All in all, it sort of got me thinking back to some mechanics that have come and gone. At one point, there were no "opportunity attacks" just "opportunity damage" -- no attack roll needed; I wonder if, within the paradigm of two class dice, this is still necessary. Similarly, there used to be a "reliable" property, whereby if a basic attack missed, it would deal damage equal to the missed attack roll (i.e. a number between 1 and 9.) This didn't make a lot of sense, in a paradigm where the base damage of a successful attack might be 1d4 or 1d6, so it only ended up being used on classes which would use bigger dice for damage -- effectively creating a "rich get richer" kind of situation, leading it to eventually be scrapped. I've never liked using half-damage (or half-anything, for that matter) in my designs, so this was my attempt at a simple, streamlined "damage on a miss"-mechanic. If there's anything to be learned from this experiment, it's that damage on a miss should only ever be 1d4, or maybe 1d6?
Another big mechanic that has disappeared is stuff happening when you roll doubles; for advantage and disadvantage on d20s in particular, this was meant to remove the frustration of rolling twice but only getting one result. When it comes to damage dice "treat 1 die as having rolled its maximum" on a tie is sorta just like, "expertise, again" albeit less useful the higher the tie is. It's another way to boost damage, but it's not particularly... slick, really. It's also a bit trickier to calculate the math for "roll two and take the highest, but also" than it is to just do without that extra wrinkle.
Basically, the alternate class dice mechanics I was testing boiled down to this:
- add the d4 to the attack
- add the d8 to a miss
- use the d12 in place of the attack roll
Now, to boost up the damage output, I revised the basic concept of these bonus dice from "attack OR damage" to "attack AND damage." The other universal (sort of) perk, was how a tie between these bonus dice and the attack roll (d20) interacted. In short, when you roll a d20 with any other, smaller die (or along with another d20) the chance of a tie is 5% -- this mechanic is used on the existing d8 mechanic, to produce additional crits. The idea here was that this would also be bolted onto the d4 mechanic (as well as treating that die as max value, for the damage component only.) The idea with the d12 would be that (at least) if the result was a tie and both values would be considered a hit, the attack would be treated as a crit, and (possibly) that any other ties would be treated as a hit.
Overall, I think "use the d12 roll in place of the d20 roll" is a really slick mechanic within a DC10 paradigm, assuming you don't have to bog it down with a bunch of other baggage. I'd really like to use that somewhere, and in fact it'll probably appear on one or more of the d12 classes. I also think it might be interesting if these stripped down d4/d8/d12 mechanics could be used for saving throws (instead of d6 bonuses.)
One underused mechanic that I brought up ages ago is using things like "surge value" or "current number of reserves" as hard-number modifiers for class mechanics. In particular, one thing I thought of lately was using the max value of 1d8 or 2d4 (such as from its use as a surge value) as a replacement target number. Changing the DC from 10 to 8 would effectively boost the hit chance on an unmodified d20 by 10% -- and would also provide some neat interactions with the tying mechanic of the d8 bonus, since that die could effectively cover the entire "miss" range that way. I haven't incorporated this in any classes previously, but there may be some implementation of it for the unfinished classes -- I may even go back and relook at some of the others, particularly in cases where 1d8/2d4 is paired with one of the 'striker dice' (d6 or d10.)
One of the main mechanics in earlier drafts was "trade-offs" which... apparently some people thought was a misnomer? Essentially, it was a double roll, whereby you'd use one roll as a bonus and the other as a penalty; apparently, this does not describe a trade-off, but whatever. This worked a lot better in the paradigm of a single class die; nowadays when it is used in the text, which die to use for the double roll has to be specified every time, rather than just saying "using your class die." It's a bit tedious.
As I've said before, I really like the "percentile as adv/disadv" for its ergonomic qualities; it's also handy because a tie on 2d10 ends up being a 10% possibility. I've combined this mechanic with a d6 roll for both the (post-d20) skill mechanics in TNP, as well as the monster roll mechanic. The other thing with d10s is that expertise increases the chance of a 10 (i.e. succeeding at a DC10) by 10% as well. Hopefully, this kind of illustrates why I think this mechanic has some potential, if there is to be a "next next project."
---
Check back for the next post on September 20th!
No comments:
Post a Comment