Hello, and questions for people smarter than me

[Strung Nether]

(For the main point, skip to paragraph 3)(This does not count as a paragraph)

I recently came to these forums and after some lurking discovered that the average person here probably knows a few orders of magnitude more about Role-playing games and game design then I do.

Most of my gaming experience is as a player of 3.0 and 3.5. My "usual" characters started out as fighters wielding great swords...and then spiked chains. Eventually I realized that although I could lockdown a medium sized humanoid with character levels when standing next to one...not being able to fly after level 8 was a really bad thing. I then learned to Google and found the "official" min/max forums for 3.5; and then I became hooked on Treantmonklv20's writing style and ideas. Now I roll wizards. Because they are awesome.

My friend and I decided to design our own RPG "D&D style" game, mostly for the shits and giggles. While doing this, we came across some ideas that we like, but have not play tested:

3d6, or d20?
How do people think about rolling a 3d6 instead of a D20? The mean stays the same at 11.5, but you get a nice bell curve for the results. I like this idea because it means that there is not as much randomness when taking actions, and I think that people who do action x usually do action x with the same level of skill. What I hope this will change is that having a +2 on someone only means that you have a +10% chance of success with the d20, instead of +2 meaning that you are better than them and that you usually win. What I'm worried about is that modifiers to your roll do not scale linearly.

To demonstrate:
-X is the percent of the time you will beat a dc of A with a d20.
-Y is the percent of the time you will beat a dc of A with 3d6.

A----X-------Y
1----95----100
2----90----100
3----85----99.54
4----80----98.15
5----75----95.37
6----70----90.74
7----60----83.8
8----60----74.07
9----55----62.5
10---50----50
11---45----37.5
12---40----25.93
13---35----16.2
14---30----09.26
15---25----04.63
16---20----01.85
17---15----00.46
18---10-----0
19---05-----0

So adding 1 to the DC just lowers the chance for a D20 to win by 5%, it lowers the chance for the 3d6 to win a percent based on the original DC. I think the 3d6 is more realistic(if it’s almost impossible, making it a little harder doesn't actually do much) but I'm not sure it will be balanced because +1 and -2 are a big deal when you are rolling for a 10.

Mana, Spells per day, and Power points too?
I am having trouble thinking of good ways to design a magic system that I like. I have brainstormed several different features that I like:

Spells have levels. Simple spells are low level, complex and intricate spells are high level. Level can be used to restrict when characters learn certain spells(No time stop until you are a good enough caster to understand this complicated spell), or as a level of the "power" of a spell(magic missile vs. fireball), or as a way to limit a caster's ammo(3 6th level spells per day), or any combination of the three.

Power Point cost. Similar to the Level system. When you get the spell, how powerful it is, and ammo is all limited by its power point cost. No getting Time Stop until you can "unlock" spells that cost 18 power points, casting a 16d6 fireball costs 16 points, and you can only spend 45 power points per day.

Mana Spells. This would work like Power points, except that there are different types of "points". Red Mana would be used for spells like fireball and Chain lightning, blue Mana would be used for spells like mage armor, slightly yellow brown Mana would allow you to use teleport spells, etc. Fireball would cost one red Mana, and do 1d6 damage/caster level, while time stop would use 2 blue Mana and 4 opaque Mana, and last ??? rounds.

In the end, every magic system needs to: Restrict access to "high level"(complicated) spells until a certain level of character power. Allow the same spell to be more powerful if cast from a different caster. Keep a caster from casting a spell every six seconds for an entire day(ammo).

what do you think are good ways to do this?

Stats
My current idea for an Abilities system is six stat system:
Strength: melee and ranged damage, carrying capacity, physical power.
Endurance: Fort save, HP modifier, Stamina modifier(stamina would be like hp, except that "special" attacks deplete it along with enemy attacks, and it comes back slowly/with rest. disarm would be a normal attack, while whirlwind attack would drain x stamina. Think subdual damage.), general "toughness."
Dexterity: Melee and ranged to hit modifier,
Agility: movement speed, dodge to AC, Reflex save.
intelligence: Arcane casting, required for certain abilities(feats), Logical processing power.
Wisdom: Divine casting, skills, Will save, total knowledge known.

