Comment by jlhawn
2 years ago
I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 lately and this kind of reminds me of when you have to roll a d20 in a skill check. Early in the game there are skill checks with a difficultly class of 2 (need to roll a 2 or higher to succeed) but you might have proficiency in that skill so you get a +3 modifier to your roll.
But if your base d20 roll result is a 1 then this is considered a critical fail and your modifiers are not added – you fail no matter what. So there is a 5% chance of failing no matter what (1 in 20).
However, you can have special items or spells which can grant you advantage in a roll: you roll 2 d20 instead of 1 and take the higher of each. Now the only way to critical fail is if you roll a 1 with both d20s. This has only a 0.25% chance (1 in 400).
So the "2 random choices" cache eviction policy feels kinda like rolling with advantage in D&D: Roll 2 die (pick to random keys) and evict the higher time since last access to evict.
I love that game and all the source material, but I really dislike the d20 as a base. I've been working on a system that uses a fixed number of d6, since with just a few d6 you get something more normally distributed, and so you can actually model real life skills more accurately, and provide a better spread of outcomes for higher level players over " I have a 5% chance to fail, or a 90+% chance in something I'm not good at "
20 years of d&d will motivate some unofficial errata.
Check out the Dominions series, which just released it's 6th installment this week! It uses "exploding D6s" for it's rolls, which means rolling a bunch of D6s and then re-rolling any 6s (recursively) and summing the result. This results in a fascinating long-tailed distribution (similar to advantage/disadvantage) so that even the weakest unit can deal damage to bosses on occasion.
I didn't mention it but I stole this wholesale! It does add a very nice long tail.
I love the Shadowrun system, where you roll a whole bunch of d6. To suceed a certain number of these need to hit a threshold. Proficiency and other advantages are granted by allowing you to increase the number of d6 you roll
Yeah that's nice. Does it reduce the d6 to a d2 basically?
In this system we're trying, you roll a fixed batch of die, and grab as many as you can that add up to your skill level. The number so "captured" is how well you do.
This very well matches the norm CDF, with naturally higher skill being better, and has nice means and variances that "spread out" at higher levels of difficulty. So easy tasks are easy because you need to capture less and you are more likely to do so. Harder tasks have a much broader range of skills that have a decent chance of succeeding due to higher variance so everyone gets to help.
We added in a bunch of sugar to make multi-roll complex checks as minigames, synergy so more people can help and so on, to make rolls as collaborative as possible.
I could go on and on...I'm in the process of writing it up for open use.
The critical fail on a 1 is a variant that I hate, it makes everything feel like a slapstick comedy. I do wish it would be played as written.