Contests, Opposed Rolls, and Tasks -- Feedback, Please?

[zot]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

Re. the opposed roll mechanic, I mentioned on another thread and will re-iterate here that I think the best version of this I've seen is Pendragon's opposed roll system. Briefly, when two sides face off, each rolls vs. their task number (e.g., in the case of TFT, a relevant stat plus or minus modifiers). If one side succeeds and the other fails, or if both fail the outcome is pretty obvious. If both succeed, the highest succeeding roll 'wins', but the lower succeeding roll generally benefits from some mitigating factor as reward for having succeeded (e.g., in combat their shield protects significantly against damage). This could be pasted in as-is with TFT.

I totally agree, which is why I linked to your post post about that a couple messages back :). The Dark City mechanic is just like Pendragon's except that it lets players roll as many dice as they want and it doesn't reward a player who beat their number but got a lower roll -- you could still add that.

Additionally, Skarg's idea of rolling against 10 fits perfectly as a "placeholder attribute" if you're doing a non-attribute roll. It works in both systems and also in Steve's system.

Both of these mechanics are superior to my original concept (and Steve's, I think) because there's no subtraction needed, unless you reward the loser, in which case that player is actually rewarded for subtracting. And so much of role playing games is about the reward...