Powers vs. Power Strike: Fishing for Crits (2025)

I'm sure I've mentioned it before but let's examine the difference in ethos between 4e and Essentials a little bit.

With an attack power in 4e, generally you declare that you're using it, then the button gets pushed, and you roll dice to determine if you hit. This means that (hit or miss) the power is expended, assuming it is a Daily or Encounter power. In Essentials, the Fighter class instead functioned off of confirming a hit with a melee basic attack; after the hit was confirmed, they would then push the Power Strike button (an encounter power) to deal additional damage. (The Paladin in Essentials got a similar mechanic, and the Scout subclass for Ranger also got access to Power Strike.)

What this meant was that you never had to "waste" your encounter powers, on a miss. It also meant that you could choose to use it only when you scored a critical hit, thus maximizing the damage effectiveness even further. It's also worth mentioning that since attacks like Charge or opportunity attacks also functioned off of melee basic attacks in 4e, buffing such attacks with Power Strike was also possible. In the 2014 version of 5e, this is also true of the Paladin's Divine Smite ability, because it is cued off of scoring a hit with a melee weapon -- so this could be done with each attack made on your turn, in addition to opportunity attacks (as long as you have the spell slots to burn.) Similarly, the Battle Master in 5e keys its maneuvers off of scoring a hit first, and then expending superiority dice after.

So, how will this work for the TNP sequel mechanics?

Well, the ethos of "2d6 + pool" implies that all of the dice will be in the pool, before the roll is made. This means that we're going to be declaring which power we're using, first -- much like in 4e. However, since adding dice to the pool increases our chances of hitting (while also increasing damage) we end up getting a benefit similar to the "Power Strike"-style of mechanic, but without the two-stage confirmation system being applied to the roll.

This begs the question of whether there should be a mechanic for critical hits, in the sequel. If we take 1/20 as our baseline (5%), then saying "11 or 12 on 2d6" would give us a 2/36 (or 1/18) crit rate, which is pretty comparable. However, we need to keep in mind that the assumption is that the attacker will always be rolling at least 3 dice; scoring at least an 11 on "highest 2 of 3d6" already boosts that to almost 1/5 -- whereas a 12 is only 7.41%

An interesting quirk of the pool system is that damage potential also increases hit potential. This also means that as your crit chance goes up, your crit damage is going up; rolling 5d6 gives almost a 1/5 chance of scoring a 12 on the attack roll, but having 3 dice of crit damage is also going to do a lot more than only having 1 die (particularly if crits are handled by say, using the rolled damage but also adding the dice's maximum value, as in TNP.)

A third thing I've been thinking about is whether there should be a flat number of "daily" power uses, or whether this should be tied to attributes in some way. In previous RPG designs that I've done, I had encounter and daily resources keyed off of stats, so the idea of doing it that way is not completely foreign to me. I was thinking of it in terms of utilization, with my classic example being the Paladin. You're going to want STR for damage, and CHA as your pool stat... but then what? We've got at least 3 other attributes to account for, and we don't want to end up with the default "dump everything into AGIL because it's initiative."

So do we make something like INT the "per day" stat (for Paladin, at least?) that governs the number of uses of your "dice pool" stat? This would necessitate your INT and CHA stats both always being at least a +1, which ties into the idea I had presented previously that your class might prescribe which of your attributes has to be a +0. This also (aside from the obvious) highlights that a "flat 10" number of points to be spread across 5 attributes would probably be a little high, if the assumption was that the Paladin only really needs meaningful numbers in 2 of those stats... particularly if the max in any stat is expected to be +3 and not +4. I do like the idea of a +4/+3/+2/+1/+0 as the "standard array" for a loadout with 5 attributes, so maybe that just solidifies it.

Now, what this does is create some interesting choices. Do you want to "pool" harder, but less often? Do you want to do it weaker, but more often? Do you want to just swing your sword harder (knowing that you're getting double your stat as damage, on a two-handed weapon) and let the pool just be a nice cherry on top, once or twice a day? Naturally, there will be ways to optimize it, but then we also have to think of how our attribute choices impact skills, and not just combat -- which I think would tend towards a heavier focus on CHA, for our Paladin. From a design perspective, we also should give some consideration to, "if our pool button can only get pushed X times per day, then how should that number line up with our crit math?" while keeping in mind the fact that pushing the button is also what increases those odds.

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Bit of a broad discussion in today's post, but hopefully the ideas flow together well enough for the readers out there.

November's scheduling is a little bit in flux, but I would expect the next post to be up by November 13th, so check back then!

Building out "2d6 + pool" and other Sequel stuff (2025)

Let's talk sequel mechanics.

Say you're making an unarmed strike. The basic idea would be that you would roll 2d6 vs. the defender also rolling 2d6. On a success, you would deal damage equal to your STR "modifier" -- so, if that number is +1, it would be 1 damage, or 3 damage if the modifier is +3. Now, add onto that, using a proper/proficient weapon for your character would add 1d6 to the pool for this attack; what this means is that you would instead roll 3d6, selecting 2 dice for the attack result and 1 die for the damage result (to be added to the STR mod.) The defender would then roll their 2d6, after attack dice have been assigned; if you're having flashbacks to the RISK episode of Undergrads, you're not alone.

Now, I received some specific advice (from the people who brought you Strike!) that, "a 2/3rds accuracy [means] If you attack 4 times, you'll miss 3 or 4 of them 1/9th of the time." In other words, without constant luck-mitigation mechanics, 66(ish)% hit rate means that someone will have a very boring time in combat, for 1 out of every 9 combats. As such, I've decided to tune the hit chance for the TNP sequel slightly up, from this number. By setting a baseline of 3d6 vs. 2d6 (and where attacker succeeds on a tie) we achieve a 72.42% hit rate, if the calculation is assuming that the attacker simply takes the 2 highest dice every time (which is about the easiest way I know how to calculate it, in anydice.) Now, that's not to say that we couldn't tinker with this, by adding modifiers to the defense; I just felt it would be easiest on the DM to not have to assume they will always be adding something to the defense roll, which they would need to look up or otherwise memorize.

The other thing we need to assume is that the attacker will regularly be adding dice to the pool, either via encounter/daily type powers or "teamwork bonuses" (as I tend to refer to them) such as flanking, Bless spells, debuffs to enemies, etc. As such, the DM doesn't necessarily have to feel bad if they do beef up enemies defenses a little bit, since the party should have tools to overcome them mathematically.

The other side of the coin is, if enemies are assumed to not have access to the attack-buffing utility that the players have, to what extent should the players' "armor class" get buffed beyond a simple 2d6 roll? At first glance (with flat bonuses being such a potentially big shift in the math) it seems like only the heaviest armored PCs would get even a +1 bonus... possibly a +2? But then this bends back around to the question of, "if a Monk doesn't cast spells, do we let them use their WIS stat as a bonus to AC?" Would that potentially make them the hardest character class to hit? The knock-on problem with that is the presupposition that in the sequel, ALL characters have 10 HP (maybe letting them add their STR, since there are no plans for a Constitution attribute.) I can say with a high degree of certainty, that a character with 2d6+3 AC and only 10 HP is a lot more unkillable than one with 2d6+1 AC and 13 HP.

Now, bringing things back to the example from the start of this post, the conundrum I run into is, "well if adding a die to a melee attack is dependent upon using a weapon," then how do we make this math work, with spells? The example keeps breaking down for "basic attacks" whenever I come back around to applying these mechanics to spells. Do we just say, "actually, screw it, spells are just a 3d6 pool by default, for no reason" or should this be keyed to something like lowest mental stat? It almost feels like (particularly assuming 2 mental stats, and not 3) that we'll end up with the lower stat applying to basic attacks, and the higher stat effectively being the "dice pool stat" for encounter/daily powers.

If the intention is that the plinking stat always needs to be a +1, that further inclines the designs towards having 3 mental stats rather than just 2 -- otherwise you'd naturally expect all spellcasters to put a +2 in one spellcasting stat, and a +3 in the other. This might be workable, after all, so maybe you just say "spellcasters have a dice pool advantage over martials, but they don't get to add their modifier to damage rolls," or something. This has a very 5e vibe to it, where spells generally only deal dice damage, with no modifiers. Also, having to rig the math so that "basic spell attack bonus" is always your +1 stat, and can never be higher...? It ends up feeling gamey and arbitrary -- one of those moments when you can look at the game and all you see is the design spreadsheet, instead of the immersion you should feel, when playing.

The problem with saying "X mental stat does at-will damage, Y mental stat does encounter/daily damage" is you end up with the problem of every spellcaster putting a +2 in X and a +3 in Y -- assuming they all get at-will spells... This would mean things potentially get to be very "paint by numbers." This creates a potentially interesting design space, though. To wit, in 2014 D&D (5e), the "half-caster" classes expressly don't get cantrips (i.e. at-will spells) so it's not as if the idea of siloing off these sorts of mechanics is particularly new. There's also the possibility of say, having the Cleric/Paladin type class use only weapons for attacks, and their spells are only used to heal rather than do damage. This would beg the question of, "OK, so is every Cleric and every Paladin just going to max STR, and then one puts WIS as their 2nd stat but the other makes it CHA" and there's no real difference? Or do you let the Cleric have cantrips, so that they at least put a +2 in both/all mental stats? Ultimately part of the question is how much utility there is to be gained, by hanging the mechanics for both classes off of one chassis in the first place. (TNP succeeds at this by using class dice; regardless of subclass, you're using the same dice, so the mechanics will at least have that much in common.) Maybe the distinction can be as simple as all Cleric healing can be done at range while all Paladin healing must be done from melee/touch distances. 