I never liked the charisma stat in DND. The non-combat rules in dnd (Diplomacy, crafting, etc) always seem to me to be really simple and bland. because of that I don’t have a stat for that, nor do I have any ideas on how someone would make good rules for that. Convincing someone that something they believed their whole life is wrong should be more complicated than rolling high on a d20 and adding a skill too it. Another thing I hate is "dump" stats. With this system, I don't really think that any character can really pick a "dump" stat.


What do you agree with? What ideas do you like or hate, what do you think is balanced and what do you think would be dumb?

[Username17]

3d6, or d20?

While the literal average numbers are the same (10.5), these two RNGs (Random Number Generators) are very different. 3d6 has the property where getting a second bonus of any value is a smaller change in gross probabilities - which in turn somewhat resembles a Gaussian distribution and thus looks similar to many real world data sets. It is however, much smaller in terms of how big a bonus of any specific value is compared to it.

In short: you can fit more standard deviations into a 3d6 RNG, but only because a standard deviation is represented by a substantially smaller number. So in general, any effect that would give +4 on a d20 roll should be modeled as a +2 or so on 3d6. If you wanted to use your bonus table from a d20 game straight, you'd want to have an RNG that was more like 5d6 and shift the base target number up by 7 or so.

I am having trouble thinking of good ways to design a magic system that I like.

There are lots of ways to make your magic system. But the core of it is that you want your resource management mini game to encourage the kinds of behavior that you think is fun. If you think it's fun for high level wizards to blow a nut doing powerful shit during their five minute workday and then go back to sleep, by all means allow people to draw from a power point reserve as you've described.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I am having trouble thinking of good ways to design a magic system that I like.

Your first starting point should be coming up with a list of design goals. Design goals aren't necessarily right or wrong, they mostly boil down to taste--though there are such thing as impractical, unpopular, contradictory, or even unattainable design goals. But the fact of the matter is that if you don't have a list of proper design goals and then figure out how your system achieves them then you're never going to get it right.

Here are some example design goals to get you started. Again, I'm not complaining that they're superior or inferior, I'm just giving you an example of a list you should come up with before you start.

- People should have their powers operate at reduced effectiveness the longer they go on in the day.
- Characters should use a wide variety of different spells.
- Spells should generally have a fixed effect regardless of other factors; players should not be allowed to acquire game effects that alter spells.
- Spellcasters should sometimes be caught off-guard because they prepared the 'wrong' list of spells.
- Players should be able to use spells if they have the resources allocated to them (spell slots, mana points, etc.) regardless of the tactical situation--no such thing as not using Red Mana spells when it's raining really hard.

You should come up with a list of around 10 things that you want your system to do before you start working on it. Right now I can't really tell why you don't like 3E's current system.

[PhoneLobster]

I am very much against the use of 3d6 over 1d20 for basically anything. Unless you know BACKWARDS some VERY good reasons for using it and can tell us right now exactly what bonus ranges you intend to use in your game design it is GUARANTEED a bad idea to use it.

I think the 3d6 is more realistic

A common misconception. I have no idea why people think this way however because NEITHER dice rolling mechanic has ANYTHING to do with accurately simulating reality or not.

People get confused because sometimes in reality results will match a vague bell curve. But it is important to note that the same thing happens in your game if most characters just have a mid line bonus as a standard and use a 1d20 mechanic.

Regardless of your rolling mechanic you create mean distributions from your imaginary population samples ANYWAY, frankly you shouldn't be caring because that is a totally retarded thing to base your game design around but as long as you have trends and standards within your bonus ranges you WILL have, ultimately, curve graphs of that data.

3d6 over 1d20 only adds an ADDITIONAL level of complexity to your game mechanics. One that is flat out always BAD. The numbers are not easy to predict or map, it hurts you at a design level and it hurts players and GMs at the table. It makes the specialist vs generalist problem worse, it makes transparency worse and it reduces the actual functional size of your RNG to be smaller than it's actual total range.

(if it’s almost impossible, making it a little harder doesn't actually do much)

That might sound good but does it sound good to also say when something is moderately easy making it a little easier is impossible because it just becomes much much easier with only a small bonus?

but I'm not sure it will be balanced because +1 and -2 are a big deal when you are rolling for a 10.

