I used to hate the wide range of a single d20, but then I realised that the maths is no different from a % dice rolling system.
You have a particular base value, and you have to achieve a particular target number. In D&D this means that you will have a % chance to succeed, in steps of 5. In a full % system such as runequest, your skill will give your chance of succeeding.
e.g. D&D: my base skill is +6, the target DC is 15. I need to roll an 9 or more, so I have a 60% chance of succeeding.
e.g. Runequest: my base skill is 55%, thus I have a 55% chance of succeeding (ignoring negative modifiers).
Then the d20 or d100 is rolled, and the result determines whether you succeeded.
I don't really have a preference. However, I do consider that there are several problems with using 2d10.
Firstly, you couldn't just drop 2d10 in place of a d20 in D&D. There would need to be significant rebalancing, because the probabilities are designed for a flat "curve". That would, pretty much, require a brand new edition with all the modifiers etc recalculated and rebalanced for the new curve.
Secondly, it would reduce the probabilities of a critical hit/miss. People I play with find that a great and exciting part of the game, and they happen on average once every 10 attacks (a critical hit and a critical miss every 20 attack rolls). On 2d10, assuming double 1 and double 10 are used, they occur only once every 50 rolls.
Finally, many of those I know with seem to find adding a single modifier to a single die roll challenging. Every time more dice (or more modifiers) are added, it slows the game down. Even if it only adds a couple of seconds to every roll, that's quite a lot over the course of a session.
It may be that there's enough advantages to outweigh these and any other disadvantages. I don't know.
Ditch the crit fail skill checks and crit fail fumble tables and rolling a 1 isn't that significant, your only guarenteed to miss attack rolls. Using the passive skills more liberally to auto resolve simple checks also helps with unnecessary checks.
I personally would rather increase crits to include a sub crit that automatically hits with no bonus damage on rolls of 19, maybe a precise hit. I don't like the extremes of success or failure on the dice system, and a 2 dice roll has even rarer crits and crit fails. Adding more gradual failure and success spikes serves more than increasing average rolls. In the case of wildly unbalanced encounters, that 5% chance may be the only opportunity to hit, and improved crit might be a serious advantage. Meanwhile a d20 result of 2 will probably miss automatically anyway, so I could add a half damage on rolls if 2 and never see it apply.
5% of each outcome is also easy to recognize, while a curve of probability is less readable. Your trying to reach a threshold most of the time, not reach a precise number, so it's not important that you have a 5% chance of max or minimum roll.
If you really want to negate critical failures and critical successes, it works. You'd effectively have a 1% chance to critically hit or critically miss. It also substantially impacts certain classes. Champions, Rogues, and Barbarians receive a substantial nerf by this method. Some spells do as well. High AC also becomes much, much better.
I'd also question the whole idea that this "more accurately represent[s] a realistic potential outcome." It just creates a bell shaped probability curve as opposed to a flat one. I think realism would simply to be get rid of dice altogether but that kinda sucks the fun out. I'd also say that a nat one doesn't mean your sword swing just wildly misses and you look like an idiot. It might simply mean that your enemy parried your blow putting you in a less favorable position.
Any combo of 1s and 2s being a critical miss and any combo of 9s and 10s being a critical hit gives you a 4% chance of each, 8% of a crit of either kind. If the 1% crit rate bothers you, it's not hard to make them a bit more common.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
If you really want to negate critical failures and critical successes, it works. You'd effectively have a 1% chance to critically hit or critically miss. It also substantially impacts certain classes. Champions, Rogues, and Barbarians receive a substantial nerf by this method. Some spells do as well. High AC also becomes much, much better.
I'd also question the whole idea that this "more accurately represent[s] a realistic potential outcome." It just creates a bell shaped probability curve as opposed to a flat one. I think realism would simply to be get rid of dice altogether but that kinda sucks the fun out. I'd also say that a nat one doesn't mean your sword swing just wildly misses and you look like an idiot. It might simply mean that your enemy parried your blow putting you in a less favorable position.