It seems more and more obvious that the applications of mental stats in spellcasting will be class and/or subclass specific; if there is to be a difference between a Wizard and a Sorcerer, the obvious one would be that the offensive punch would come from INT and CHA, respectively, for those classes. Likewise, it might be the case that a Warlock uses CHA offensively but a Paladin uses CHA defensively. You can also build in some exceptions-based design, like maybe "Warlocks always use CHA for offensive spellcasting [even if it isn't their lowest mental stat, i.e. for at-will spells]" with the tradeoff being that they don't get per-day spells, as such -- again, this is sort of the conceit of the Warlock in any D&D edition besides 4th, but it carries a decidedly more 5e vibe to it.

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Harkening back to the Eldritch Horror boardgame, one of the things that I dislike about it mechanically is that it is such a mishmash of mechanics. Normally you succeed on a 5 or 6, but Bless increases that to succeeding on a 4, whereas Bane reduces that to only succeeding on a 6. The game also has mechanics that let you reroll one of the dice in your pool, but also to add dice to the pool after the fact. In my opinion, it could benefit from picking one of these mechanics and sticking to it -- as you might guess, my preference would be to just expand the dice pool. A similar train of thought came up with regards to the sequel mechanics; if a mechanic allows for a bigger pool of dice for the damage... should we simply say, "You can also use the attack roll dice as damage roll dice [as is possible with some of the class dice bonuses, in TNP]"? Or should the attack dice always be excluded from the damage roll, but the dice pool should be made even bigger?

If the attack dice are allowed to be used as damage, this would incentivize putting the highest possible rolls towards the attack -- which removes some of the gambling aspects of using an "average" attack roll, to try and boost the damage roll higher. That is to say, it essentially works against the spirit of what the dice pool mechanic is trying to do, so my instinct would be to simply expand the pool instead. This kind of tilted me towards using the "attack as damage" mechanic sparingly, if at all -- such as, maybe only having it apply to daily powers. This mechanic would, however, interact in interesting ways with a "power attack" mechanic, which might stipulate having to use your lowest die from the pool as one of your attack dice, in exchange for adding 1 die (or more) to the pool; it sort of brings that gambling aspect back to the table.

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A fairly long post today, albeit mostly speculative. Hopefully this will bring some results in the near future, and I can start to narrow down the designs and bring things into sharper focus.
Next post is planned for September 30th, so check back then!

Leveraging Synergies (2025)

A recent topic of discussion on the TNP Discord was how D&D 2024 compares to TNP, in terms of what it's doing with skills.

In 5e, you have a proficiency bonus that scales up as you level (starting at +2) and generally speaking, you get proficiency with 4 skills -- 2 from your class, and 2 from your background. Certain features (such as Jack of All Trades, for the Bard class) let you add half of this bonus to your skill checks; other features allow you to add double this bonus, a mechanic which is typically referred to as "expertise." Barring these outliers, your proficiency bonus will scale up to +6 and your ability mods will cap out at +5; a +11 modifier effectively means a 10% success rate against a DC30 (i.e. only a d20 roll of 19 or 20 would succeed.) Most DCs in 5th Edition are done in increments of 5, with each increment representing a 25% swing in difficulty; with advantage, a d20 roll with no modifiers vs. a DC10 is equivalent to about a +5 bonus, or about 25% (coincidentally).

As you can probably guess, this leaves 5e with a fairly narrow band of DCs it can meaningfully use. So with the 2024 rules, they've tried to crowbar in advantage, if/when you can reasonably argue to the DM that proficiency bonuses from a skill/tool/etc. would overlap for a given action; instead of stacking/doubling these proficiency bonuses, the DM is instead encouraged to grant advantage on the check. The problem is that not all skills have a tool which makes an obvious pairing with them, causing a difference in effective DC of potentially 25% (the difference between advantage vs. a straight roll.) In short, this is an afterthought, and that's why it's mechanically/mathematically unsound.

If we go back to 3.5, there was a system for "skill synergies" whereby 5 ranks in a given skill granted a +2 bonus to a related skill. Even this was a very "pick & choose" kind of affair, where it was not universally applied. By contrast to what 3.5/5e D&D are trying to do, both TNP systems have skill synergies built into their baseline assumptions. Every "core" skill falls under an Attribute and a Skillset; what this means is that adding bonuses to a skill always increases the bonuses to the other skills that are related to it.

For example, in 3.5 having 5 ranks in Bluff gives you a +2 to Diplomacy and Sleight of Hand checks. In TNP, if you increase your Subtlety skillset, that would increase both your Bluff and Sleight of Hand skills; likewise, increasing your CHA attribute would increase both your Bluff and Persuasion skills. Because all core skills fit somewhere on the grid, this built-in system for synergy works across all core skills; the skillsets effectively serve as another vector (in addition to attributes) by which thematically-linked skills are able to be synergized. In TNP, you can gain training and/or a bonus rank in either the attribute or the skillset for a given skill; instances of overlapping training do not stack, but they do provide the "mastery" bonus to such skills. In the sequel, each bonus to a given skill's attribute or skillset would add an additional d6 to the pool for that type of skill check.

Now, admittedly, where this idea falls short in the TNP systems is with knowledge skills; although they are grouped by power source (and only half are unique to a given power source) power sources are not given a "score" nor do knowledge skills have "skillsets" or any other such 2nd vector to group them together. In TNP this is somewhat remedied by additional ranks (beyond 3rd) being more readily available, for knowledge skills. As for the sequel mechanics, those details are still being worked out.

I think a strength of the 2d6 ethos for the sequel is that every die you add into the pool has the potential to matter. One complaint I've heard about older versions of the World of Darkness system is that it's still all down to random chance; you roll X number of d10s, and need a 10 to show up, in order to succeed. Likewise, when I play Call of Cthulhu-based boardgames, you end up needing a 5 or a 6 on a d6 in order to succeed; if you fail, you spend a token and gamble again. In both cases, your previous failures don't get you any closer to success. (Worth mentioning here, most newer versions of Axis & Allies, including some 3rd-party off-shoots, allow for previously-failed technology rolls or "tech tokens" to accrue towards eventual success at such research.) With the sequel mechanics, the fact that you are always adding 2 dice together, means that you avoid the pitfalls of the WoD and CoC systems, because low rolls are still potentially useful and therefore worth something. The other thing is that having 2d6 as the DC provides some variability in which results will succeed, as well; obviously, high rolls always have a better chance at success, but nothing is out of the realm of possibility in an "opposed roll" paradigm.

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Running a few hours behind schedule, but managed to stay caught up for August.
Look for the next post around September 10th.

Sequel Mechanics: Initiative (2025)

I know I had said previously that I would be interested in trying to make initiative checks back into a form of skill check, but I've since realized that's a bad idea.

The whole point with a d20 initiative roll is to actually provide some dispersion of the numbers, so there's less worrying about tie-breaking, or everyone's numbers being bunched up together. If you're doing a d6 pool and taking the highest 2, you're actually getting the opposite effect; similarly, this is why TNP still uses a d20 initiative roll, rather than a d10+d6 skill check.

Since the default mechanic for most rolls in the sequel will be some variation on 2d6, my first intuition is to have it so that initiative checks start with 2d6, and then add 1d6 "per plus" of Agility, to the pool. So a character with a +3 Agility would roll 5 dice, and the total of all of those 5 dice would be their initiative count. I feel like this would be a good compromise, providing the desired variance while also giving a tangible benefit to having a higher attribute.

The interesting thing with that idea, is you could then use the attribute as a tie-breaker if needed. For example, if someone with a +1 Agility rolls 18 on 3d6, and someone with a +3 Agility rolls 18 on 5d6, then the person with the +3 would win on the tie-breaker. It also makes my brain tingle a little bit, because instead of everyone randomly rolling a number between 1-20 and slapping a modifier on it, your attribute effectively determines the ceiling for how well you could possibly roll; a +0 would cap out at 12, while a +3 would cap out at 30.

Initiative sort of naturally avoids the pitfalls of needing a "release valve" for excessive dice, since the number can basically go infinitely higher. This makes it easy to have any initiative bonuses just add dice to the pool, rather than use something like advantage on a d20 roll, for example. Likewise, with 2d6 as the minimum roll, it's easy enough to have a -1 dice pool penalty as a baseline mechanic.

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Another relatively short post for today, since it's a pretty quick topic.
In the background, I'm still working out ways to get the other mechanics ironed out w/r/t weapon dice and spells and attributes and such.

Next post will hopefully be on or before June 17th, with one more post before the July break.

The Death of the DC10? (2025)

Without completely rehashing the conversations that came to light on Discord, I'll summarize some of the key points.

