Tuesday, August 21, 2018

#RPGaDAY2018 - DAY 21: Which dice mechanic appeals to you?


Day twenty-one of #RPGaDAY2018 is all about dice, dice baby! A question that is a remix of an ancient question from the very first year of #RPGaDAY, back on the 9th August 2014 we asked about your favourite dice. This time, that question has been remixed by M L Straus who hosts a Youtube channel called The OG GM's Adventures.

I fired my usual interview questions over to him and he answered with a video! Fantastic!


Thank you for the remix!

As I mentioned, the question that once was "Favourite Dice" has now become today's question, Which Dice Mechanic Appeals to You?

Cool. Thank you! Don't forget to check out the OG GM's Adventures Youtube channel and click subscribe.

Photo's quite old now, it's very full now...

That's actually pretty tricky. I can't think of any single mechanic that appeals - probably something simple. The simpler the better in my opinion.

That said, I'd never really considered probability curves until I started designing the Vortex System for Doctor Who. It's a weird one, as I was a massive Unisystem fan (and still am) but the range of the roll on a single D10 is the full 1-10, with the probability being equal for each result.

When working on Doctor Who I kinda wanted success to be a little easier, so I had to look at what the average roll would be - using a single die doesn't really give you an average roll does it? I dunno. However, if you take two dice, you immediately get that lovely bell-curve of probability for the result. Nice! It meant things were certainly more predictable for working out the successes and difficulty levels. I'm not saying I got them right, but hey... they seemed to work and people liked it.

Tomorrow's question is about non-dice mechanics, so I'm going to continue this there as WILD doesn't use dice (which is a little frustrating as I had the perfect system name for it). So how do you get a probability curve on a card turn? More tomorrow...

Until then - Stay multi-classy!

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