All posts by Charles Smith

Randomness Mechanics are the core of most (but not all) Tabletop RPG systems. Usually this takes forms of dice. But why? Why do we have these randomness mechanics inbuilt into these games? Well there are a few reasons, beyond the normal reasons for RNG found in video games or such.

Its to create the lowest level meta tension and release cycle. When you role a die, you don’t know the result but you should have at least a rough idea of what you need to roll to succeed. This creates tension. Seeing the result on the die and resolving what ever math that surrounds it, gives you the result. Whether you succeed or failure or even a bit of both, the tension is relieved.

But for Tabletop games, particularly those with Game Masters or Dungeon Masters, it also relieves them of deciding on if something succeeds or not. Unless a group is very close and very trusting of their GM, this can cause the negative kind of tension and frustration, so we need something between the GM and the players to resolve success and failure. That’s where Dice come in.

Another aspect of dice is forcing players to adapt. The term “a plan never survives contact with the enemy” is very applicable to RPGs but there are many was for a plan to go awry. There is of course how the GM uses NPCs, mistakes made by players or misinformation, but one that I believe is critical for a plan to go awry is a fun and exciting way is for the action a player tries to perform fails. Then player’s have to adapt, change course, and all hell breaks loose (sometimes literally!).

So, we have why dice are used, now for the how. RPGs uses several different dice systems dependent on a multitude of factors. Some look for simplicity, some are limitations from the time they we’re created, some are thinking about long term progression, some are more interested in creating a very dynamic system or fidelity in success and failure, some for familiarity. Going back to our concept, here are the factors I really wanted to keep as our focus.

• A System with a high Depth to Complexity ratio
• A Flexible system to allow for a variety of challenges
• A System that can keep players engaged for long periods of time
• A familiar system to the players at my table

For my players, who have played primarily Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons, a D20 systems is the most familiar. And looking beyond my own group, with the popularity of these systems, the majority of potential players would also be familiar with using and running with a d20 system and it has historic ties to D&D giving a little bit of an OSR feel.

Another potential dice could be the D6, the most common dice found around the world. Using a D6 alone however is mathematically swingy, giving only 6 results means there is little room for interesting or nuanced results and limited in modifiers used for circumstance or ability as even 1 point can be significant. That is why most systems use multiple, but this can get a little clumsy for my liking and adds an unnecessary layer of math that reduces the tension of any given role. A D20 by contrast gives a good idea whether you succeed straight away.

D100 systems are not as bad for this either. As, in most cases, you role 2d10 with one for tens and one for units, just looking at the 10s gives you that rough idea of success. The issues with D100 systems is they are clunky to explain off the bat. If people are not familiar with them already, they can be confusing to get your head around to start off with. While around half of my players have played games such as Call of Cthulhu before, some haven’t, so this may become a problem at my table. Another issue with the D100 system is its raw width of possibilities. In an average gaming session, are you going to need 100 different possibilities. Not really. The difference between a 72 and 73 is not really disenable to most players and again makes modifying rolls tricky without what seems like major steps.

With all this, I believe that using a D20 system is probably the best for Yorktown. This is mainly due to Familiarity but is historic ties to D&D and its immediate result nature are also big plusses, and with the explosion of D&D within the last decade the worries of limited playing audience having access to D20s is less relevant. Next, the Character Outline and Yorktown has innovated on a key concept from the very start of the hobby: the Class.

This is where the project originally started back in February 2020. Initially I was going to simply homebrew a few aspects of Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition (from now referred to as 5e for simplicity) and leave it at that, but as I previously explained, the more I was making alterations, the more I felt starting from the core would have been better. Well, this is where all that started, the Advantage system.

5e’s mechanic of advantage and disadvantage is, like the rest of its mechanics, elegant yet lacking depth for my tastes. There are simply two conditions: has advantage and has disadvantage; which can either be true or false. This leaves any given roll to have the following results

Advantage	Doesn’t have Disadvantage	Has Disadvantage
Doesn’t have Advantage	Roll Normally	Roll two dice, take the lower result
Has Advantage	Roll two dice, taking the higher result	Roll Normally

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While this mechanic is very easy to play with, it lacks fidelity for nuance. Advantage doesn’t allow for the stacking of bonuses, for instance when a Barbarian rages there is little point in the Druid casting Bull Strength on them as the Barbarian already has Advantage on Strength Checks.

Spells are where this is really shown. Almost every spell has to be heavily limited in scope to allow higher levelled spells to be powerful enough to matter. Even then, a spell such as Foresight, a top level spell, which gives a blanket advantage is often overlooked because it is so easy to gain advantage that you need in any moment as well as it being negated by any way to gain disadvantage. 5e has found ways around this, such as the Bless and Bane spells which add or subtracts a four sided dice (d4) to the roll rather than giving advantage. This is less powerful that advantage mathematically but still gains a tangible benefit to the player who uses it.