Essentially, the DC10 is one of those elements that the current sequel design retains from TNP; an argument could be made that it's vestigial, or that it's one of those "ship of Theseus" situations -- but on the other hand, you have to start somewhere. Where it seems to be at loggerheads is in the particularly sequel-ish notion of adding flat modifiers into the mix. To wit (and, in short) if the assumption is that your combat rolls will always add your highest stat (i.e. a +2) then the DC isn't really 10, it's more like it's actually an 8.

So, one direction in which that conversation forks off is, how do we incentivize variety in combat modifiers? Well, essentially you would have to structure a class' basic features such that the +2 was always (or at least, often) adding dice to the pool. The math tells us that a +1 increase in attack is about equal to adding one more d6 to the pool, so the bigger incentive is going to be adding the die, because it also adds a d6 of damage (and not just +1 damage.) Alright, but since our acceptable range of modifiers is already so limited (+0/+1/+2) how do you iterate that idea over, say, 6 different classes? This idea also solidifies the notion that the attribute array would have to be limited to a single +2 -- otherwise, you'd put a +2 into your attack stat, and a +2 into your "dice pool" stat, because that's a no-brainer.

Now, this sounds like a nitpick, but part of the reason I chose DC10 in the first place is because of the ergonomics of it; 10 is the first double-digit number, it's also ingrained in 10-fingered humans (which is likely the reason the base-10 number system exists.) But as I've said before on the blog, where it really came from was if you strip away your +3 attribute and +2 proficiency when trying to hit an AC15, the math of +0 vs. AC10 is exactly the same. But that's talking about d20 math, and the sequel isn't in that paradigm at all, anymore.

So the first idea that occurred to me was to strip out the modifiers; to keep the math the same, we'd have to arrive at a DC8 -- at least for a basic combat roll involving 3d6. Well, 5 is a nice starting point (for the reasons mentioned previously) and adding the number of dice to that gives you 8. So maybe the DC is "5 + [number of dice]" instead of just a flat 8. What I quickly found with that is the DC escalates slightly, for almost no meaningful change in hit-chance; this felt like it was adding overhead to the mechanics with no subsequent added functionality.

Building off of that, the next idea that popped into my head was, "what if the DC was [number of dice] * 2?"

What this would functionally do is lower the DC of the 'basic attack' down to 6, giving a much higher hit chance and reliable damage output; it also creates a cap where having 6 dice in the pool bestows steep diminishing returns, and 7 pushes the DC into impossible territory (i.e. 2d6 cannot equal more than 12, and 7 dice would create a DC of 14.)

With a little help from the people who brought you Strike! RPG, I was able to get a very precise calculation as to what the math would look like on this (rather that just ball-parking it, with my limited mathematical knowledge.) Using the two lowest possible dice (which still produce a hit) for the attack roll, and the remaining dice for damage, we get:

3d6 DPR = 3.58
4d6 DPR = 5.40
5d6 DPR = 5.93
6d6 DPR = 3.21

The question then is, does this give us enough flexibility to build out the mechanics? Clearly, the answer is "not quite" since this would effectively cap the number of additional dice you could add to the pool at 2 or 3; the only way you could get around that is to cap the DC at something like 10 -- go figure.

The other thing we have to remind ourselves is that without using modifiers, "only 5s and 6s matter" starts to creep back in. (It genuinely makes me wonder if the Arkham Horror-type games are built around the assumption of 5s and 6s being successes, for this same kind of reason -- or it could just be a coincidence.)

And that's pretty much where I sit, at the moment -- stuck between a rock and a hard place. It seems silly to have flat modifiers that don't matter, but it seems nearly impossible to diversify those numbers, either. On the other hand, if you go back to the paradigm of "attributes only matter for skills" then we've just reinvented d20 TNP (seemingly right down to the DC10, even) -- almost like building that ship of Theseus I mentioned at the start.

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April should be a lot better for sticking to the planned schedule of 5th/15th/25th, so check back on those dates, for more!

Double or Nothing (2025)

I was giving some consideration to the skill mechanic proposed in the previous post; to wit, a baseline +0 mod would result in a straight 2d6 vs. DC10 roll. This has pretty low odds of success (1/6th) compared to the d20 baseline of 1d20-1 being about 45%

So what if we do something with rolling doubles? 5+5 and 6+6 would already make a success, but the other 4 combinations (out of the 36 possible, with 2d6) makes for an 11.11...% outcome; if you add this to the 1/6th chance, it becomes 27.77...%

Now, clearly, based on the numbers in that previous post, we probably wouldn't want to shift all of the other odds up ~11% so probably this mechanic would be limited to when you're only rolling 2d6 on a skill check.

But maybe there's something we could do, using the doubles with attack dice.

If the baseline roll is 3d6 (2 used for attack, 1 used for damage) there are 216 combinations that can result; matching pairs would exist in 36 of those (including triples) 24 of which would be combinations other than [5,5,X] or [6,6,X] ...which again results in 11.11...%

If we go back to another previous post, we laid out the attack math, where a +2 mod resulted in a 68.06% hit chance, and a +1 mod resulted in 52.31%; increasing either of these numbers by ~11% keeps us still well within acceptable hit-chance ranges, which is pretty interesting! The question would be, how do we apply this sort of bonus? A boost of this size actually pretty closely mirrors the usage of "Combat Mastery" in TNP, so it stands to reason that this bonus could apply in similar situations. (The other bonus mechanic in TNP being class dice bonuses, which the sequel mechanics would mirror/mimic by using the d6 pool mechanic.) Also worth mentioning: off the top of my head, it wouldn't change damage-roll outputs very much; only a combination like [4,4,6] would actually produce a meaningful damage boost (by allowing the 6 to be used for damage instead of attack, while still producing a hit.)

I think if the general ethos of the game's mechanics is to roll a pool of multiple dice but ultimately only use 2 of those dice to determine the result, then including something like doubles adds a fun layer to it. Obviously, once we go beyond 3d6 and start to account for a bigger dice pool, the math would get more complicated.

It also recently occurred to me that the previous post basically took the 3d6 math, and put a new slant on it. As mentioned before (when looking to other possible dice mechanics) the ranges for flat modifiers on 3d6 vs. DC10 are extremely narrow; basically only +1/+0/-1. What the previous post did instead, was basically turn the flat modifier into a die pool, using the 3rd die (i.e. 2d6+[highest 1d6, of the pool] instead of "3d6+X"). Having a two-stage skill check roll is still a little bit janky, but I think something like that was sort of inevitable, in a "d6 does everything" mechanical paradigm.

However, by adding doubles to the success pool, we actually decrease the necessity of rolling the dice pool, albeit only by that ~11%. It speeds things up a little, because results like 2+2, 3+3, and 4+4 (which would still mathematically have a chance to succeed, with a 3rd die added to them) are instead just fast-tracked to being successes, bypassing the need for that 2nd-stage of the check.

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One more post is scheduled before the end of March; to try and keep things on track, it'll likely be out by March 28th at the latest.

Reverse Engineering (2025)

I've been thinking on how to handle the skill check mechanics for the sequel, and I realized the original idea had gotten away from me, somewhat.

In TNP, the skill "check" die is a d10, and the bonus die is a d6; to mimic this in a d6 system, the obvious thing to do would seem to be replacing the d10 with 2d6. But somehow I'd gotten to a place where it had morphed into some variation on "d6 pool for everything, all the time," and it still seemed to miss the mark. Without beating a dead horse, the effective mod range is a bit limited, and the dice rolls that matter are likewise pretty limited. So I went back to the fundamental 1d10+1d6 idea.

Ok, let's say the "check" die is 2d6; anytime you make a check, you roll 2d6. Against a DC10, this gives you only a 1/6 chance of success -- so some more dice and/or mods are clearly needed. The average on 3d6 is 10.5, meaning that 3d6 vs. a DC10 is basically a coin flip. What TNP does is essentially increase the number of "bonus" dice you can roll, thus increasing the odds of rolling a high bonus/modifier to your check. We could apply this same logic to a 2d6 system; the base check is 2d6, and the bonus is the highest d6 out of a pool. If we're using the current baselines, this would be a maximum of +2 from Attributes, and probably the same for Skillsets (maybe +3?)

Using anydice, we can figure out the odds for how this works vs. a DC10:

• 2d6+1d6 = 62.50%
• 2d6+[highest 1 of 2d6] = 75.23%
• 2d6+[highest 1 of 3d6] = 81.13%
• 2d6+[highest 1 of 4d6] = 84.37%
• 2d6+[highest 1 of 5d6] = 86.35%

This actually looks really promising, because as the chance of failure drops towards that 15% threshold, the diminishing returns on further boosting a skill start to kick in. Adding the implicit assumption of a 3rd die (except in the case of a +0 mod) also gets around the problem of "only 5s and 6s matter." The problem is that this breaks the check into 2 distinct rolls, which is a bit inelegant; the base 2d6 clearly can succeed, but is unlikely to do so -- but pooling them all together completely changes the math. If the 2d6 is a 3 or less, then the bonus dice become irrelevant (because the check has no chance of success) but a result between 4 and 8 means that success is still possible -- unlike with the "dice pool only" model, where it's just... 2 out of X dice have to equal 10, so if you roll all 4s and 3s (or lower) you're just screwed.