I'm really unsure of what "a more realistic potential outcome" even means in a D&D universe, given things like being able to potentially fire a heavy crossbow eight times in six seconds without any sort of magic being involved.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
If you like games designed for a bell curve probabilities, I recommend you Iron Kingdoms RPG. DnD is not designed for bell curve and changin it would mess up the balance, giving unreasonable advantage to high-AC creatures and PC.
I would say go with 3d6 AND change the way advantage/disadvantage works so you can more readily deal with higher target ACs and skill rolls. Just change advantage/disadvantage to levels where each level gives you a +/-1d4 advantage/advantage and/or a +/-1 advantage die that scales up/down per level of advantage starting at d6 (1d6/1d8/1d10/etc). Example: If you have a party in which a bunch of enemies are affected by Faerie Fire, while the party itself is under a Bless spell every attack by a party member against those targets would get +2d4 to hit. If a Rogue takes careful aim as well they would get another 1d4 - meaning the average attack roll from the Rogue would be about 18.
Advantage and disadvantage are significantly easier and smoother in a dice pool system than they are with the d20.
Rolling 2d10 for checks because you feel like it? An advantage roll is 3d10 instead and keep the two best dice. Dis is roll 3d10 and keep the two worst dice. Same with any other dice pool. 3d6 Ad/Dis turns into 4d6 and discard the highest/lowest die. Hell, with d6s you could even start having advantage and disadvantage stack up ot interact in interesting, meaningful ways beyond "once you have both the universe stops caring about you." It'd get complicated so there's arguments against it, but there's also arguments for it in some cases.
But yes. Dice pools make advantage/disadvantage and similar mechanics much easier. That's technically(ish) how Genesys' story dice work, except with a whole lot of awful extraneous nonsense that makes resolving a check take forever and a week and makes Genesys even worse than D&D for making your supposedly competent adventurer-type person into a hilariously inept failgoon. Blegh.
I think one thing multi-dice proponents are forgetting is that some people have problems with math, even simple math, yet love D&D. Adding dice together can already be a challenge for those players, and this would make practically every roll in the game a multi-dice affair. I have an autistic player who loves D&D (and for whom the game has helped a lot in their socialization skills), but math is not their strong suit at all.
Honestly, I think the problem is that DM's call for dice rolls in far too many circumstances. If there shouldn't be a significant chance of failure, then a roll shouldn't be needed. I've played sessions with only a handful of dice rolls, and those have turned out great.
1. More dice to keep track of. Need to add the numbers in your head instead of just seeing what number you got on one die, nice and neat.
2. It would make the game a lot more “hit or miss” in nature. Is the average 11+ your modifier good enough to beat the target, or not? With the new probability curve, that question becomes way more important. It would encourage powergaming, because otherwise let’s say that 11+ your modifier IS NOT good enough to hit a boss monster’s AC, well now you might be pretty darn worthless this fight. With the swingy 1D20 you will hit here and there however.
the entire system would have to be redesigned around the 2D10. Just plopping it in would be a disaster. The power gap between something a little stronger and something a little weaker would grow to an immense gulf, because the stronger thing is much less likely to have a bad round, while the weaker thing is much less likely to have a good one.
whilst a system with d6's was in the original D&D, that isn't how the rest of DnD went along. The swingy-ness is the point.
I shall recant.
The swingy-ness is the point.
This is at the core of the fudging & closed rolling V.S. no fudging & open rolling debacle. The dice are the unbiased arbiters of resolution. They have just the same chance to give you any number as any other number. You saying that a 2d10 system making an average result more likely is directly opposed to this ethos and way of thinking. Biasing towards a certain curve rather than have all results be equal is the direct opposite of that which is wanted.
Let's start a fight: 2d10 🎲 makes more sense than 1d20 - change my mind.