So if you assume you are using the mid range all the time, yes, the granularity of the 3d6 RNG is so large it is abysmal, you may as well be using a 1d10 or 1d8 or something as your RNG at that point.

Also, Frank's comment about bigger and smaller bonuses is flat out incorrect.

Because a second bonus on a 3d6 is NOT "always smaller" in value.

Sometimes it is LARGER in value.

And no a +2 on a 2d6 is NOT worth +4 on a 1d20. We went over the maths on this, but he still doesn't understand that point. And the fact that he doesn't understand it is a pretty good hint that this is a mechanic too complex to use as your primary RNG.

[Lago PARANOIA]

New Guy, just go here if you want more bell curve talk. I don't want to derail the thread talking about RNG. Just resurrect this one.

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49968

[TarkisFlux]

Or better yet, just read it and then don't resurrect it. There are useful bits in there, but that thread should never be brought back to life. Nothing good can come of it at this point.

On magic, have some more stuff to consider.

[Calibron]

Your potential magic system seems a bit overcomplicated, but workable if your friends are into that kind of thing.

If you are interested in encouraging a wizard to not simply blow his load and then snuggle up in a rope trick for next 8 hours I suggest only making combat viable or verisimilitude inconvenient, that is, spells that would be a strain on the world's verisimilitude if wizards could cast them as much as they wanted, spells cost power points; at 5th level a Wizard that wants to bring the pain would throw down a Stinking Cloud or, ostensibly, a Fireball, but if he wanted to save his power points for a more dire situation he should be able to toss out an Obscuring Mist and plink away with Magic Missile all he wants with no power point cost.

[LR]

...if he wanted to save his power points for a more dire situation he should be able to toss out an Obscuring Mist and plink away with Magic Missile all he wants with no power point cost.

Even assuming that infinite low-level spells are a good thing (which is probably a decent assumption), Vancian magic is still a better system than power points for limiting tiered magic, and does a lot to prevent the five minute workday. Adopting a Winds of Fate-style system or simply disengaging power recovery from physical rest would probably do a lot more. Also, OP, if you're designing the system from scratch, putting Fighters and Wizards on different power schedules is a bad idea unless you want to make a system where fighters are just flat-out worse than casters.

I understand why you might think that power points would be better, given the design goals of D&D magic. However, the fact is that you have limited actions in combat, and if you draw your high level spells and low level spells from the same resource, high level spells will make that action worth more. This encourages people to go nova and then rest, which doesn't follow the goals you listed in your post.

[Calibron]

Strung, I took another look at the mana portion of your proposal and I have to say: forcing the wizard to keep track of half a dozen or so separate pulls of points every single time they use a level appropriate ability is going to be an utter and total bitch in the middle of combat and a general book keeping headache.

If you're married to the idea of colored mana then I have an alternative proposal. Have Mana and Power Points be totally separate thing, don't require that Mana be spent simply to use a spell; have it be a power booster, and keep the sheer amount of Mana small since you already have a big pool of power points to keep track of. Have Mana function somewhere along the lines of Metamagic, spending 1 piece of Blue Mana would allow you to Extend your Mage Armor, 2 pieces of Red Mana would Empower your Fireball, ect., ect.; And of course the specific color of Mana could only strengthen the proper type of spell.

Even assuming that infinite low-level spells are a good thing (which is probably a decent assumption), Vancian magic is still a better system than power points for limiting tiered magic, and does a lot to prevent the five minute workday.

Vancian Magic does nothing to limit the 5 minute workday that Power Points fails to do. It is, in a way, worse, since instead of expending all of their resource before resting a mage is likely to rest after expending only their top level or 2 of spells, ignoring the lower level slots entirely that haven't already been used on some random utility or buffing.

[The Man Who Killed Death]

As another alternative to what Calibron suggested for your mana system, you could use it as something you spend during character creation/leveling up. Gathering specific colors of mana allow you to advance up that color's list of powers sort of like advancing a sphere (where each color was a sphere, or you could unlock spheres within a color).

I like that idea actually, although it would tedious to make sure everything was balanced and idiot-proof so you don't have people spending mana in stupid areas rendering them useless.

[Calibron]

Using Mana to specialize your wizard sounds like a cool idea.

[The Man Who Killed Death]

I know, now I want to start working on something like that.

