View Single Post
Old 01-31-2016, 05:51 AM   #8
Dinadon
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Success roles: effective skill below 3

What hasn't been mentioned yet is that the chance of Critical Failure keeps increasing. If your effective skill is 0, then a roll of 10 or more is a critical failure. Once effective skill is -6 or -7 the Critical Success and Critical Failure ranges will overlap!


The thing is, from a game design perspective, this isn't a symmetrical situation. People seek to maximise success, while minimising failure. Thus Critical Success range expands, then stops, to prevent an I win button. A 16 is the maximum you can roll as this encourages you to use modifiers to diversify skill use, but also has no effect on margin of success if the check uses that instead of simple success. Meanwhile, few people would want a Critical Failure 50% of the time. The cap of 3 means Critical Failure is at worse around 20%.
Dinadon is offline   Reply With Quote