Every time I roll a d20, I am just as likely (percentage-wise) to end up with a critical failure as I am to just barely succeed, because every face on the die (theoretically) is just as likely to come up as any other.
Whereas with 2d10, the likelihood of rolling an "average" check or save (10, 11, 12) is significantly higher than getting a critical failure (double 1's) or critical success (double 10's). Not only does the 2d10 model more accurately represent a realistic potential outcome, but it also makes your skill bonuses (or penalty) more meaningful because it reliably increases (or decreases) the likely average of all your rolls, instead of just sliding the window one direction or the other.
What do you think?
Going back to the OPs starting post I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that his big concern was not the combat system use of the d20 but the skill system. So let’s break this into those 2 parts. 1) How would a switch to a bell curve multi dice system impact the skill rolls?
2) How would the switch to a multi dice system impact the combat rolls?
we don’t really need to rehash the math - that has been covered very nicely. My view is that for combat I prefer the single dice system that shows both the general randomness of real combat and the effects of real skill over time ( if I’m a white belt and your a black belt on any given attack I have a flat chance to hit you and you have a flat chance to miss blocking/dodging me - if they line up I hit, but over time your going to hit me a lot more than I’m going to hit you so you win the fight.) For skills I think I would prefer the multi dice - I shouldn’t really have a large chance to fail something I’m skilled at doing, but “critical” successes shouldn’t be very likely either. Yurei’s advantage/disadvantage by adding a die and taking the 3 best/worst as well as proficiencies granting bonuses to boost the scores for more skilled folks would, I suspect, work better for skills. It would need some rework so you math whizzes have at it 😁.
Keep in mind that bounded accuracy in D&D targets an average success rate of 66% in combat; that's rolling 8+ on 1d20. Rolling 8 or higher on 2d10 happens 89.5% of the time. If nothing else, if the system were changed then either bounded accuracy goes out the window or ACs and DCs go up across the board and everything is still just as swingy as it ever was. Swinginess is more a function of outcomes than of rolls, and again: in D&D there are only two outcomes regardless of the number of dice you roll.
There may not be 2 outcomes but what % of the time you get those outcomes does matter. Especially with skills and that was where I, at least, was suggesting the multi dice approach. If I have a basic skill n something then I should be getting a success on a roll of standard difficulty @90% of the time. It might call for rethinking the harder difficulties and going up by 2s or 1s but it represents reality with skills much better. As I said above I would leave combat as is since I think it is better represented this way.
whilst a system with d6's was in the original D&D, that isn't how the rest of DnD went along. The swingy-ness is the point.
I shall recant.
The swingy-ness is the point.
This is at the core of the fudging & closed rolling V.S. no fudging & open rolling debacle. The dice are the unbiased arbiters of resolution. They have just the same chance to give you any number as any other number. You saying that a 2d10 system making an average result more likely is directly opposed to this ethos and way of thinking. Biasing towards a certain curve rather than have all results be equal is the direct opposite of that which is wanted.
Swinginess is bad.
Swinginess sucks donkey rocks.
Swinginess says my eleventh-level artificer with tool Expertise rolling at +10 to Thieves' Tools checks, with a 1d4 from Guidance and the ability to +5 any roll she makes with Flash of Genius at need, still has a 5% chance to be completely and utterly baffled by a five-copper DC 5 baby's-first-lock from the local fishmonger's bazaar.
No. **** that. **** that literally forever. And don't give me that moose garbage about "critical success/fumbles only happen during combat"; point me at one single GM ever who adheres to that instead of doing "hilarious" garbage like "Oh no, your master locksmith with really high quality artisan-grade thieves' tools rolled a 1 on your check? Guess you broke your picks! You're gonna have to buy some new ones, and I bet the guards at the next town will be really interested in why you're trying to buy thieves' tools! wink wink!"