You could also use that for your warrior types as well. Start with basic frameworks for the classes (Warrior, thief, magic-user,etc) and have various amounts of mana to spend for specializing in different ability sets for those classes. So a cleric is a magic-user who spent a lot of white mana while a ranger is a warrior who spent a lot of green. Or something like that.

[Grek]

Mana as a recharge mechanic can work IF you have mana recharge through some means that is not "Spend time resting". If you have it recharged over time, then you get people using up all of their mana super-fast and then resting, which is lame. Base it on monsters killed or treasure collected or damsels saved or any other goal based setup.

[Strung Nether]

3d6:
Ok...after seeing what happened in this thread I really...Really...REALLY don't want to talk about this anymore. The best and simplest way I can think of to explain why I like 3d6 over 1d20 is that it has a average of 10.5, which means that if you add 10 to the DC of the task you will be able to easily tell if you will succeed more or less than 1/2 of the time, and what Murtak says on the seventh page of "that" thread:

In a curved RNG system you are basically in one of the following positions: In the middle of the RNG (at the center, or right next to it), significantly below the middle, or significantly above it. If you are not in the middle part of the RNG you do not care much about bonuses, especially small ones, as they do not alter your chance of success much. If you are in the middle however even a +1 can make a big difference.

This means that for level-appropriate tasks (or skill-appropriate in levelless systems) you care about getting that last small bonus point. It also means that is damn hard to actually push someone off the RNG entirely. So in DnD terms, two level 10 fighters dueling would care about taking the higher ground, swinging on chandeliers and the like. A 10th level fighter fighting some gnolls wouldn't care about higher ground, or being flanked. In DnD as-is however the dueling fighters don't much care about getting a +1 or even +2. Sure, they will take the bonus if they can get it, but hitting on 11+ and hitting on 13+ is barely distinguishable. The gnolls on the other hand will go from hitting on a 19 (or 20 or not being able to hit at all) to hitting on a 15 and might suddenly be a threat.

When combat occurs between equals, I want tactical decisions to be a big deal. High ground, cover, and rough terrain should matter in a sword fight between two samurai masters, but less so when one of those samurai masters is clearing rats out of a basement. (my opinion, feel free to disagree to yourself)

ok...that's it. no more 3d6 "discussion." ever. Please.

Stats:
No one brought this up, and I think that's because I did a really shitty job of explaining it. I now realize that evaluating an Inherent Character Abilities System can’t really be judged unless you know what the stats are used for. Here goes for some explanations that make sense:

Strength: Strength is a measure of your character's physical power. It effects how much you can carry, how much damage you do with Melee/Ranged Weapons, and effects how well you can wrestle(grapple).
Endurance: Endurance is a measure of your character's physical Toughness. It affects how hard you are to kill, and how resistant you poison and certain spells(Fort. Def.).
Dexterity: Dexterity is a measure of your character's physical precision. It effects how well you can hit your target with Melee/Ranged weapons.
Agility: Agility is a measure of your character's physical speed. It affects how fast you can run/jog/move, and how well you can avoid attacks(Armor and Ref. Def.).
Intelligence: Intelligence is a measure of your character's mental problem solving ability. It effects Arcane spellcasting, and is a prerequisite for complicated Maneuvers.
Wisdom: Wisdom is a measure of your character's mental knowledge. It effects Divine spellcasting, and how many skill points you character has.

FYI: In this system wizards get spells, clerics get miracles, and fighters get maneuvers. I think I will go with everyone has attack they can always do(sword/disarm/trip for Martial and Divine, magic missile and assorted weak utility for spellcasters), then give everyone better attacks that drain resources(whirlwind/spring attack for Martial, Resistance/harm for Divine, and Solid fog/clearicy for Arcane). The five minute work day is dumb...so stamina/mana/spells will come back on a non-per-day basis.

I want every decision in character creation to matter, and I don't want there to be any really "easy" choices. Dumping Cha. felt ...bad when I rolled up Fighters. and it didn’t really matter much to my character that I had a low Cha. because I never rolled diplomacy. I think that the way I have the stats set up now makes it so that nothing can be "dumped."

Again, you guys have more experience with this. is not having dump stats as good as I think it is? do you like or dislike what I did to social stats? I'm mostly blowing smoke and theory-craft out of my ass on this.