So now that we've established that this works, the immediate question is, can we further reverse-engineer this into a combat system? As I've often said, you should either have a unified system (that usually works great for one subsystem and badly for another) or you have distinct subsystems, but both serve their purposely excellently. The conundrum of an "all d6 system" is that it's not very unified if there are still distinct mechanics for combat vs. for skill checks -- despite everything using the "same" dice. 

The current combat mechanics are based around the supposition of 3d6+mod, where 2 dice (plus a flat mod) are used for the attack roll, with the remaining die (plus the same mod, probably) being used as the damage roll. To make this work anything like the check dice... basically it would mean a significant boost to hit-chance, assuming we're sticking with a cap of +2/+2d6 modifiers (which, you can't really meaningfully go lower than that, so...)

As mentioned in the previous post, the fact of attack rolls having damage as a "release valve" for unused dice means that the attack mechanics will likely/necessarily have to be different than the skill check mechanics. The other consideration is that the "acceptable ranges" for both types of rolls are different; skills should mostly fall in the 45% (i.e. a -1 mod, in D&D terms) to 85% range, whereas attacks probably need to have 55% or 60% as a baseline, and increase to 90% or possibly 95% with teamwork and other bonuses. This all makes it hard to unify mechanics, since unified mechanics should (presumably) produces unified outcome ranges -- so if that isn't the goal, then unified mechanics likewise shouldn't be the goal. This new idea now gives us mechanics that hit both of our prescribed benchmarks; the question next is can we do anything to further simplify and/or unify these two systems, and still produce comparable outcomes?

...

Next post is due on (or about) March 15th, so check back then for more!

Stream of Consciousness [2025-02-13]

I've been out of pocket for most of the intervening time since the last post, so I haven't had much opportunity to sit down and focus on TNP or sequel stuff. (Other non-TNP stuff has caught my attention recently, though.)

Carrying on from the previous post, one question that came to mind was how to handle the Attribute mods, with regards to skill usage. For example, just because a "+2" Attribute is used as a flat modifier for combat, does that mean it has to be used as a flat modifier for skills, too? Or could that +2 mean "add 2 dice to the pool" instead? It's a little bit unintuitive and inelegant to do it that way, but in the earlier sequel designs, it was intended that the math would function in a similar fashion; specifically, attributes would be flat modifiers for combat but provide "skill rank bonuses" (i.e. add d6s to the pool) when it came to non-combat. (By extension, it was supposed that Skillsets would use a binary trained/untrained convention, for bestowing advantage on the d10 component of skill checks.)

So what would be the value in doing that? Well, basically if you have bonuses to Skillsets that don't interact with combat in any way, you can hypothetically have a bit more variance in those bonuses. In reality though, our acceptable ranges for skill checks is something like (best 2 of) 3d6+0 through 5d6+2 -- effectively meaning a maximum of a +2 Attribute modifier and a +2 Skillset bonus. If our Attributes are capped at only one being a +2, then that would mean more Skillsets could have a +2 bonus (since they'd be paired with +1 or +0 bonuses, from Attributes.) Part of the issue is that for the most part, there isn't a significant difference in the boost from going to an additional +1 flat modifier vs. an additional +1d6 into the dice pool; for skills, where the math tends to remain relatively static and not impacted by situational bonuses, this causes a bit of a lack in variety.

Does the skill check mechanic need to be kicked down to 2d6? The problem is that 2d6+2 is still a <50% success rate, so you'd probably be adding a 3rd die to the pool most of the time anyway... which feels kind of like reinventing the wheel. On the other hand, it'd potentially let Skillset modifiers go as high as +3, without breaking anything.

Honestly, if all of this navel-gazing has taught me anything, it's that using both Attributes and Skillsets for dice pool bonuses is beginning to seem like a more appealing option as time goes on. Having to work around the flat modifiers is too much of a straight-jacket, particularly if you know you're going to layer something else onto it, in addition; having both of them simply add to the pool eliminates this problem entirely. It would also open up the possibility of having a less tightly-banded range for Attribute modifiers, i.e. opening it up to having more than one +2, if nothing else.

...

We've got one more post scheduled for this month, so in order to keep roughly on schedule, that should be out by February 24th at the absolute latest. Check back then!

Sequel Musings -- Part 2: A New Paradigm (2025)

In the short intervening period since the previous post, a lot of spitballing and discussion has gone on, in the TNP Discord. Without belabouring the point too much, the combat mechanics have essentially been narrowed down to "keep 2d6," with the baseline assumption starting at rolling 3 dice; any two can be used as the attack roll (scoring a hit on a 10+) with the remaining dice used for damage.

So how does that hit-chance look, when a modifier is applied to it? (Calculated by using the highest 2 of 3d6):

• +0 = 35.65%
• +1 = 52.31%
• +2 = 68.06%
• +3 = 80.56%

From that, I would argue that we can eliminate +3 as an option for the combat math; the percentage is already too high, and the system needs to account for other bonuses. The basic idea would be that bonuses granted from class features, teamwork, etc. would add more d6s to the pool; much like TNP, extra dice not used for the attack roll would be used for extra damage -- and the attack roll would never exceed 2d6+mod.

For combat math, I think it's safe to assume that your highest modifier would always apply. It also means that on a "basic attack" the average damage roll (on a hit) would be the remainder of [2d6+2 - DC10]; if the average of 3d6 is 10.5, and at least an 8 needs to be added to the +2 in order to score a hit, that remainder ends up being 2.5 -- in which case, I would argue that it probably makes sense to also add this +2 modifier to the damage roll.

Now, moving away from combat, to the skills side of things...

If we use the TNP "skill grid" as our basis, we can rank skills by assigning a value to them, based on both their Attribute and their Skillset. If our assumption is that combat math is fueled by Attribute mods (which range from +0 to +2) then we have to shape our Skillset bonuses around that. That all being said, we don't need to give as much consideration to outside modifiers, the way that we would do with combat.

My first intuition was "Skillsets add ranks, and Attributes also add ranks," or in other words, neither adds a flat modifier, but both could add to the "d6 pool." The problem with this (as was brought to light in discussion) is that it amounts entirely to randomness, whereby you're just rolling more and more dice and hoping for some combination of 5s and 6s on two of those dice (or a 4 and a 6, obviously.) The upside is that even at "highest 2 of 6d6" the success rate is only just approaching 75% which also means that even by adding 4 additional dice to the baseline 3d6 roll, the math only then breaks the 80% mark. If the +3 modifier math was deemed too high for combat (because it reaches this 80% mark) then it stands to reason that a +2 cap for Attributes means a +1 cap for Skillsets, if these modifiers are meant to be potentially combined together. By letting one of these numbers be dice instead of a flat modifier, it gives us a bit more wiggle room for some variety. A +2 modifier added to "highest 2 of 5d6" (i.e. +2 dice to the pool) would cap out at just over 90% success rate -- which is basically the absolute ceiling of what I think would work, for skills. 

This also begs the question of, in a spread of 5 Attributes, how many +2s, +1s, and +0s should a character have? If you're able to overlap two +2 Attributes with a +2d6 bonus on two Skillsets, suddenly you're at that mathematical ceiling, for something like 1/3rd of the skills in the game. If skillfulness is meant to be spread across a party of 4 or 5, then this wouldn't make any sense. It probably stands to reason that a well-rounded party would have one character with a +2 for each of the 5 Attributes -- meaning an Attribute spread of something like +2/+1/+1/+0/+0 as the default. By extension, this would allow bonus dice from Skillsets to have a bit more flexibility, since we only need to worry about one Attribute's worth of skills ever approaching that 90% (and of those, probably/maybe only one out of 3-4 applicable, overlapping Skillsets.)

Anyway, that's a lot of talk about dice probabilities and math. The challenge once you find a dice engine that hums, is how to convert that into something that feels like the type of game you want to be playing. In essence, you back-port the mechanics onto the character classes as best you can, rather than starting from the character concept, and trying to make up mechanics that fit and work.

...

As the blog schedule goes, the next post should be up on or about February 12th, so make sure to check back then!

Sequel Musings (2025)

Perhaps it shines through in some of the posts I've made about the TNP sequel before, but the designs (such as they are, thus far) don't really have me as excited as some of the breakthroughs I experienced when working on TNP. For example, I don't like how the 'first attempt' mechanics boil down to "sometimes you use this mod, sometimes that mod, and other times no mod." Broadly speaking, I think the weapon damage die mechanics don't carry the same pop that 'class dice' do in TNP (because these mechanics don't stack, unlike TNP) even though they're meant to behave similarly. The weapon damage dice feel like a compromise, particularly when the attack math is laid bare, and there ends up being no variance in the crit bonuses.

So I'm beginning to lean in a new(ish?) direction.

I've made a post in the past, offering and evaluating some alternative "DC10" mechanics. The suggestion that made the most sense (in the paradigm of the attribute ranges extrapolated from TNP / projected into the sequel design ideas) was basically 2d6+mod, where 'advantage' would be "3d6, keep the 2 highest" and 'disadvantage' would likewise be "3d6, keep the 2 lowest."