Some things do not bloody ******* merit failure. Some things do not bloody ******* merit success. And until GMs as an aggregate whole learn that, I will always be a proponent of mechanically limiting aberrant results as much as is feasible. A zeroth-level street urchin with "thieves' tools" consisting of a few bent-up wires will never, ever, EVER crack the king's jewel vault, and a twentieth-level master thief will crack that dumbass DC 5 lock literally more easily and more reliably than you or I can buckle our belts. It is not funny when an untrained moron shows up an Expert master of a skill. It is not funny when the Expert master breaks their shit, or snaps their bowstring, or hurls their sword through a momentary portal into the Abyss, or whatever other dumbass idiotic nonsensical total-bullshit Loony Toons tombuggery you decide to inflict on them for having the sheer gall to roll a natural 1. It's not cool, it's not a strength of D&D, it's not a storytelling moment.
It's ******* bullshit.
The "swinginess" of D&D means every last single character in D&D is not actually trained at anything. They have no practiced skills, no honed masteries, nothing. They're all a bunch of screaming yaybos flailing mostly at random and praying the Almighty Math Rocks of the Gods come down in their favor. It is maddening, and it very much dissuades many people from trying to make "expert of their trade"-type characters.
Chaos has its place in a game of D&D 5e. So does actually being good at what you're good at, and being able to rely on those skills.
whilst a system with d6's was in the original D&D, that isn't how the rest of DnD went along. The swingy-ness is the point.
I shall recant.
The swingy-ness is the point.
This is at the core of the fudging & closed rolling V.S. no fudging & open rolling debacle. The dice are the unbiased arbiters of resolution. They have just the same chance to give you any number as any other number. You saying that a 2d10 system making an average result more likely is directly opposed to this ethos and way of thinking. Biasing towards a certain curve rather than have all results be equal is the direct opposite of that which is wanted.
Swinginess is bad.
Swinginess sucks donkey rocks.
Swinginess says my eleventh-level artificer with tool Expertise rolling at +10 to Thieves' Tools checks, with a 1d4 from Guidance and the ability to +5 any roll she makes with Flash of Genius at need, still has a 5% chance to be completely and utterly baffled by a five-copper DC 5 baby's-first-lock from the local fishmonger's bazaar.
No. **** that. **** that literally forever. And don't give me that moose garbage about "critical success/fumbles only happen during combat"; point me at one single GM ever who adheres to that instead of doing "hilarious" garbage like "Oh no, your master locksmith with really high quality artisan-grade thieves' tools rolled a 1 on your check? Guess you broke your picks! You're gonna have to buy some new ones, and I bet the guards at the next town will be really interested in why you're trying to buy thieves' tools! wink wink!"
Some things do not bloody ******* merit failure. Some things do not bloody ******* merit success. And until GMs as an aggregate whole learn that, I will always be a proponent of mechanically limiting aberrant results as much as is feasible. A zeroth-level street urchin with "thieves' tools" consisting of a few bent-up wires will never, ever, EVER crack the king's jewel vault, and a twentieth-level master thief will crack that dumbass DC 5 lock literally more easily and more reliably than you or I can buckle our belts. It is not funny when an untrained moron shows up an Expert master of a skill. It is not funny when the Expert master breaks their shit, or snaps their bowstring, or hurls their sword through a momentary portal into the Abyss, or whatever other dumbass idiotic nonsensical total-bullshit Loony Toons tombuggery you decide to inflict on them for having the sheer gall to roll a natural 1. It's not cool, it's not a strength of D&D, it's not a storytelling moment.
It's ******* bullshit.
The "swinginess" of D&D means every last single character in D&D is not actually trained at anything. They have no practiced skills, no honed masteries, nothing. They're all a bunch of screaming yaybos flailing mostly at random and praying the Almighty Math Rocks of the Gods come down in their favor. It is maddening, and it very much dissuades many people from trying to make "expert of their trade"-type characters.
Chaos has its place in a game of D&D 5e. So does actually being good at what you're good at, and being able to rely on those skills.