Spells
I read this, and it has some good points about the whole spellcaster thing. I think what I'm going to do is not make spells/miracles better than melee...just different. Martial classes will have these things called maneuvers. Some will use up stamina, and others won’t. The ones that don't you can probably use at will unless they require something else(you can only do a roll-stand when prone). Arcane people get spells...and they use ???(spell slots? Power points? other?) some spells don't use those, so the Arcane person can use those spell like normal attacks.

This way fighters can actually make decisions on their turns, instead of just when they level up. And it makes a fairly balanced point to start from(I think).

The main thing is I need a system so that I can limit when people get access to powerful spells/maneuvers/miracles, and I need to limit them so that the powerful ones aren't just used again and again. It needs to be a tactical decision when you blow your Lunging Face Stab Strike maneuver because if it isn't...then not using it on round 1 is dumb, and that is dumb game mechanic.

I also have tons of ideas like:
-Stamina making you worse if you use most of it up.
-Save or die/save or be screwed spells/miracles/maneuvers work better if they have less hp/are wounded (give reason to not open combat up with uber attacks).
-HP representing "awesome" instead of actual tissue damage...so you don't actually take tissue damage until your HP is low...and then someone stabs you in the face and you bleed out in two rounds.(or they could stab you in the shoulder...so you are heavily wounded and are not combat effective...but not actually dead yet.)
-all of the possible ways having "mana" of different colors or different essences and all the possible ways that could modify the way you facestab/cast...this could get awesome.

If only making things work well didn't take so much careful effort...

PS: how about resting is like...combat being over and you taking a 30 second break to catch your breath? Maybe I need to think more about resource management....(full healed before every combat due to regenerating magic?)

[The Man Who Killed Death]

You could use a stamina mechanic for everyone, where casting a spell or stabbing someone in the face takes up stamina/magic stat/whatever and your stronger spells/face stabs do more damage to those abilities. So you won't ever want to nova first turn unless you're sure you'll win that turn because after that you're stamina is at 3 and all you can do is stab someone in the arm, and not very accurately.

As long as you can coordinate costs between using stuff and make sure the powers aren't over the top so a party could just nova first turn and kill everything, it seems like a decent idea (apart from the bookkeeping, which is actually a big deal for most people). Either way, it really isn't much more effort than keeping track of power points, except that you're adding so much per round/whatevertimeframeyoufeellike.

With the above you'll want physical attack/stamina stats and magical attack/stamina stats, unless stamina covers all of that.

[Calibron]

In the Heroic Fantasy Sword&Sorcery RPG I'm writing I decided on powers being At-Will, Recharge(requires a Full-Round Action to regain access), or Daily. The health system is utterly different from DnD so I'll leave off on that, having too many disparate ideas when you're working on a project will often cause progress to grind to a halt.

[PhoneLobster]

When combat occurs between equals, I want tactical decisions to be a big deal. High ground, cover, and rough terrain should matter in a sword fight between two samurai masters, but less so when one of those samurai masters is clearing rats out of a basement.

But... 3d6 does not benefit those goals even a little bit. But hey, you want to say that and just not actually discus it further and figure out how 1d20 rather clearly benefits your goals better than the 3d6?

Well, fine, but why you even ask for help at that point I have no idea.

Now, as for your resourcing schemes.

I think daily and such abilities are totally uncool.

I direct you to another one of my old threads.

Make your resourcing mechanics exciting and dynamic.

Normal mana point and spells per day/encounter mechanics are boring as all heck.

I also have tons of ideas like:
-Stamina making you worse if you use most of it up.

I think the lack of stamina itself can be bad enough. If you need to burn it to have good actions, especially if you need to burn it for defensive saves of some sort having little or now <insert resource name here> is a bad enough thing on it's own that you don't need an additional "and now suffer -X to rolls" mechanic cluttering things up and breaking your RNG.

-Save or die/save or be screwed spells/miracles/maneuvers work better if they have less hp/are wounded (give reason to not open combat up with uber attacks).

You so totally just want everything to run off the same damage/defense reduction track then. As the simplest way to ensure that Turn To Frog spells get better as you take Sword Damage to your HP is for Turn To Frog spells to run off dealing damage to your HP.