In addition to that, I've also teased other concepts I've had in mind, for other RPGs I might want to design -- with this one in particular jumping to mind:

an ultra-lite mechanical system, that fires off of d6s only (and maybe a standard deck of 52 cards) that can easily be played on a bus, or out on a camping trip

So why do I bring this up?
I'm sure I've posited this before, but if you're going to push forward with "d6 pool" as your 'unique selling proposition' (particularly if the decision is made to shed the 'weapon damage dice' mechanics) then the next question invariably is, why keep the d20?

I keep finding myself answering that question with a question: What do you replace the d20 with?

One of the mechanics that I had used in previous RPG designs was sort of... mixing and matching attack dice and damage dice, to create "power attack" or "precise attack" mechanics. So for example, if the attack roll was 1d10 and 1d6, and the damage roll was 2d6, a "precise attack" would let you use the two highest dice out of all 4 -- ensuring you a better chance to hit, at the cost of lowering your overall/average/maximum damage. Perhaps the d6 pool could be modified to perform this sort of function, as well?

Just spit-balling here, but lets say your default mechanic is to roll 5d6, and you can use up to 2 of them as your attack roll (probably adding an attribute modifier, or similar) with any remaining d6s used as your damage roll. In a way, this sort of brings back the tradeoffs that class dice bonuses have, where you're often using a die to score a hit (or a crit) at the expense of using that die for damage. To wit, you would be trying to compile the two lowest d6 rolls possible to hit that "DC10" mark, so that your higher rolls could be preserved for damage.

This ultimately begs the question of how the d6 pool is to be bounded. If at its core, the system is relying on "2d6+mod" in order for DC10 to be at all viable, then it stands to reason that the design might have to hand-hold players towards ensuring their main attack stat is at least a +2 (assuming that such stats are used for both number of dice in the pool, and for attack modifiers... which might be messy.) Then, situational and/or "power" bonuses can ping either flat numbers or secondary stats, in order to add more dice to the pool. And, if the assumption is that the d6 pool is both your attack and your base damage (because we're not using weapon damage dice) then your floor actually needs to be +3 / 3d6 in order for this to work. That all being said, a straight 2d6+3 vs. a DC10 isn't significantly better odds than 1d20 vs. DC10 -- with the added downside that +3 is already near the ceiling of where TNP designs would imply that attribute modifiers ought to be.

Maybe you just say "screw it" and make it so that the default roll is 3d6, with any modifiers being over and above that? In that paradigm, a +2 mod might give you 5 dice total, with your attack roll being (effectively) 2d6+2, with 3d6 remaining for damage. Something about that feels "off" though, to me. Heck, maybe the attack roll needs be changed to 1d6 and the DC changed from 10 down to 5?

Anyways, I think there's something to this, but I haven't quite hit the nail on the head just yet. I already feel as though marrying the 2d6+mod ethos to the "d6 pool" idea has more going for it than... "weapon damage dice, but also d6 pool, but also d20." I'll have to give it some more thought to try and clean this up (and admittedly, I don't really know how to calculate for this type of dice-rolling, since it isn't a simple "keep the highest" or "keep the lowest" sort of rule -- so I'll have to dig deeper into that, too.)

...

Hopefully that was an enlightening post, for everyone.
Next entry is due up on January 31st, so check back then!

Comparing Dice Mechanics (2024)

Continuing on with the ideas behind the planned TNP sequel, I've been giving some thought to how the old mechanics compare and contrast with the new.

By necessity, TNP has 5 different "class dice bonuses" that are all meant to be roughly mathematically balanced with each other; some dice can be added to a hit, a miss, to damage, or some combination of all 3, and the d12 even has its own unique jumble of mechanics.

The idea with the sequel would be to pare this down, so that instead of rolling 5 different dice and "reading the tea leaves" to determine how to assign the bonuses, you might (for example) roll up to 5 d6s, using the highest as an attack bonus, and all of them as a damage bonus. (Another way to do it might be to use one for an attack bonus, and the rest for damage, but I digress.) A couple of problems arise with this.

First, I find it kind of bland, compared to the sort of "emotional rollercoaster" effect you can potentially get from the various class dice bonuses. Secondly, it doesn't really play nice with the idea of "weapon dice" as I've put forth previously. As extra damage, the d6 mechanic works fine, but when it comes to attack bonus, the weapon dice and d6 pool are stepping on each others' toes. The idea behind the weapon dice was to keep the uniqueness of some of the class dice bonuses (in particular, the d8 mechanic of "add to a miss, crit on a tie" as well as the [current d10/proposed d12] mechanic, which is a roll that replaces the d20 result) rather than just have bonuses that are strictly "+math" types of things.

So the question is, to keep the mechanics from overlapping, what do you do?

I think that a purely d20/d6 based system could be interesting, and might have some merit. As I've mentioned before, you could revert skill checks back to d20 rolls from d10, by allowing "attributes" to provide a negative skill rank bonus, instead of always being a minimum of "+1" -- although I generally find this clunkier than the "d6 pool" skill bonuses of TNP. The other problem is, if class dice bonuses are considered the "USP" of The Next Project, then excising weapon dice from the sequel designs would eliminate a significant portion of that DNA.

I'm really of two minds about this. I do think that the current weapon dice model is neat, because of how it streamlines the particular design space from other D&D games, but also adds it to TNP where it didn't really exist before. I also like how it allows the d12 mechanic to really be unique and shine, rather than in the TNP iteration where it is fairly limited and has to fall in line, so to speak. I also don't think it really makes sense to do a rework to the tune of, "it's TNP, but actually d10 isn't a class die anymore."

If that were the case, the combinations would be reduced to 6:

• d4/d6
• d4/d8
• d4/d12
• d6/d8
• d6/d12
• d8/d12

Coincidentally, if we're considering possibly only including 6 classes, that might not be the worst thing... But does it even make sense to have d6 as a "class die" if the "d6 pool" mechanic is going to be the new standard? Or should that standard just be thrown out, in favour of 4 class dice? Does d10 become the generic "extra damage" mechanic, in that case?

I feel like I'm chasing my tail a little bit, but basically there seems to be a bit of a schism forming, within the intended new designs. Should weapon dice just be damage, and let "d6 pool" handle the attack bonus and extra damage function? The reason weapon dice was proffered as an attack bonus to begin with is that the "d20 vs. DC10" standard felt like it wasn't hitting enough -- but only getting an attack bonus when you have a damage bonus (i.e. d6 pool) doesn't feel right, either. One idea I had suggested was, ok, maybe you always use your STR or DEX d6 pool for weapon attacks, but then your class features/special abilities/teamwork bonuses could add d6s to that pool (such as a CHA bonus for Paladins, as an example.) I think there's some merit to that idea, but it comes back to, is the d6 pool mechanic just too bland? It certainly doesn't feel engaging, the way that the class dice mechanic potentially does. Should the whole system use d20/d6, and the attributes be reworked accordingly?

Really what it boils down to is does the "design space" of weapon dice (and hanging onto some vestige of the old "class dice bonuses" in this particular guise) really add something of value? To wit, part of the fun of class dice bonuses is the picking and choosing aspect; weapon dice don't really do this, since you're only ever going to be using one per each attack. Again, the problem is, do you shift to a "weapon die or d6 pool" standard for the attack bonus? It feels sort of clunky and kind of a "worst of both worlds" solution.

Suffice it to say, this is kind of a mental exercise which hasn't led to me any concrete conclusions. But it has given me more of an appreciation for the certain 'it' factor that the TNP mechanics have.

...

A bit of a delay in the scheduling, but expect the next post on October 19th or 20th.

Math-o-logical (2024)

As mentioned in the previous post, TNP does not use any static modifiers. This is one of the rules which bound the system (another being that all character statistics must be derived from class dice.) Part of the reason for this is to simplify some of the math, but also to encourage "teamwork bonuses" for increasing your chance to hit, in combat.

That all being said, I feel like the flat 55% success rate just doesn't cut it; I've even heard that some D&D-alike systems have chosen to eschew attack rolls altogether. As such, one of the things I've been juggling with my future project, is having a simple attack bonus to increase the hit chance -- namely, the weapon dice mechanics, as well as the d6 pool mechanics which I've touched on in recent posts. So it's probably a good time to look at the math a little bit.

Sticking with a DC10:

• 1d20+1d4 gives us a 50% hit chance, and 17.5% crit chance
• 1d20+1d6 gives us a 50% hit chance, and 22.5% crit chance
• adding the higher of 1d4 and 1d6 to a d20 gives us a 50% hit chance, and 24.58% crit chance
• adding the highest 1d6 out of 5d6 to a d20 gives us a 50% hit chance, and 32.15% crit chance

So what does that mean, in practical terms? Well, one thing I've always talked about within the designs of TNP is that the math should have a "meaningful" chance of failure -- a number I've typically pegged between about 15%-20%, particularly for skills. If we're incorporating these sorts of bonuses into the designs of the combat math, we can see that we're rapidly approaching that threshold for failure chance; we can't really increase hit chance much higher, particularly if "teamwork bonuses" are meant to be over and above what's accounted for here.