I'm fully on board with the idea that normal distributions are better than flat ones, but it is worth pointing out that nothing about your post has any basis in the rules of D&D. If your bonus is at least +4, there is exactly 0 chance of failing to pick a DC 5 lock, and the GM doesn't really have to call for a roll (though, who uses DC 5 locks anyway). Natural 1s don't mean anything special except on attack rolls, and if your GM is using shitty house rules, it's not really fair to be mad at the game itself because of it.
"Nat 1s are auto-failures on everything" is one of those 'house rules' that's not really any such thing, much like "The Surprise Round". Everybody does it, and since GMs constantly call for rolls they have no business calling for, it means people flub checks they have no business flubbing all the time. I've played at tables with GMs who deliberately fish for natural 1s to screw players over with (if only ever once, for any given such dickhead GM), and when called on it they say "that's how the game works! If you roll a nat 1 you goof up and something bad happens!" It's such a pervasive thought pattern that even GMs who know better end up doing it half the time. You can't get away from it, and players are always expected to just grin, grit their teeth, scratch their difficult-to-locate tools or their vital-to-the-current-adventure weapons off their sheet and say "sure."
It is absolutely ridiculous. It is beyond ridiculous. And people who advocate for "swinginess" are always doing so specifically so they can hang onto their "hilarious" critical fumble tables and continue making players wish they were dead rather than playing D&D at their table.
If I have a basic skill n something then I should be getting a success on a roll of standard difficulty @90% of the time. I
Setting aside that there arguably shouldn't be a roll at all if your chances are +90% on a skill check, what are we talking about here when you say "standard difficulty"? Is that very easy (DC 5), easy (DC 10) or even medium (DC 15)? Another edit: also, what's basic skill? Are we talking simply being proficient or is there a minimum stat modifier involved?
Swinginess says my eleventh-level artificer with tool Expertise rolling at +10 to Thieves' Tools checks, with a 1d4 from Guidance and the ability to +5 any roll she makes with Flash of Genius at need, still has a 5% chance to be completely and utterly baffled by a five-copper DC 5 baby's-first-lock from the local fishmonger's bazaar. ... It's ****ing bullshit.
It is bullshit, because it isn't true. There are no crit fails on skill checks. If the DC is 5 and your modifier is +4 you can't fail. Can. Not. Fail. Period. If you want me to point to a single DM who adheres to that there's obviously me, but also literally every youtube/twitch DM I know. Certainly Matt Mercer, who adjudicated a natural 1 on a skill check in the last CritRole episode if you want to look it up (edit for correction: last but one, since I usually follow on youtube and Thursday's episode hasn't dropped there yet).
I used to hate the wide range of a single d20, but then I realised that the maths is no different from a % dice rolling system.
You have a particular base value, and you have to achieve a particular target number. In D&D this means that you will have a % chance to succeed, in steps of 5. In a full % system such as runequest, your skill will give your chance of succeeding.
e.g. D&D: my base skill is +6, the target DC is 15. I need to roll an 9 or more, so I have a 60% chance of succeeding.
e.g. Runequest: my base skill is 55%, thus I have a 55% chance of succeeding (ignoring negative modifiers).
Then the d20 or d100 is rolled, and the result determines whether you succeeded.
I don't really have a preference. However, I do consider that there are several problems with using 2d10.
Firstly, you couldn't just drop 2d10 in place of a d20 in D&D. There would need to be significant rebalancing, because the probabilities are designed for a flat "curve". That would, pretty much, require a brand new edition with all the modifiers etc recalculated and rebalanced for the new curve.
Secondly, it would reduce the probabilities of a critical hit/miss. People I play with find that a great and exciting part of the game, and they happen on average once every 10 attacks (a critical hit and a critical miss every 20 attack rolls). On 2d10, assuming double 1 and double 10 are used, they occur only once every 50 rolls.
