Updated Mechanics: Double Rolls, Advantage, Disadvantage (2023)

In previous iterations of the designs, advantage and disadvantage were nested under the idea of "double rolls" -- which seems reasonable enough, given that in those instances, you're rolling the same die twice. One of the added mechanics that TNP was using pertains to what would happen if you rolled doubles (i.e. a tie) on a double roll; specifically in the 2018 draft, "if a double roll results in a tie, you can redo the roll, or treat one of the dice as having rolled its maximum value."

Generally speaking, the reason for adding in this rule was because you always feel kind of robbed when advantage turns up the same result on both dice. Since disadvantage would always use the lower result, this added rule didn't impact the result of a tie with disadvantage, unless you chose to reroll.

Since the designs are moving more towards the "2dX" expression (rather than describing those as being some sort of double roll) as well as moving towards class dice bonuses and away from advantage, things have been reworked in the latest designs.

Specifically, advantage is only going to be applicable to certain types of rolls:

• Initiative Checks (d20)
• Skill Checks (d10)
• Base Damage (class dice)
• Initiative Bonus (class dice)

Now, since the class dice expressions mentioned here can use 1dX or 2dX, in order to have advantage work as a generic bonus that can be applied to these rolls, the old double roll mechanic has been broken down into its composite parts. Essentially, when advantage is applied to a 2dX expression, the "treat one of the dice as having rolled its maximum value"-rule is used, on a tie. Part of the rationale for doing it this way is that, interestingly enough, 2d4 with advantage and 1d8 with mastery produce the same average result as each other (about 5.375) as do 2d6 with advantage and 1d12 with mastery (about 7.42). This is potentially very helpful in ensuring that base damage expressions (as well as initiative bonuses) remain reasonably balanced with each other.

The idea with allowing advantage to be applied to initiative bonuses was meant to create another little piece of design space to work with, in terms of class features. With advantage on initative checks being more of a specific, situational bonus (as mentioned in the previous post) I didn't want to have class features tinker with the checks themselves, too much.

In order to streamline things (and make some of the calcuations a bit simpler) the option to reroll on ties has been removed. Also, as a general rule, disadvantage will override advantage; this means that if both would apply to a roll, only disadvantage is applied. This makes sense in the context of skill checks in particular, where training with a skill gives you advantage, but debilities to skills are intended to give you disadvantage -- whether you have training or not.

To avoid any further confusion with the 2dX mechanics, there is no applying disadvantage to base damage or to initiative bonus, within the new designs; generally speaking, disdvantage will only be applied to:

• Attack Rolls (d20)
• Saving Throws (d20)
• Initiative Checks (d20)
• Skill Checks (d10)

Generic double-rolls do still exist within the mechanics, and always use the mechanic for ties. This is typically utilized where a specific number range is meant to be produced. For example, the Sage's magic missile ability targets a number of enemies equal to the stacked value of the double roll (effectively, 2d4 number of targets, taking into account the mechanic for ties.) and each missile deals damage equal to the lower of the two double-rolled dice (i.e "lowest 1 of 2d4") The result is that the number of targets will be from 3 to 8 (skewed towards the average of 5.375) and the damage of each missile will be from 1 to 4 (skewed towards the average of 1.88).

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A fairly brief topic for today, but I figured it was one worth touching on.
Hopefully I can get us back on schedule going forward; next post is planned for April 5th.