The knock-on effect is that it brings into question the idea of using 1d10 for skill checks. Apart from the ergonomic value of using percentile d10s for an advantage mechanic, if the combat system is using d20, and is based around the assumption of a hit rate in the range of 67.5%-82.15%... then why not just go back to using d20 for skills, too? With the idea being to unify all of the dice bonuses into d6 pool mechanics, this would have the added benefit of allowing attributes to be +0 or even possibly go into negatives, while still allowing the skill math to work properly. The only big sticking point (for me) is deciding what (if anything) a critical success on a skill check should do; using a d10 vs. DC10 system neatly side-steps this consideration.

The other question is whether this scale makes more sense than the d10 skill check math:

• 1d20-1d6 = 37.5%
• 1d20+0 = 55%
• 1d20+1d6 = 72.5%
  
• 1d20+[highest 1 of 2d6] = 77.36%
• 1d20+[highest 1 of 5d6] = 82.15%

Another thing I'm considering is that while most special abilities will be keyed off of attributes (for example, a +2 DEX providing a pool of 2d6) the flat modifier for those attributes might also be used as a damage bonus, just to improve the "oomph" of basic attacks. Another use for flat modifiers might be a sort of 'mastery' mechanic, whereby a die result cannot be lower than the modifier, or could be rerolled if lower/equal to the modifier.

If we're sticking with the 5 attributes of TNP (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Charisma, Agility) and we're assuming the d6 pool will consist of one attribute, plus any "teamwork bonuses," then it stands to reason that our attributes shouldn't really exceed 3 (working from the TNP cap of 5d6 "extra damage" as our baseline.) So how many "points" should we be able to spread, between our attributes? Assuming a minimum attribute of +1 and maximum of +3, we could use 10 points to give us an array of +3/+3/+2/+1/+1. I almost wonder if the better alternative is to start with +1 to all, and then have class/background/whatever give you a +2 to two stats (as in 4e) or +2 to one and +1 to another (as in 5e). I think it'll really come down to what "feels" like the "right" amount of points.

...

That wraps up another meandering post, for now.
Check back on August 21st for the next one.

Re-iterating the Designs (2024)

The current designs for attack bonuses focus on the "class dice" with the bonus essentially being a non-stacking "typed" bonus. What this means is that while you might have one of each class dice bonus (and you can roll all of them) you only actually use one of these dice as your attack bonus -- the rest are used as a damage bonus.

The way I've decided to iterate on this idea (for whatever follows after TNP) is to instead use d6s for this bonus; only the highest d6 would be used as the attack bonus, but all of the d6s will be used as a damage bonus. With the designs pivoting towards d4/d8/d12 as the "weapon damage dice," I am also considering using this roll as a bonus to the attack roll, which can be used instead of the d6 bonus. The basic idea would be a stripped down version of the TNP class dice bonuses: the d4 would be added to the attack; the d8 would be added to a miss, and; the d12 would be used in place of the attack roll (and probably crit if both the attack roll and the d12 would 'hit'.)

Now, a while back, I was looking at potentially replacing the d20 mechanic with a 2d6+mod system. The interesting thing with this, is that it essentially required that all of the modifiers be positive, in order for the mechanic to produce suitable ranges under a DC10 paradigm. This sparked a connection in my brain, since the skill mechanic in TNP essentially has "skill rank bonuses" that likewise have to be positive -- but they're a d6 bonus, rather than a flat modifier.

Building off of this idea, and porting this latest d6 mechanic onto it, I got an entirely new idea rolling. Generally skill ranks were capped at 3, but in some cases it might be possible to get it as high as 4 or even 5 (particularly with knowledge skills.) In the ethos of "extra damage dice," TNP was likewise capping at 5d6 or 3d10, both with a maximum of 30 damage.

What if we devised a system where the skill rank bonus and the attack/damage bonus were keyed off of the same modifier?

For example, a +2 DEX attribute would let you roll 2d6 and keep the highest, as a bonus to your skill checks (1d10) using that attribute. However, a Rogue might also get a perk when using suitable weapons/attacks, where they would be granted a d6 'sneak attack' bonus based on their DEX attribute; +2 would grant 2d6, with the highest roll being added to the attack roll, and both dice being added to the damage. Barbarians could do something similar with their STR attribute while raging, as another example.

I quite like how this design ethos is shaping up. The one misgiving I have is whether weapon damage dice are a meaningful enough design space, or whether the whole thing could fire off of d6 and d20 alone; would we even need/want to keep d10 for skill checks?

I also think by breaking out of the "class dice" paradigm, it allows this kind of a system to be a lot slicker, more unified, and potentially run a lot faster. I think it would benefit from standardizing on something like 10 reserves for each class, and possibly even 10 HP per character (if enemy damage is scaled back accordingly) -- rather than necessitating that these things be extrapolated off of class dice, or a constitution score. This also allows for the possibility of unifying under d6 as being the bonus die for all rolls (attacks, saves, checks, initiative, and damage) rather than having a mix of d6, d10, and class dice, as in the current ethos; this seems like a meaningful quality-of-life improvement, especially if this can all be neatly tied back into attributes.

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Time for summer break! This blog should return by the start of August, or possibly sooner (as mentioned in the previous post.)

Deconstructing the Dice: A "Generic" TNP? (2024)

One of the overarching conceits in TNP is class dice, and how they power all of the mechanics, for each and every class. But what if we were to take a more traditional "generic" D&D-style approach, particularly to the roles of the dice? This is an idea I've been pondering recently, and I've alluded to the general concept of it in at least one previous post.

Specifically, what I want to focus in on today is weapon dice, and how you might start from the general (particularly 5e-ish) D&D approach, and "TNP-ify" the concept. So lets get down to basics.

Broadly speaking, 5e has very few weapon damage die archetypes, with (usually) one obvious best choice out of the available options. Now, not every character is proficient with every type of weapon, but let's set that aside for now. Broadly, most thrown weapons do 1d6 damage, whereas thrown finesse weapons do 1d4; likewise,  'light' weapons (i.e. suitable for two-weapon fighting) do either 1d4 or 1d6 damage. For all intents and purposes, any other one-handed melee weapons cap out at 1d8; two-handed melee weapons are either 2d6 or 1d12, and polearms (i.e. 'reach' two-handed weapons) are 1d10. The 'simple' versatile weapons are 1d6/1d8, but the 'martial' versatile weapons are 1d8/1d10 (worth mentioning that in 4e, two-handing a versatile weapon simply gave it a +1 damage, rather than a different die.) Most ranged weapons are either 1d6 or 1d8, with the 1d10 option being a heavy crossbow, that really requires feat investments to be worth it, IMO.

What am I getting at with all of this? Well, what if instead of scaling the class dice bonuses back to just 1d4, 1d8, and 1d12, we instead scaled back the weapon dice to 1d4, 1d8, and 1d12? Since d6 and d10 are the de facto "extra damage" mechanic dice in TNP (despite also having class dice bonus mechanics available to them) it seems logical that if you were to "TNP-ify" weapon damage dice, you might exclude d6 and d10, for use with other mechanics.

For example:

1d4: thrown weapons, light weapons

1d8: one-handed melee weapons, ranged weapons

1d12: two-handed melee weapons

So, you're necessarily leaving out some of the more niche weapon properties, but if the idea is to strip things down and abstract them a lot, it makes some sense that this would be the way to go. You could even do something to prop up two-weapon fighting by saying that characters with martial weapon proficiency (or its equivalent) could use 1 light weapon and 1 one-handed weapon to do TWF (1d4/1d8, comparable to the typical 1d6/1d6 loadout of 5e) and have a feat that could bump that to doing TWF with two one-handed weapons (ie. 1d8/1d8, exactly as the 5th Edition feat does.) Another thing is you could keep the 'versatile' property by mixing in the +1 damage mechanic from 4e, and even potentially do something with 2d4 weapons(?)

So what would you do with the d6 and d10? Well, to me, the d6 has always been the go-to "extra damage die" because they are so ubiquitous and also ergonomic; if late-stage 4e was any indication however, the actual go-to was d8, but assumedly that boils down to that game's math. Anyway, I started thinking to myself, does the system really need two extra damage dice, if we're not in a "class dice" paradigm, and any character class can be using any die for their mechanics?

That's when it hit me. 

I'm sure I've said in conversation (when discussing the TNP skill mechanics) that the percentile dice actually make the most sense as a default advantage/disadvantage mechanic. In the new drafts of TNP, when making a skill check (or monster roll, as the DM) you can roll both percentile dice, and the "1s" die is assumed to be the "natural result" whereas the "10s" die is the disadvantage or advantage result (when/if applicable.) So what if we used the percentile dice in this fashion, but applied them as the bonus/penalty to a d20 roll? For example, have the "1s" die be disadvantage, and the "10s" die be advantage; applying this die to a d20 roll, vs. a DC of 10 produces comparable results (within ~5%) of the standard advantage/disadvantage mechanic, with just using a d20 (i.e. roll 2, take the highest/lowest, respectively.)

(The other angle to come at this might be to have the weapon die function as both the damage, and the attack bonus; that way you could potentially free up the d10 for one more weapon die, or switch the roles and have d10 be the "extra damage die" with d6 being the additional weapon die.)