Finally, many of those I know with seem to find adding a single modifier to a single die roll challenging. Every time more dice (or more modifiers) are added, it slows the game down. Even if it only adds a couple of seconds to every roll, that's quite a lot over the course of a session.
It may be that there's enough advantages to outweigh these and any other disadvantages. I don't know.
Because d20's are way cooler and much more fun to roll.
Ditch the crit fail skill checks and crit fail fumble tables and rolling a 1 isn't that significant, your only guarenteed to miss attack rolls. Using the passive skills more liberally to auto resolve simple checks also helps with unnecessary checks.
I personally would rather increase crits to include a sub crit that automatically hits with no bonus damage on rolls of 19, maybe a precise hit. I don't like the extremes of success or failure on the dice system, and a 2 dice roll has even rarer crits and crit fails. Adding more gradual failure and success spikes serves more than increasing average rolls. In the case of wildly unbalanced encounters, that 5% chance may be the only opportunity to hit, and improved crit might be a serious advantage. Meanwhile a d20 result of 2 will probably miss automatically anyway, so I could add a half damage on rolls if 2 and never see it apply.
5% of each outcome is also easy to recognize, while a curve of probability is less readable. Your trying to reach a threshold most of the time, not reach a precise number, so it's not important that you have a 5% chance of max or minimum roll.
If you really want to negate critical failures and critical successes, it works. You'd effectively have a 1% chance to critically hit or critically miss. It also substantially impacts certain classes. Champions, Rogues, and Barbarians receive a substantial nerf by this method. Some spells do as well. High AC also becomes much, much better.
I'd also question the whole idea that this "more accurately represent[s] a realistic potential outcome." It just creates a bell shaped probability curve as opposed to a flat one. I think realism would simply to be get rid of dice altogether but that kinda sucks the fun out. I'd also say that a nat one doesn't mean your sword swing just wildly misses and you look like an idiot. It might simply mean that your enemy parried your blow putting you in a less favorable position.
Any combo of 1s and 2s being a critical miss and any combo of 9s and 10s being a critical hit gives you a 4% chance of each, 8% of a crit of either kind. If the 1% crit rate bothers you, it's not hard to make them a bit more common.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I'm really unsure of what "a more realistic potential outcome" even means in a D&D universe, given things like being able to potentially fire a heavy crossbow eight times in six seconds without any sort of magic being involved.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
If you like games designed for a bell curve probabilities, I recommend you Iron Kingdoms RPG. DnD is not designed for bell curve and changin it would mess up the balance, giving unreasonable advantage to high-AC creatures and PC.
I would say go with 3d6 AND change the way advantage/disadvantage works so you can more readily deal with higher target ACs and skill rolls. Just change advantage/disadvantage to levels where each level gives you a +/-1d4 advantage/advantage and/or a +/-1 advantage die that scales up/down per level of advantage starting at d6 (1d6/1d8/1d10/etc). Example: If you have a party in which a bunch of enemies are affected by Faerie Fire, while the party itself is under a Bless spell every attack by a party member against those targets would get +2d4 to hit. If a Rogue takes careful aim as well they would get another 1d4 - meaning the average attack roll from the Rogue would be about 18.
Advantage and disadvantage are significantly easier and smoother in a dice pool system than they are with the d20.
Rolling 2d10 for checks because you feel like it? An advantage roll is 3d10 instead and keep the two best dice. Dis is roll 3d10 and keep the two worst dice. Same with any other dice pool. 3d6 Ad/Dis turns into 4d6 and discard the highest/lowest die. Hell, with d6s you could even start having advantage and disadvantage stack up ot interact in interesting, meaningful ways beyond "once you have both the universe stops caring about you." It'd get complicated so there's arguments against it, but there's also arguments for it in some cases.
But yes. Dice pools make advantage/disadvantage and similar mechanics much easier. That's technically(ish) how Genesys' story dice work, except with a whole lot of awful extraneous nonsense that makes resolving a check take forever and a week and makes Genesys even worse than D&D for making your supposedly competent adventurer-type person into a hilariously inept failgoon. Blegh.