Having a weird conversion mechanic where Turn To Frog gets a scaling bonus based on your HP damage and visa versa is the same as having Turn To Frog and Sword In Face attacks both just deal HP damage... only you also have a weird conversion mechanic to navigate every turn.

-all of the possible ways having "mana" of different colors or different essences and all the possible ways that could modify the way you facestab/cast...this could get awesome.

That's something rather tricky. Moving toward a unified damage mechanic at one end while moving AWAY at the other with split mana resource types had better have some really funky cool justifications.

PS: how about resting is like...combat being over and you taking a 30 second break to catch your breath? Maybe I need to think more about resource management....(full healed before every combat due to regenerating magic?)

See my resource thread, but as a quick summary. How about small resource restoring actions are all in combat actions you can take. And out of combat just means you can keep taking them without interruption or threats until you are full pretty quickly..

[Username17]

Having multiple different endurance systems for different kinds of actions usually results in multiclass characters that are wildly out of sync power-with with the single classes.

There is basically two ways of handling it, and they both generally suck. You either give everyone some White Mana and some Black Mana, and this makes characters who have things to spend White Mana on and things to spend Black Mana on awesome because they can effectively use more of their abilities before recharging (half of their abilities have an effective cost of zero compared to the other half); or you force the Black/White character to split their Mana ahead of time, in which case they suck (because they can't use one big power twice and everyone else can).

Whatever endurance system you happen to use, people should probably use it. Making multiple subsystems and running them in parallel is confusing, but not particularly good.

4e's idea of giving everyone the same usage schedule was a legitimately good idea. It's just the implementation that was shit.

-Username17

[TarkisFlux]

3d6:
Ok...after seeing what happened in this thread I really...Really...REALLY don't want to talk about this anymore. The best and simplest way I can think of to explain why I like 3d6 over 1d20 is that it has a average of 10.5, which means that if you add 10 to the DC of the task you will be able to easily tell if you will succeed more or less than 1/2 of the time, and what Murtak says on the seventh page of "that" thread:

In a curved RNG system you are basically in one of the following positions: In the middle of the RNG (at the center, or right next to it), significantly below the middle, or significantly above it. If you are not in the middle part of the RNG you do not care much about bonuses, especially small ones, as they do not alter your chance of success much. If you are in the middle however even a +1 can make a big difference.

This means that for level-appropriate tasks (or skill-appropriate in levelless systems) you care about getting that last small bonus point. It also means that is damn hard to actually push someone off the RNG entirely. So in DnD terms, two level 10 fighters dueling would care about taking the higher ground, swinging on chandeliers and the like. A 10th level fighter fighting some gnolls wouldn't care about higher ground, or being flanked. In DnD as-is however the dueling fighters don't much care about getting a +1 or even +2. Sure, they will take the bonus if they can get it, but hitting on 11+ and hitting on 13+ is barely distinguishable. The gnolls on the other hand will go from hitting on a 19 (or 20 or not being able to hit at all) to hitting on a 15 and might suddenly be a threat.

When combat occurs between equals, I want tactical decisions to be a big deal. High ground, cover, and rough terrain should matter in a sword fight between two samurai masters, but less so when one of those samurai masters is clearing rats out of a basement. (my opinion, feel free to disagree to yourself)

ok...that's it. no more 3d6 "discussion." ever. Please.

I'd love to oblige you, because I agree lots and even asked you not to, but I can't. Because you're wrong on / misrepresenting a couple of things.

1) The average on 1d20 is also 10.5, so that point doesn't really help you pick one. You can do your 10 trick with either of them.

2) If you just want people going for tactical bonuses because they matter you can absolutely do that on a d20 by just using bigger numbers. On 3d6, starting from the middle a +2 bonus will take you from needing to roll an 11 to needing to roll a 9, and is almost a 25% jump (according to your chart anyway) in success. Which is a huge jump, akin to getting +5 on a d20 for positioning. But that percentage jump is not consistent because of the bell curve. If you got another +2, and needed to roll a 7 or better, that's only a 16% jump; about +3 on a d20. And your next +2 is only an 8% jump, about +1.5 on a d20. So yeah, you care about positional advantage in an even match, and you scramble for every bonus you can get if you're disadvantaged (where successive bonuses are actually worth more until you cross the 50/50 threshold), but you don't care about them as much if you're already likely to succeed on a task. Diminishing returns if you don't need them, and increasing returns if you do. Multiple bonuses don't stack the same way, so you care about your initial bonuses more on 3d6, but you don't care about later ones as much (assuming you start in the middle anyway, if you start on the unlikely end you care about everything you can get for a while).

