Character Creation & System Changes

Ceres Rose

I support the idea of by default having it be based on the damage dealt rather than a flat +1/-1. Say, for example the attack does 20 damage, you could just have a random +/- 20% on there which will bring it from 16-24. 24 is still 50% more damage than 16, so there's a sizeable bit of variance, but it's nothing like 4-35 or the 8-28. You could even use that variance portion to characterize weapons more and make them feel different from eachother. Some of the benefits of more precision-based weapons like a rapier or longsword could be lesser variance (say +/-10% or in some cases maybe even none whatsoever). You could even use that as a trait to give some items as a special property when magically or otherwise automatically generated. That and/or the inverse with a weapon that has wilder variance than its normal version. Meanwhile, other side of the coin would be to have wilder, brutish weapons have larger variance, like a giant club or axe being +/-40% to appeal to people who like to have that gambling aspect. Of course, the concern would be overly complicating the weapons, but one of the benefits I see of the Myriad system in maptools is being able to automate all that. It’s also worth noting though that in the case of a sum of many dice rolls, that the result tends towards a normal distribution. That is to say a bell curve. Where 1d12, it’s equally likely that you get any result on the die, with 2d6 it’s more likely you get a number in the middle. The overall distribution of the dice is a (flatter) bell curve. The more dice you add, the steeper the bell curve gets, and the less likely it is to get any of the results on the fringes. There’s 6 out of 36 ways when you roll 2d6 that you get 7 as a result (16.7%), but 1 out of 36 ways you get a 2 as a result (2.7%). When you roll a lot of dice as part of damage, while your theoretical min and max damage can be 20 damage apart, the way the actual probability of those damage outcomes is very different rolling 4d6 compared to 1d20+4 (though the min and max aren’t quite equal there). This characteristic is something I’ve actually really liked about the way your success system works with ability checks. A d20 is very volatile in a way that the sum of many dice rolls aren’t because the sum of many dice rolls tends towards the middle, where a d20 is equally likely to roll an extreme as it is to roll any other number. It makes characters feel more consistent.

Makes sense to me.

I'm considering scaling the variance depending on the base amount of base damage dealt. So at higher damage dealt, like 20 base damage, it could be -3/+3. I understand 17-23 still is not that big of a difference, but I have always valued rewarding a player action in combat with a result that meets their expectations. As the critical hit / accuracy systems have evolved, there is still high variance in the damage based on that alone. That also does not take into account critical hit or hit effects that are not just plain damage. There is a lot of depth within combat interactions that a flatter weapon damage alone hopefully won't make things too predictable.

I think the reason that spells like mind trick didn't get chosen in the old system was because players saw one of the spell's options as superior to the others. If their main focus is applying blight they will see the option that applies blight and nothing else. Obviously only using one of the spell's effects diminishes the power of the spell. I think this is the same reason dirty trick saw little use. The new system seems to alleviate this issue by improving a lot of the mechanics. Really excited to see how the players will play the game now that they have more and better options presented to them.

Is a +/-1 variance not too far a swing in the other direction? I was under the impression that the players liked the gamble of dice rolls, though 4-35 is pretty extreme for sure.