Please do not contact or message me.
I think one thing multi-dice proponents are forgetting is that some people have problems with math, even simple math, yet love D&D. Adding dice together can already be a challenge for those players, and this would make practically every roll in the game a multi-dice affair. I have an autistic player who loves D&D (and for whom the game has helped a lot in their socialization skills), but math is not their strong suit at all.
Honestly, I think the problem is that DM's call for dice rolls in far too many circumstances. If there shouldn't be a significant chance of failure, then a roll shouldn't be needed. I've played sessions with only a handful of dice rolls, and those have turned out great.
So, two things:
1. More dice to keep track of. Need to add the numbers in your head instead of just seeing what number you got on one die, nice and neat.
2. It would make the game a lot more “hit or miss” in nature. Is the average 11+ your modifier good enough to beat the target, or not? With the new probability curve, that question becomes way more important. It would encourage powergaming, because otherwise let’s say that 11+ your modifier IS NOT good enough to hit a boss monster’s AC, well now you might be pretty darn worthless this fight. With the swingy 1D20 you will hit here and there however.
the entire system would have to be redesigned around the 2D10. Just plopping it in would be a disaster. The power gap between something a little stronger and something a little weaker would grow to an immense gulf, because the stronger thing is much less likely to have a bad round, while the weaker thing is much less likely to have a good one.
You said “fight me”, there’s my punch.
whilst a system with d6's was in the original D&D, that isn't how the rest of DnD went along. The swingy-ness is the point.
I shall recant.
The swingy-ness is the point.
This is at the core of the fudging & closed rolling V.S. no fudging & open rolling debacle. The dice are the unbiased arbiters of resolution. They have just the same chance to give you any number as any other number. You saying that a 2d10 system making an average result more likely is directly opposed to this ethos and way of thinking. Biasing towards a certain curve rather than have all results be equal is the direct opposite of that which is wanted.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
UwU
Going back to the OPs starting post I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that his big concern was not the combat system use of the d20 but the skill system. So let’s break this into those 2 parts.
1) How would a switch to a bell curve multi dice system impact the skill rolls?
2) How would the switch to a multi dice system impact the combat rolls?
we don’t really need to rehash the math - that has been covered very nicely. My view is that for combat I prefer the single dice system that shows both the general randomness of real combat and the effects of real skill over time ( if I’m a white belt and your a black belt on any given attack I have a flat chance to hit you and you have a flat chance to miss blocking/dodging me - if they line up I hit, but over time your going to hit me a lot more than I’m going to hit you so you win the fight.) For skills I think I would prefer the multi dice - I shouldn’t really have a large chance to fail something I’m skilled at doing, but “critical” successes shouldn’t be very likely either. Yurei’s advantage/disadvantage by adding a die and taking the 3 best/worst as well as proficiencies granting bonuses to boost the scores for more skilled folks would, I suspect, work better for skills. It would need some rework so you math whizzes have at it 😁.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
There may not be 2 outcomes but what % of the time you get those outcomes does matter. Especially with skills and that was where I, at least, was suggesting the multi dice approach. If I have a basic skill n something then I should be getting a success on a roll of standard difficulty @90% of the time. It might call for rethinking the harder difficulties and going up by 2s or 1s but it represents reality with skills much better. As I said above I would leave combat as is since I think it is better represented this way.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Swinginess is bad.
Swinginess sucks donkey rocks.
Swinginess says my eleventh-level artificer with tool Expertise rolling at +10 to Thieves' Tools checks, with a 1d4 from Guidance and the ability to +5 any roll she makes with Flash of Genius at need, still has a 5% chance to be completely and utterly baffled by a five-copper DC 5 baby's-first-lock from the local fishmonger's bazaar.