If we're going to do a "generic" TNP (i.e. as a sequel, or follow-up project) and move away from class dice, it makes sense to keep some of the original DNA, by giving each dice these kinds of specific mechanics -- so that every die has a "role" (pardon the pun.) I do think you lose something by shitcanning the 5 class dice bonuses, but sometimes it's a case of addition by subtraction; to be fair, these mechanics have only really existed "in the ether" (something that came into the designs after the relatively-stable 2018 edition) but were meant to be the unique selling feature of TNP, going forward. Whether or not they carry over to a post-2024 TNP is yet to be seen.

I think there's a couple ways to do a proper followup to TNP: 

1) you go more traditional/generic with it, something that's more recognizably "D&D-ish", possibly with full-on ability score mechanics

2) you go back to my previous RPG designs, with (ideally) only two dice forming all of the mechanics, leaning heavily into modifiers, but stripping the classes down to the bare essentials

3) you make an ultra-lite mechanical system, that fires off of d6s only (and maybe a standard deck of 52 cards) that can easily be played on a bus, or out on a camping trip

I haven't settled on what the followup will be, but in the back of my mind I'm always trying to come up with fresh ideas for how to make a new TTRPG tick.

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Apologies for the delay(s)! If you ever need more updates, remember to check the Discord.
Next post is planned for June 6th; the scheduling pattern may change going forward, but I'll try to keep to the "3x per month" frequency (likely with a makeup post in December.)

Filling the Toolbox (2024)

When setting out to build the mechanics of a game, I think it's important to figure out what things you want to emulate and what not to emulate.

To give an example, the 3.5/4e paradigm of using flanking to provide a +2 attack bonus (referred to as Combat Advantage, in 4e) placed an emphasis not only on precise positioning and grid-based combat, but also a focus on tactics, co-operation, and teamwork. Without this as a baseline rule in 5th Edition, sources of advantage or other dice bonuses more or less boil down to "magic did it."

When I started off working on TNP, I always sort of envisioned a system where "playing to type" would give you advantage on the action you were taking; the easiest example I can put forward would be attacking in melee as a barbarian. This ethos could also be applied to something like which skills you use; to wit, earlier versions used class dice for the skill mechanics, and some of those included replacing d6s with bigger class dice for skills that were "iconic" to a given class.

Along with advantage/disadvantage, I had always envisioned expertise/mastery as being the signature, cornerstone dice mechanic that TNP would operate off of -- but in actuality, class dice ended up being its own layer of class-specific mechanics (particularly when it came to attack rolls.) In the recent drafts, the decision was made to standardize the class dice mechanics; a d4 bonus granted by a Cleric would be the same as a d4 bonus granted by an Acrobat, or a Druid, or a Sage, etc.

This is also around the time I started to ask a question, what really are the core dice mechanics of the system? Part of what created this impetus was the decision to move away from d20 for skills. What came out of this question was the 5 core rolls (attacks, saves, skill checks, initiative checks, and base damage) and the more standardized, streamlined bonuses that applied to them (attack bonus, save bonus, skill rank bonus, initiative bonus, and extra damage.)

Another aspect of "filling the toolbox" with regards to the game's mechanics was the skill grid. I've mentioned it before, but essentially, between the core skills (aka ACIDS tests) and knowledge skills, TNP pretty much covers all of the skills included in D&D, from 3.5 onward. Not to say that I necessarily think all of those skills will be used in every campaign, but by fitting them all somewhere into the grid, you can bolt the skill system (even, potentially, without bolting the rest of TNP) onto a game or an adventure where all of those skills are assumed to be part of the designs.

One thought I've had as it pertains to the skills grid is the idea of how it could be implemented differently. For example, in an ethos where "ability modifiers" are kept to a minimum of +1, you could easily substitute those numbers for your skill ranks, with each +1 bonus adding another d6 to the dice pool; if attributes determine skill rank bonuses, then the implication would be that skill "training" (i.e. advantage on the d10 component) would be a function purely of skillsets, rather than being applicable to skillsets or attributes (as it currently is.) This would actually be an interesting way of doing things, particularly in a potential "2d6" DC10 system, described in a previous post.

I think the other big bit of "toolkit-building" in TNP relates to the status effects and conditions. I actually have already made a quite lengthy post on the decision process behind which ones to include, so I won't rehash all of that here. What I will say, is that I think perhaps these designs are a bit "over-engineered," for purpose. It may very well be that this serves as the baseline for a new system, since I keep finding myself rarely incorporating these deeply into the character class designs, any time I do a re-draft. 

Part of that is because I think of TNP as being designed more as an "HP attrition" game first and foremost. A lot of the optimization mentality in 4e was that debilities just drag out the (already lengthy) combat, essentially forcing the party to spend more resources (particularly healing resources) whereas building around higher damage helps to more quickly advance combat to its natural end-state. "Damage is king," as they say. Circling back around to what I said earlier in the post, playing to type was meant to make your character more effective (i.e. deal more damage) in combat.

The other part of it is as a response to 5e having such poorly-designed and under-utilized conditions. To wit, seemingly every spell has its own conditions, and if a spell does reference one or more of the pre-established conditions, it always builds some clunky exception(s) into it. Much like standardizing the class dice bonuses, I wanted TNP to have standardized conditions, which do the things you expect things to do, in a D&D game. To this point, while I think the 4e conditions are sometimes very "gamey" and don't always lend themselves to this ethos, I think the format and the standardization of 4e's conditions laid a good foundation for how this sort of thing ought to be done -- and that's why TNP apes this formatting so closely.

If there's one more idea I'd include in this exercise, it's the mechanics of the monster roll. As I've mentioned before, one thing I did when homebrewing monsters in 4e, was to standardize the damage expression -- rather than having each subtype of each monster race using different types of dice. The fact that the MM3 math was so standardized, made this sort of thing easy to reverse-engineer. Part of the monster-building "toolkit" is this idea of having a standardized damage dice roll, regardless of the monster type. Part of the thinking behind "using the dice for everything" in TNP (rather than having static modifiers) is that it creates a stable cap on what damage expressions can potentially be -- and nowhere is this truer than with the monster mechanics; each swing is only ever going to be 1d10+1d6, with standard monsters only using the higher die, effectively capping them at 10 damage, while elites, solos, and archenemy types are capped at 16 (albeit solos and archenemies will likely take more than one swing per round, or have access to multi-target abilities.) With the HP for PCs varying between 24 and 32, this also gives us a pretty good handle on what combat length should look like, once we account for "save" chance and come up with DPR expectations for monsters.

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A bit of a retrospective post today, but I'm also thinking of how I can move things like the mechanics forward, into future designs. So I find these little exercises in navel-gazing to be occasionally helpful.

Next post is due up on April 24th, so check back then!

Core Designs: "Players Always Roll" (2024)

In the earliest iterations of TNP, the idea was that monsters would always do a flat amount of damage (usually 1 point) when they targeted the PCs. This was partly because HP was a lot lower (essentially capped at "maximum value of your class die") but was also done to speed up gameplay; it was one less roll the GM needed to make. When I decided to expand the monster roster to include minion types (and swarms) this idea of fixed damage was integrated into their designs, and other monsters were given a damage roll, often referred to as the "monster roll" -- specifically a d10 and a d6.

(Without going on too much of a derail, this was derived from my own hack of the "MM3 on a business card"-math that came out of 4th Edition D&D; essentially, I used 1d6+1d10 (per tier) as the monster's damage roll.)

In 4e, the ethos is "attacker always rolls" i.e. you don't roll a Reflex save when targeted, instead the attacker rolls vs. your Reflex defense to determine whether their attack succeeds. TNP kind of... does an homage to this, by saying "players always roll," which means you roll if you're attacking OR if you're being attacked. This was an interesting quality-of-life improvement on the DM side, particularly in the play-by-post playtest games I've done; the DM could declare the monsters as targeting certain PCs, and say, "roll defense; take X damage on a fail," and the play could move on to the next person in initiative. Eventually the roll made when a player was attacked got renamed from a "Defense roll" to the more familiar "saving throw." 

Where this tends to get gummed up is in status effects and conditions. For example, if an effect gives you disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws (such as the Incapacitated condition) how does that work for monsters, who don't make either? Well, the short explanation is that while the monster roll funcions as the damage roll (on a failed saving throw) it is treated as also being the monster's "attack roll" for the purposes of applying such penalties; the disadvantage is applied to the d10, thus making the monster roll effectively a "percentile" die roll which models advantage/disadvantage, and with a d6 added to it.

(Worth mentioning here is that this is also how skill checks are handled, as they use the exact same dice. In the new draft I have been working on, skill checks are therefore recommended to always be rolled as percentile dice with a d6 bonus die, rather than "1d10+1d6" -- but more on that in a future post, probably.)

Alright, so what about the disadvantage on saving throws? Well, the Incapacitated condition (which gets nested into lots of other debilities) also causes anyone with this condition to grant combat mastery to their enemies. Now, this is where I need to have a big think: Should the condition expressly say, "monsters are impacted in X way, but PCs are impacted in Y way," or, should this condition cause PCs to both have disadvantage on saving throws and grant combat mastery, while monsters only do the latter? This seems overly-punishing in a way that isn't really intended, so I'm thinking some of these conditions might have to stipulate different effects for monsters or players.

