FrankTrollman wrote:Wow. You're saying it works better than
Call of Cthulhu?
CoC is one of the worst
systems ever put together. Fortunately the
game is based largely around mood, magical teaparty, and the expectations that your characters will die horribly sooner rather than later. So the system doesn't get in the way that much. But that doesn't mean that the game mechanics aren't a war crime. They totally are. Making something that is game mechanically superior to CoC is not even enough information to tell us whether you've met the bare minimum requirements to not get laughed at.
I have no idea what "magical teaparty" is, but he took the d% roll under, made it into a d20 roll under, and gave skills ranked 1-20, which you check when you pass, and then at some point try to fail in order to improve. Any further similarity to CoC is unknown to me, as I haven't played it. On the other hand, the most negative comment I've ever heard about it came from you, just now.
Wow. You're horrendously wrong here. Degree of Success is incredibly easier with d% roll over. Your Target Number is 100, you roll your dice and add your modifiers. Your degree of success is just the last two digits of the final number.
You've still got to add two double digit numbers it to get that number. Subtraction is marginally more difficult than addition, but dealing with smaller numbers is easier than dealing with larger numbers, and that includes when the smaller number is the result. Also the simple comparison counts for a lot. Consequently, roll over is
not objectively easier; either way it's not massively easier (as you assert later on).
This isn't even up for debate. If you want to roll percentile dice and you want to do things with degrees of success or opposed rolls, you should use roll over. Mathematical steps can be counted. Roll Over requires less of them. Also, it provides exactly the same actual chances as Roll Under because it is literally the same system which has been simplified to have all the necessary numbers on the right side of the equals sign.
Well actually it is up for debate, because I'm saying that's not true. I'm fully aware that it's mathematically identical (I'm in the final year of my maths PhD, and I've taught stats to 3rd year undergraduates), however that does not make it identical in practice. You've got two systems with different maxima, you'll get different ideals depending on how you weight them.
The only way that Roll Under ever has an advantage with anything is if you are generating binary success/failure results and you are not applying circumstantial modifiers of any kind. In that very limited circumstance, Roll Under is superior because it resolves with a simple comparison operation instead of requiring addition or subtraction of any kind. If you are doing anything else (opposing tests, modified tests, degree of success, secret difficulties, etc.), then Roll Over is somewhere between "slightly easier" and "massively easier".
How do circumstantial modifiers affect anything? You add the modifier to your skill, then try to roll under it. Easy. If your GM decides to add a hidden modifier, all they've got to do is add the modifier to your score, and then determine the result by comparison when you read the dice out.
For critical successes, in roll under you say "if you passed, and the last digit of the dice is a 0 or a 5, you've got a critical success". This scales with your ability. I can't think offhand of an equivalent system for roll over, except for "did you pass by 50 (or X) or more?" That might be easy, but it doesn't scale the same way, and you've still got that addition to take care of. Plus instead of a gradual chance of critical going from 1-10 as your score goes from 1-100, it stays 0 until 50, then swings up to 50% at 100, which seems rather less elegant to me. And do you seriously need Degree of Success all the time? I don't think so. I'd say that limited circumstance is more the norm.
d% in general is not a particularly good mechanic, unless you use the one thing it's good for, and that's giving percentage chance of success. Not percentage chance of degree of success, just plain and simple binary success, and roll under is where it shines. You can do a lot with that.
If you are advocating Roll Under for an RPG today, you are a relic. This is 2012, and science has progressed. You might as well be advocating THAC0. It's a pointless overcomplication of the rules system. Like THAC0, it simply reverses the signs on some things with no realized or even potential benefit
I'm not advocating THAC0. When we had to use THAC0, we replaced it with the 1e to-hit tables. THAC0 involves scores that decrease as you get better, that's where the problem lies, not in the subtraction. It's an unintuitive system, which leads to confusion as it's difficult to get your head round what you're supposed to do with it. As a point of interest though, THAC0 can be rearranged to be the easiest possible system, provided your GM is willing to share the opponent's AC with you.
Yes, it's 2012, that doesn't mean we need to keep reinventing the wheel just to say "it's better because it's new". People had roll over in the 70s too. I don't know when the first dice pool came out, but I'll bet that's been around for a while. We do, however, have 40 years of experience of what works. I'm aware that roll under is not as popular as it used to be, but with the exception of Runequest or something, I can't think of any games out right now that use d% roll over.
I like tea.