Point is, you can make either one work if you want, as long as you set the size of your conditional modifiers appropriately and don't let people stack them to the heavens if you still want there to be a challenge.

[Username17]

Situation: You have a Fighter who is a hard core PC. There are some goblins and there is an enemy NPC Fighter. When getting higher ground or whatever the fuck to get a conditional advantage on the attack, the chart looks like this:

Attacker	Defender	3d6 Bonus is...	d20 Bonus is...
Fighter	Goblin	small	medium
Goblin	Fighter	large	large
Fighter	Fighter	large	medium

Now what a "bonus" is will change depending on whether you use 3d6 or 5d6 or a d20 or %d. The lengths of the RNGs are different, and some of them have critical regions in the RNGs. But assuming that you scale your bonuses to the RNG you are actually using, the chart above is going to dictate the kind of impact that bonuses are going to have on combat outcome.

The Goblins are always going to become a lot more dangerous when they get bonuses, no matter what system you are using. Their attacks are numerous but unreliable (hitting infrequently), and so a small bonus to percentages is going to end up doubling their damage output or more (often much more). That's a property of massed fire more than a property of any particular RNG (although interestingly, the property is more pronounced on a curve-roll like 3d6).

-Username17

[Vebyast]

As another alternative to what Calibron suggested for your mana system, you could use it as something you spend during character creation/leveling up. Gathering specific colors of mana allow you to advance up that color's list of powers sort of like advancing a sphere (where each color was a sphere, or you could unlock spheres within a color).

Interesting ideas have been had while I was away from the computer.

Extension of this idea: you can associate mana with a spell to buff it up in a manner appropriate to the type of mana (associate with, not spend mana on). If you then give players the ability to shuffle their mana around every now and then, you end up with a sort of metamagical polychromatic version of the Book of Blueness, which could be fun. I recall playing a few video games where something similar worked out pretty well.

[PhoneLobster]

There are so MANY assumptions and points in need of clarification I can't even begin to address that "informative table" Frank just put up.

Because I can't even actually identify or divine enough of the assumptions about mechanics that he is using since there are so many of them.

[The Man Who Killed Death]

Interesting ideas have been had while I was away from the computer.

Extension of this idea: you can associate mana with a spell to buff it up in a manner appropriate to the type of mana (associate with, not spend mana on). If you then give players the ability to shuffle their mana around every now and then, you end up with a sort of metamagical polychromatic version of the Book of Blueness, which could be fun. I recall playing a few video games where something similar worked out pretty well.

Maybe, I was thinking something like this.

Classes: Warrior, Thief, Mage

Each class has five sets categories of ability sets (Green, Red, White, Blue, Black) and there are spheres within those mana colors. Every level regardless of class, you get so much mana to spend, choosing from any of the five colors and you start spending it on some of the spheres. Multiple mana spent on a single sphere might have various effects like making those powers more effective.

From there you could probably "burn" mana from a color you have to do something cool or whatever. So you burn a red mana to make your fireball do more damage (or max out the rolls for the damage dice), but until that mana comes back you either can't use it or something else. I don't know.

Maybe every point of mana after the first is a specialization point you could burn for the metamagic effects, and those points you could swap around every day or whatever the time frame is.

[Vebyast]

Maybe, I was thinking something like this.

Classes: Warrior, Thief, Mage

Each class has five sets categories of ability sets (Green, Red, White, Blue, Black) and there are spheres within those mana colors. Every level regardless of class, you get so much mana to spend, choosing from any of the five colors and you start spending it on some of the spheres. Multiple mana spent on a single sphere might have various effects like making those powers more effective.

From there you could probably "burn" mana from a color you have to do something cool or whatever. So you burn a red mana to make your fireball do more damage (or max out the rolls for the damage dice), but until that mana comes back you either can't use it or something else. I don't know.

Maybe every point of mana after the first is a specialization point you could burn for the metamagic effects, and those points you could swap around every day or whatever the time frame is.

