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Old 01-05-2018, 01:55 PM   #91
Steve Jackson
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Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

I wonder if perhaps the "roll more dice for more difficulty" mechanic should be done away with entirely, in favor of stat penalties.

When you roll 4 dice the result is very often going to be within a few points of 14.

When you roll 5d, the significant majority of results will be from 16 to 19. The bell curve gets way steeper and most uncertainty is lost. Larger numbers of dice are more predictable yet.

Stat penalties, on the other hand, keep the familiar 3d bell curve the same and move its center point. Much less predictable.
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Old 01-05-2018, 02:00 PM   #92
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Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jackson View Post
I wonder if perhaps the "roll more dice for more difficulty" mechanic should be done away with entirely, in favor of stat penalties.


Stat penalties, on the other hand, keep the familiar 3d bell curve the same and move its center point. Much less predictable.
It also makes the game more portable if you have a smaller set of dice.
On the other hand throwing more dice just 'feels' more impressive.
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Old 01-05-2018, 02:26 PM   #93
bookworm562
 
Join Date: Jan 2018
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jackson View Post
I wonder if perhaps the "roll more dice for more difficulty" mechanic should be done away with entirely, in favor of stat penalties.

When you roll 4 dice the result is very often going to be within a few points of 14.

When you roll 5d, the significant majority of results will be from 16 to 19. The bell curve gets way steeper and most uncertainty is lost. Larger numbers of dice are more predictable yet.

Stat penalties, on the other hand, keep the familiar 3d bell curve the same and move its center point. Much less predictable.
I always approached the "swinginess" of luck and the impact on the game with trepidation. It made for great howls of jubilation and misery. If you're playing an ongoing game, eventually the luck runs cold and you have difficulties. Having that averaging and more predictability might cause people to adjust their character choices, especially to flatten out the peaks and valleys of chance. I think that having both methods gives a lot of flexibility.

As an aside, people seem to be willing to accept a d20 roll as an acceptable distribution. I always loved the bell curve of 3d6 and miss it when playing other games.
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Old 01-05-2018, 02:28 PM   #94
larsdangly
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jackson View Post
I wonder if perhaps the "roll more dice for more difficulty" mechanic should be done away with entirely, in favor of stat penalties.

When you roll 4 dice the result is very often going to be within a few points of 14.

When you roll 5d, the significant majority of results will be from 16 to 19. The bell curve gets way steeper and most uncertainty is lost. Larger numbers of dice are more predictable yet.

Stat penalties, on the other hand, keep the familiar 3d bell curve the same and move its center point. Much less predictable.
That is a good point. Mean reversion starts to creep in more and more strongly with the addition of every die. Conversely, the 3d distribution is not that much flatter than 3 or 5: A 14 stat might seem only modestly higher than the 10-12 range we consider typical, but has a 90 % chance of success at a 3d roll under. I suppose this amounts to a question of taste. My experience is that the 'dice math' is much simpler and faster than 'modifier math'. And for the extreme cases of very large modifiers acting on very high attributes (bringing them down into the normal 3d range), it call all feel very 'swingy'. As I say, a matter of taste, but the anecdotal evidence from the tables I've run says people like the dice math.
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Old 01-05-2018, 02:40 PM   #95
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Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jackson View Post
I wonder if perhaps the "roll more dice for more difficulty" mechanic should be done away with entirely, in favor of stat penalties.

When you roll 4 dice the result is very often going to be within a few points of 14.

When you roll 5d, the significant majority of results will be from 16 to 19. The bell curve gets way steeper and most uncertainty is lost. Larger numbers of dice are more predictable yet.

Stat penalties, on the other hand, keep the familiar 3d bell curve the same and move its center point. Much less predictable.
That's a valid point, statistically speaking. I'm looking over my old D6 probability tables and it's empirically true that more dice actually removes statistical uncertainty, counter-intuitive as that seems when you write it down. On the other hand, it's also a quick and easy way to define "the impossible" and still let someone take a swing at it. When they die as a result, well, you can always say; "Dude! Five dice versus your AdjDX of 8? What were you thinking? The rest of you, as you stand there at the edge of the gorge in which Ragnar the Invincible just fell to his death, look to your left and notice the path to the side, along with the sign that says 'To Black Mountain'..." ;-)
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Old 01-05-2018, 08:41 PM   #96
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Join Date: Jan 2018
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As you are looking to possibilities

TFT is a simple but elegant system - I still use mechanics and ideas from Space Gamer 23 and 24 for example - for Ship board combat, Vikings and other periods of history for skirmishing. At one time I also adapted another hex based popular system into more of a melee based game

Would strongly encourage you to give some thought to the historical aspects of melee - While Saga and some of the recent Osprey rule sets cover unit actions - Or even consider the boarding actions during Pirate encounters and the like. I believe there is a niche for individual and small unit actions at the Skirmish level.
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Old 01-05-2018, 09:24 PM   #97
tbeard1999
 
Join Date: May 2013
Location: Tyler, Texas
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Originally Posted by ak_aramis View Post
Ty Beard had a high-tech adaptation and traveller crossover.

ISTR Ty hangs out here.
I do now :) Hey Wil; how have you been?

