

Crawler TTRPG Devlog 3 - On Dice Mechanics From One of the Mathematically Illiterate

previous post >here<

hello denizens, it has been some time. Consistency is a difficult dragon to chase. But i persist!

the past weeks on Dice mechanics have been on my mind.

ttrpgs are ofc much more than their dice math, but distinct dice math does a lot to differentiate the feel and pacing of a system.

what are my goals for the dice system?

amount of dice rolled should correspond to skill level

players should be able to collaborate on skill tests

success chance should feel relevant to skill level

attempt to minimize algebra, at least for GM

Some general thoughts on dice systems and why d10s

[d100] personally, i love d100 systems, they are quite easy to parse when seeing how likely someone is to succeed at a test, but percentile dice are rarely encountered by the layperson and in my experience seem to cause some moments of confusion that can break the flow of a scene, most commonly when someone rolls (0, 00) and has to remember if that is a 0 or 100. Another drawback of these systems is that you're only ever rolling 2 dice, and having played wargames, rolling fistfuls of dice is joyous.

[d20] d20 systems are good but are forever overshadowed by DnD in the public consciousness. which is a shame, a d20 rolls well, and 5% increments are granular without being hard to parse. Also there're a lot of pretty d20s out there.

[d6] i really don't know why i feel the way i do about d6 systems. But there is something deeply unexciting about them to me. The ideas in systems forked from Forged in the Dark rules are awesome, i love the dice pool system in the Arkham Horror RPG is excellent, if a little boardgamey, and so on. but there's just something that makes me think of backgammon or monopoly when i roll d6s... but not when i play wargames for some reason? the mind is a strange bag of meat. i'll probably reconsider this opinion at some point.

[d4] standard d4s are unpleasant to roll. getting octahedral d4s is difficult. however triangle agency is wonderful, hilarious and somehow makes do.

[d8/d12] d8s and d12s are in a similar bag. i like that the percentage increments on them aren't round odd and make the changes a touch less intuitive to math. i don't know many ttrpgs that use them, though d12s are becoming more common in boardgaming (more on this later). The main issue is accessibility, players cant buy a sets of d12s or d8s easily so you either have to create the product or expect players to buy 10 sets of rpg dice to play your game, which is unreasonable.

[d?] custom dice systems, (fate, ffg's starwars games, others) i find it strange to lock access to your imagination make believe game through tools that only your company happens to sell. i like open source, accesability, ease of use... proprietary dice is reinventing the wheel for the purposes of profit.

[misc] honorable mention - non dice games: fiasco, 10 candles, alice is missing, that ttrpg that uses a jenga tower for skill checks... fun! but very difficult to design systems for.

[d10] d10 systems - i'll be honest i have not played any WoD games, though i really would like to try Mage the Ascension. WoD games exiting and being relatively popular does present an option that other dice systems don't. your FLGS is quite likely to sell sets of d10s! the percentage chance on a single die roll is easy to parse (10% increments) but since we have access to fistfulls of them things become more interesting.

so what about crawler?

my original implementation of the system was more or less ripped off from the world of darkness games, roll xd10s, count results of 6+, compare to difficulty rating.

d10 values are read 0-9

Skills go from 1 - 7+

Attributes go from 2 - 7

Difficulty goes from easy at 2 successes to nearly impossible at 7

Some abilities grant situational bonus dice to PCs

PCs can assist in a check by rolling 1/2 of a relevant skill

rolling the same number multiple times counts as a crit, critical success on a success, critical failure on a failure.

on a 9 the die explodes allowing the player to roll a bonus die for every 9 rolled (there is no limit to exploding dice)

degree of success is determined by distance from success goal:
(greater failure <- target -> greater success)

so the GM sets a difficulty rating for a test, Players roll their skill or attribute +- modifier level's worth of dice and check success count against the target.

In testing this system however presented a few issues, at least in vibe to me while i was testing:

At low skill levels (1-3) difficult checks become physically impossible without enough boosts and assisting PCs.
High Skill levels (5+) were still prone to failing difficult checks due to 40% chance success on each die roll, while modifying a success to 5+ from 6+, changing the percent chance to 50% felt too easy)
It was difficult to create meaningful dice manipulation abilities, or maybe i had a mental block but most boiled down to boost x or reroll x neither of which did much to help with the issue that difficult checks were hard to consistently pass moderate difficulty checks.

All the above made the difficulty hard to control for the GM and at worst came across as arbitrarily difficult. Sure the characters are just regular people so many things they would do in the context of a rpg should be difficult, AND collaboration is important, but...

Lessons Learned:

the system should not scale down in difficulty due to player count
the likelihood of success should be slightly more more obvious/bounded to the players and GM to ease arbitrary cognitive load.

there is a playtest lined up for the 23rd. And i am unhappy with a core mechanic of the game...

I came across the Awaken Realms 'rpg in a box' board game Lands of Evershade. It surprisingly has a similar dice system! each stat gives a pool of d12s to roll against a scaling difficulty. Difficulty is set by n+ roll value for success and x successes needed.

this is cool

multiple axes of difficulty may be the thing that makes this work!

and so:

Dice system 2 - Electric Avenue, Rock Down To.

Modifications:

^ lower skill and attribute values (less dice rolled but assists more meaningful)

^ difficulty is now set by roll above target (n+ to succeed) and needed successes (testing required)

^ degree of success now set by count of successes / crits

^ 0s and 9s are now crits (WIP)

d10 values are read 0-9

Skills go from 0 - 5+

Attributes go from 1 - 5

Difficulty goes from easy at 2+ to nearly impossible at 9+

Some abilities grant situational bonus dice to PCs

PCs can assist in a check by rolling 1/2 of a relevant skill rounded up

rolling a 9 counts as a critical success and a 0 as a critical failure

degree of success is determined by count of crits and successes / failures

the crit system will defo need some revisions, but for the next test we are gonna go with crits inform type of success.

e.g.

skill check 5+ 2 successes needed

-> 5 dice rolled [0, 2, 5, 6, 6] -> success but with negative consequences

-> 5 dice rolled [2, 2, 3, 4, 9] -> failure but with mitigating circumstance

Consequences of changing a core system.

i have 2 weeks to revise a lot of things 0_0

but this is exciting. i feel i can get some more interesting abilities for the PCs than situations dice bonuses now that we have a more versatile dice system

if you made it all the way down here, you're extra cool!
Thanks for reading my nonsense.

Hopefully someone found this interesting, and i am very happy to discuss!

May kindness find you

SumFool signing off : )

crawler ttrpg dice

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