No. **** that. **** that literally forever. And don't give me that moose garbage about "critical success/fumbles only happen during combat"; point me at one single GM ever who adheres to that instead of doing "hilarious" garbage like "Oh no, your master locksmith with really high quality artisan-grade thieves' tools rolled a 1 on your check? Guess you broke your picks! You're gonna have to buy some new ones, and I bet the guards at the next town will be really interested in why you're trying to buy thieves' tools! wink wink!"
Some things do not bloody ******* merit failure. Some things do not bloody ******* merit success. And until GMs as an aggregate whole learn that, I will always be a proponent of mechanically limiting aberrant results as much as is feasible. A zeroth-level street urchin with "thieves' tools" consisting of a few bent-up wires will never, ever, EVER crack the king's jewel vault, and a twentieth-level master thief will crack that dumbass DC 5 lock literally more easily and more reliably than you or I can buckle our belts. It is not funny when an untrained moron shows up an Expert master of a skill. It is not funny when the Expert master breaks their shit, or snaps their bowstring, or hurls their sword through a momentary portal into the Abyss, or whatever other dumbass idiotic nonsensical total-bullshit Loony Toons tombuggery you decide to inflict on them for having the sheer gall to roll a natural 1. It's not cool, it's not a strength of D&D, it's not a storytelling moment.
It's ******* bullshit.
The "swinginess" of D&D means every last single character in D&D is not actually trained at anything. They have no practiced skills, no honed masteries, nothing. They're all a bunch of screaming yaybos flailing mostly at random and praying the Almighty Math Rocks of the Gods come down in their favor. It is maddening, and it very much dissuades many people from trying to make "expert of their trade"-type characters.
Chaos has its place in a game of D&D 5e. So does actually being good at what you're good at, and being able to rely on those skills.
Please do not contact or message me.
I'm fully on board with the idea that normal distributions are better than flat ones, but it is worth pointing out that nothing about your post has any basis in the rules of D&D. If your bonus is at least +4, there is exactly 0 chance of failing to pick a DC 5 lock, and the GM doesn't really have to call for a roll (though, who uses DC 5 locks anyway). Natural 1s don't mean anything special except on attack rolls, and if your GM is using shitty house rules, it's not really fair to be mad at the game itself because of it.
"Nat 1s are auto-failures on everything" is one of those 'house rules' that's not really any such thing, much like "The Surprise Round". Everybody does it, and since GMs constantly call for rolls they have no business calling for, it means people flub checks they have no business flubbing all the time. I've played at tables with GMs who deliberately fish for natural 1s to screw players over with (if only ever once, for any given such dickhead GM), and when called on it they say "that's how the game works! If you roll a nat 1 you goof up and something bad happens!" It's such a pervasive thought pattern that even GMs who know better end up doing it half the time. You can't get away from it, and players are always expected to just grin, grit their teeth, scratch their difficult-to-locate tools or their vital-to-the-current-adventure weapons off their sheet and say "sure."
It is absolutely ridiculous. It is beyond ridiculous. And people who advocate for "swinginess" are always doing so specifically so they can hang onto their "hilarious" critical fumble tables and continue making players wish they were dead rather than playing D&D at their table.
Please do not contact or message me.
Setting aside that there arguably shouldn't be a roll at all if your chances are +90% on a skill check, what are we talking about here when you say "standard difficulty"? Is that very easy (DC 5), easy (DC 10) or even medium (DC 15)? Another edit: also, what's basic skill? Are we talking simply being proficient or is there a minimum stat modifier involved?
It is bullshit, because it isn't true. There are no crit fails on skill checks. If the DC is 5 and your modifier is +4 you can't fail. Can. Not. Fail. Period. If you want me to point to a single DM who adheres to that there's obviously me, but also literally every youtube/twitch DM I know. Certainly Matt Mercer, who adjudicated a natural 1 on a skill check in the last CritRole episode if you want to look it up (edit for correction: last but one, since I usually follow on youtube and Thursday's episode hasn't dropped there yet).
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].