That's pretty similar to what I was thinking. Being able to burn mana that was previously attached to an ability also gives you "powerful stuff now makes me less powerful later", which is a valid design goal.

The only problem is that the effects of burning mana have to be significantly better than having that invested mana, otherwise there's no reason to burn mana. Since you also have to make investing mana powerful enough to be worthwhile, the effects of burning mana are going to have to be pretty spectacular. Spectacular enough that burning even a small amount of mana would have a good chance of instantly ending an encounter.

I feel like the following table would balance out with Tome metamagics if you handed out one mana per feat per three levels.
[*]investing n mana in a single spell or ability allows you to apply n spell levels of metamagic to that spell for free (chosen at cast time).
[*]investing n mana in a sphere or set of spells gives you a +n bonus per die or a +n bonus to the save DC for those spells.
[*]burning n mana allows you to choose and apply 2n or 3n levels of metamagic to that instance of the spell.
Then you relate the color of the mana to its effect, and you're done.

[Strung Nether]

First: The 3d6.

I think some miscommunications have happened.

1) The average on 1d20 is also 10.5, so that point doesn't really help you pick one. You can do your 10 trick with either of them.

I agree. That is why I chose 3d6 instead of 3d12 or some other dice combination. If the DC is 13, and you have a +3 to your roll it's easy to figure out that you will beat it half of the time. If, however, the standard RNG was 3d8, it becomes a little more complicated to tell.

2) If you just want people going for tactical bonuses because they matter you can absolutely do that on a d20 by just using bigger numbers. On 3d6, starting from the middle a +2 bonus will take you from needing to roll an 11 to needing to roll a 9, and is almost a 25% jump (according to your chart anyway) in success. Which is a huge jump, akin to getting +5 on a d20 for positioning. But that percentage jump is not consistent because of the bell curve. If you got another +2, and needed to roll a 7 or better, that's only a 16% jump; about +3 on a d20. And your next +2 is only an 8% jump, about +1.5 on a d20. So yeah, you care about positional advantage in an even match, and you scramble for every bonus you can get if you're disadvantaged (where successive bonuses are actually worth more until you cross the 50/50 threshold), but you don't care about them as much if you're already likely to succeed on a task. Diminishing returns if you don't need them, and increasing returns if you do. Multiple bonuses don't stack the same way, so you care about your initial bonuses more on 3d6, but you don't care about later ones as much (assuming you start in the middle anyway, if you start on the unlikely end you care about everything you can get for a while).

I also agree with this. I like examples, so Ill illustrates it with this one:
You have samurai 1 and samurai 2 locked in a epic struggle to the death(they are identical characters, both hitting the other on a roll of 11). Since each consecutive bonus to attack for ether will give diminishing margins of returns, the difference between +7 to attack and +8 to attack is very little in terms of the percent of hitting. However, The first +1 will give you a significant change in terms of success percent, as well as the first -1. This means that when samurai 1 and samurai 2 are battling, things like high ground(+2) can give up to a 20% or more improvement in your hit chances, while when Peasant 1 attacks Samurai 1 (DC18), having high ground and flanking (+4) will only give about a 9% increase to the chances of hitting. It doesn't really matter if the peasant has high ground or has good cover...the samurai is so much better than him that while something could happen and he could stab the samurai...it doesn't matter that much.

Does that make sense?

More about mana:
Say...using your fireball does 1d6 damage per Red mana you have. Using your Meteor swarm does 2d6 damage per red mana...but you also will lose two red mana after you cast it. Full round meditate action to restore one mana.

It makes blowing your load a gamble...say you start with six mana
Blow Load damage per round: 12d6, 8d6, 4d6, 0, 0, 4d6, 0, 0...
Keeping your load damage per round: 6d6, 6d6, 6d6, 6d6, 6d6...

IF you knew exactly how long combat was going to last you could blow your load at the "optimal" rate...but that is a very hard thing to know. This could work with spells that don't do damage too. Fog cloud does not blow any of your load...Solid fog blows some, and cloud kill blows allot of your load.

Potential issue: Even if Wall of stone blows 6 mana, a wizard could build a castle in a day... same with a lot of spells that have effects that linger around after the casting is over. How to fix this?

Maybe spell casters blow fatigue when they blow their load too...or maybe mana is just for arcane, and stamina is just for martial?