Pros	Cons
Quick and easy to give out as GM	Lacks Fidelity for more complex scenarios
Easy for Players to understand	Limits the balancing of Abilities
Low Complexity	Low Depth
	Very powerful bonuses limits how often they are used

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So, what do other systems do. Well, first I went to Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 as well as Pathfinder’s 1^st Edition. These two systems are very, very similar so I am going to for the most part use them together, generally referring to them as Pathfinder or P1. Pathfinder uses a different mechanic as it uses a circumstance bonus of a modifier to adjust game rolls in either direction. With P1’s system, you can only take the highest of any given type of bonus or penalty.

As an example, If a Bard wants to persuade a tavern keeper to tell them about the spooky tower in the distance, and makes a persuasive argument, a Dungeon Master may give him a +2 circumstance bonus. Yet if the drunken fighter in the background is trashing the place, he might get a -5 circumstance bonus. This allows for a DM to craft with great fidelity, yet can be feel quite clunky. This makes it not used as often as I would like, to have in my session.

Pros	Cons
High Fidelity for DM to prescribe for any situation	DMs forget to give Circumstance bonuses as its not standardised
Simple Addition to the game	High Complexity

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Then, I started looking outside of Dungeons and Dragon’s related RPGs. The first I came across was Call of Cthulhu 7^th Edition. This is a d100 system, so any mechanics here are related to two rolls of a 10 sided dice (d10) each representing a different digit. It also varies in the way it handles difficulty class (or what number you have to roll to succeed in what your attempting). In D&D and Pathfinder, you roll a twenty sided die (d20) and add a modifier based on you skill with the Game Master deciding on a number which the player has to reach to succeed on a check, Call of Cthulhu the number you need to roll is decided by you skill, with preset additional difficulties of Hard (rolling under half the number given), or Extreme (rolling under a fifth the number given). While I like this mechanic for the otherworldly horror style of Call of Cthulhu, I prefer to keep the core dice mechanics around the d20 which Dungeons and Dragons use (more in a later post). But there advantage mechanic is different.

For advantage Call of Cthulhu gives you an extra die that can replace the first digit. This increase the chances of rolling under the number you need. Unfortunately this system really only works for this system and translating it to a d20 system leads to 5e’s mechanic. So what kind of mechanic could satisfy the balance between two mechanics I had with e2 and P1.

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The idea was to take the Bless/Bane idea of adding a die and run with it. This was a tangible bonus that was clear to the player, and something that can be scaled. This comes from the standardised dice sets. Standard polyhedral dice sets generally come with 7 dice: a four, six, eight, ten, twelve, twenty and percentile (a ten sided dice with numbers ranging from 00 to 90 to be used to roll between 1 and 100). As the d20 was going to be the core ability dice, we could uses the others to create a scaling bonus. Initially, between me and Chris, we believed 3 states a Minor Advantage, Moderate Advantage and Major Advantage would give us the flexibility we desired. But after a bit of testing and developing the system further, we moved to use all 5 other dice on the following scale.

Slight Advantage	Minor Advantage	Moderate Advantage	Significant Advantage	Major Advantage
+1d4	+1d6	+1d8	+1d10	+1d12

This mechanic allows for enough fidelity of to add depth, but also standardises terminology thus reducing the complexity at the table. But this system does have increased complexity around different areas. First of all is stacking. The concept we came up with allows for stacking, in that having two of the same level advantage increase the level of advantage. For instance, if you gain a second Slight Advantage, your advantage becomes a Minor Advantage. This does mean players will have to track status effects and circumstances more closely, but this is the cost of any system that stacks bonuses, and this is worth its additional complexity in depth for what I am aiming for.

Additionally, there is the element of randomness to consider. As we are adding additional dice to the equation, this makes it harder for players to gauge their chances of success. This is not always a bad thing, in my experience understanding this too much can lead to players down sub-fun routes to be optimal. But having too much obscurement of their chances could lead to over hesitation and a general slow down in game speed. This is something I need to test and gauge during playtesting. Another element is that the nature of this random system is presented in a different way to the way it actual plays. The way it is presented, its linear. Having a Major Advantage sounds like you will get a greater bonus that a Minor Advantage, but this is not necessarily the case. As seen above, the biggest difference is going from No advantage to slight, as players will gain a minimum of a +1 bonus on all checks. This again, needs playtesting currently, but I hope this won’t be as big an issue right now. The system should still encourage players to stack modifiers but also makes sure it doesn’t get out of hand such as it can in P1.

Next up is core dice mechanics and how we have decided to combat the Modifier race.