My sci-fi rules were designed explicitly to avoid the problem of equating penetration and damage (which leads to poorly armored characters typically being killed outright when hit by a modern weapon).

Basically, high tech weapons do a certain number of dice damage. High tech armor reduces each die by the armor’s rating. But it acts normally against Melee weapons. For instance, a heavy pistol does 2D damage. Heavy ballistic cloth armor stops 3 points of damage. It will reduce each die by 3 (but only to zero). Against melee weapons, it stops 3 points of armor. Primitive thrown/missile weapons doing 1 die or less damage are treated like melee weapons. Missile/Thrown weapons are treated like guns, with bonuses treated as a separate die. So the cloth armor would affect a longbow doing 1d+2 by stopping the +2 entirely and reducing the die by three. The armor would affect an Arquebuss (3D+3 damage) by stopping the +3 entirely and reducing each die by three points.

If you don’t like subtracting from each die, an easy way to handle hi-tech armor is to treat a 6 as no damage for 1 point hi tech armor, 5-6 for 2 point high tech armor, 4-6 for 3 point high tech armor, etc.

This system also allowed melee weapons to be reasonably effective against high tech armor...if you got close enough.

I’m not sure that this system is wildly realistic, but it was a reasonable approximation for 1982. And it played very fast, once you got used to it.

Last edited by tbeard1999; 01-05-2018 at 10:08 PM.
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Old 01-05-2018, 09:27 PM   #98
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

I appreciate and agree with much of what you've written, but:

Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
1) Perhaps the most awkward element of the original game concerns modifiers to die rolls: Perhaps 2/3 to 3/4 of all such instances call for a reduction or bonus to the controlling attribute, and the remainder call for an increase or decrease in the number of dice rolled. Thus, there are two different mechanics in play, and a very large number of modifiers to keep track of. A better design would condense these into a smaller number of more coarsely 'chunky' modifiers. My advice would be to use a modification to the number of dice rolled for any modifier larger than 2, keep the attribute modifiers only for circumstances that lead to small modifiers (1 or 2), with the only exception being the armor and shield DX penalties (because the power balance in the game depends significantly on the trade off between protection and DX penalty). A very large number of modifying factors (lack of a talent; attacking from the rear; attacking in HTH; casting spells in HTH; etc.) would be reduced to a much simpler rule: add or subtract a die from the pool you roll. I would also recommend doing the same thing with ranges of thrown and missile weapons, making coarse range 'bands' where you roll 3d, 4d, 5d, etc. All of this will simplify learning, the volume of rules on the page, and speed play.
The number of die-roll modifiers is on your list of the top quibbles you have with TFT?

That sounds like a change to a non-problem that creates some new questions, reduces the grain of the system, and actually seems more complicated to me than the existing modifiers.

For example, what about auto success/failure, double and triple damage, or the chance to drop or break a weapon? Particularly for 2-die rolls, which would become common (attacking rear and downed foes) - triple on 2 and double on 3 would make those more juicy, but are we going to do 10 auto-miss, 11 drop, 12 break too? Is this "simplicity" worth it to either lose or increase those possibilities? The new players you hope to help will now more frequently need to know the six crit result ranges for each of at least 2d, 3d, and 4d rolls. That seems to me certainly harder to memorize than the existing DRMs, the most common of which are listed in Melee and don't seem that numerous to me.
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Old 01-05-2018, 09:39 PM   #99
tbeard1999
 
Join Date: May 2013
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Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

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Originally Posted by David L Pulver View Post
The main problem I found in TFT combat was that, barring the silly Unarmed Combat rules, it was "all offense." You couldn't play something like a cinematic swordfight involving light armored or unarmored fighters, because fighters only increased in attack ability (higher DX) but DX never improved your defensive ability. This is not a fault in the rules _as a game_ but it is a problem as a roleplaying game, because it makes certain common characters hard to play.

I've seen various fixes for it -
Agreed. I used various fixes until I came up with my Evade/Blitz mechanic. Basically, after movement but before combat, any figure can “Evade” by reducing his adjDX by any number of points (max was 6 I think). Any melee attackers also reduce their adjDX by the same amount. The initiative loser states what he’ll do first.

So a high DX figure could reduce his DX and make himself much harder to hit, while retaining enough DX to have a decent chance of hitting.

The Blitz mechanic worked the same way except a figure could add to his adjDX, giving the same bonus to any melee attackers. The maximum was 4 I think.

This allowed a low DX figure to increase his chance of hitting at the cost of being easier to hit.

Evading/Blitzing figures all attack in the same order they would have before the DX modifier was applied.
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Old 01-05-2018, 09:49 PM   #100
tbeard1999
 
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Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jackson View Post
I wonder if perhaps the "roll more dice for more difficulty" mechanic should be done away with entirely, in favor of stat penalties.

When you roll 4 dice the result is very often going to be within a few points of 14.

When you roll 5d, the significant majority of results will be from 16 to 19. The bell curve gets way steeper...
Yep, that was a major problem with Tunnels and Trolls. I usually ditched the additional dice mechanic and replaced it with a -3 modifier for 4d, a -6 modifier for 5d, etc.

Last edited by tbeard1999; 01-05-2018 at 10:09 PM.
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