The same issue arises with things like positioning or terrain effects; since "advantage on saving throws" has been excised from the mechanics, these effects instead grant the PCs a save bonus (a d6, which can be stacked, but only the highest d6 roll is kept.) But what about the monsters? Well, they don't make saving throws, so instead the PCs should have disadvantage to attack enemies with one or more of these effects in play... Which then begs the question: Instead of a save bonus to the PCs, should cover (or similar) instead grant disadvantage on the monster's "attack" roll, just so that the terminology being used is consistent (even though the mechanical applications are different)?

I do think that the way in which conditions and status effects were built out in 4e was slick, and very much worth emulating. I'm just having a bit of trouble translating that ethos over to a system with a different mechanical underpinning. This is one of the other reasons that I'm becoming more convinced I'll want to take on the task of doing a followup game to TNP. I think the game could be made to run a lot smoother with some different mechanical underpinnings, such as "attacker always rolls" and using things like flat modifiers in some places (instead of dice, for everything) -- but then it wouldn't be TNP anymore; it'd necessarily have to be something different.

...

Next post is planned for April 4th so check back then!

Overview: Class Dice Bonuses (2024)

Recently, I've been giving some thought to how the class dice bonuses work (particularly since finalizing the d12 bonus, in this post which covers the overall topic in great depth.) One thing I was considering is whether "attack and damage" should be the exception or the rule; it turns out those mechanics are kind of split 50/50... At any rate, I figured a big recap of the specific, individual mechanics was warranted. I also want to use this post to try and narrow down what is the most concise way to word the mechanics for each die.

There are a couple of things I should mention first. Since TNP does not use static modifiers (for example, a +3 STR mod or a +2 proficiency bonus, to your attack roll) a total roll of 20 or higher is considered to be a critical hit. This means you can score a crit on a natural 20 on the d20, or by adding to a hit (a d20 roll of 10-19.) Some people are immediately confused by the prospect of some dice bonuses being allowed to be "added to a hit" but this is the reason for that. Similarly, you can add to a miss to improve it to a hit (10-19), which is a bit more intuitive.

As mentioned in the previous post, all class dice bonuses that are not used as the attack bonus are used as a damage bonus. I'm not sure that I've been entirely clear on this point before, so I think it's worth stating here; basically, if there is an exception to this rule, it's that some specific dice can be used as the attack bonus AND as a damage bonus. You can always roll all of the dice bonuses that apply to the attack being made, but you must choose only one of those dice results to be applied as the attack bonus. (Similarly to save bonuses or skills ranks, where you may be able to roll more than one d6, but only apply the highest.) With that out of the way, let's go over each die.

The d4 bonus can be added to either a hit or a miss, and can be used as a damage bonus even if it is used for the attack bonus (i.e. "attack [hit or miss] and damage.") So for example, if the d20 result is a 9, adding a d4 roll (i.e. minimum 1) to it, will turn that miss into a hit; likewise, if the d20 result is a 16, a d4 result of 4 could be used to turn that hit into a critical hit. The special perk for the d4 is that it is treated as having mastery applied to it, but only when used as a damage bonus. This means that if the d4 turns up a 1, it is effectively treated as a +1 to the attack roll, but as a +4 to damage (mastery allows you to treat a 1 as whatever the highest number is, on the die to which mastery is being applied.) So, the d4 bonus provides a small boost to both hit chance and crit chance, as well as a small (but very reliable) damage boost.

The d6 functions similarly to the d4, with the exception that it cannot be used as a damage bonus if it is used as the attack bonus on a roll that would already hit (i.e. if the d6 is used to improve a hit into a crit.) So for example, if the d20 result is a 9, you can use the d6 as the attack bonus and as a damage bonus; if the d20 roll is a 16, you can use the d6 as the attack bonus OR as a damage bonus -- not both. The shorthand I tend to use to think of this is "miss and damage; hit or damage."

The d8 is more straightforwardly "miss or damage." On a hit, the d8 can only be used as a damage bonus; on a miss, the d8 can be added to the d20 result to possibly improve it to a hit. The special perk for the d8 is that if the d8 result and the d20 result are a tie (i.e. the d20 rolls a miss, on the numbers 1 through 8), you can treat the attack as a critical hit; since this perk is considered to be the attack bonus, you cannot use the d8 for a damage bonus if you do so -- the d8 can never be used for both attack and damage. I've always thought of the d8 bonus as sort of "raising the floor" in terms of hit chance.

The d10 bonus in this paradigm is "hit or damage" -- it can either be used to improve a hit into a crit, or it must be used as a damage bonus, only. Since this was found to be just slightly low in terms of the average damage boost, the d10 was given the special perk that (as the attack bonus) the d10 result can be used in place of the d20 result. What this means is that a roll of 10 on the d10 can be used to turn a miss into a hit; essentially, this is a flat 10% chance to improve a miss into a hit. Broadly speaking, though, the function of the d10 is to improve crit chance while offering a large boost to damage.

The d12 is essentially "hit and damage." As was mentioned in the previous post (linked above) the d12 has been given a special attack bonus function, whereby it improves all extra damage dice by treating them as having rolled their maximum result. (For this reason, if this attack bonus is used, the extra damage dice should not be rolled, to prevent mixing them up with the base damage dice, and potentially applying this bonus incorrectly.) Now, the d12 bonus is allowed to be used as damage in addition to providing this benefit, but since this special benefit counts as the attack bonus no other dice may be used as the attack bonus, when and if this benefit is applied. To wit, this means that the attack has to hit on its own merit, or the special benefit couldn't be applied to the extra damage. As an additional benefit, whenever the d12 is used as a damage bonus and the attack is a critical hit, the d12 is treated as having rolled its maximum result; this means that it pairs well with bonuses that potentially increase crit chance.

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Now, the reason that these attack bonuses exist, is because I felt that TNP really needed its own "unique sales proposition" to really set it apart from other systems -- compared to previous iterations, where TNP leaned heavily into the 'advantage' mechanic. I like that by structuring things this way, the attack bonuses are never wasted, on a a hit -- since they can then be translated into damage instead.

It's worth mentioning here, that all class dice bonuses are rolled at the same time as the attack roll. This allows the players to see the potential results of applying one attack bonus vs. another, without the mess having to choose which bonus you're aiming for, and then hoping to roll it. This has the effect of speeding up gameplay; basically, if you miss, you're looking for the smallest bonus that turns it into a hit, and if you hit, you're likewise trying to see if you can turn it into a crit. There really isn't any gambling involved, but the randomness of the dice will present different options depending on the outcomes.

Another interesting quirk of the system is how I've chosen to impliment "combat mastery." Since in 4e D&D, combat advantage was a straight +2 to hit, I wanted something that mimicked this kind of bonus. Simply applying mastery to the d20 would mathematically translate to about a +1 to hit... but it only actually did anything if you rolled a 1. This seemed a little underwhelming, to say the least. As such, combat mastery was expanded to include the attack bonus die; in most cases, this works out to roughly an additional +1 to hit. Doing this means that, for example, a 1 on the d10 bonus can be used to turn a miss into a hit (increasing that 10% miss improvement chance to 20%) while also increasing the ability of the other dice to improve misses into hits (d4, d6, d8), or hits into crits (d4, d6, d10.)

In light of this, since the d12 doesn't gain a benefit from combat mastery (since the number on the d12 result can't be used to manipulate the total of the attack roll) it might make sense as an additional benefit to have combat mastery apply to the d12 bonus as a damage roll... hopefully that wouldn't be too confusing to keep track of.

The Next Mechanics -- Part 2: Re-"role"-ing the Dice

Somewhat in the same vein of a recent post, today I'm going to share some design ideas I've had recently, which may or may not appear in a future game.

First, I want to talk about class dice bonuses. Basically, I think an interesting basis for a new system would be to have simplistic d4, d8, and d12 attack bonuses, with d6 and d10 used strictly for extra damage; this obviously would be a lot easier to balance and mix-and-match in a design ethos which expressly isn't about "class dice," in the way that TNP is. 

That being said, I actually did manage to come up with some balanced reworks, whereby the dice bonuses are approximately equal (when using the assumption of 1d8 as the base damage.) These mechanics assume the dice bonuses can be added to attack AND damage, unless otherwise noted:

• d4: always treated as max value for the damage portion of the bonus; if the d4 ties the attack roll, treat the attack as a crit
• d6: [can be added to attack and damage] -- no other special considerations
• d8: if the d8 ties the attack roll, treat the attack as a crit; can only be added to a miss [essentially the same as the TNP bonus, with the addition of being able to be used for attack and damage]
• d10: roll 2d10, and use the total OR the d20 result to resolve the attack; treat the lower d10 result as the bonus damage, with mastery applied to the roll for determining the damage portion only
• d12: can be used in place of the attack roll; if the d12 roll ties the d20 roll and both would be a hit, treat the attack as a crit; if the d12 and d20 are a tie and both would miss, treat the attack as a hit

Some of these are obviously a bit wordy/clunky, so I do generally prefer the idea of streamlining the bonuses to be more simple, and at the same time making it so not all dice have to be bonuses.

The other major idea I've been giving some consideration to, is what is the resolution mechanic (if not d20)? The thing to ask is whether the DC10/d20 system is really adequate; to wit, is a 50% hit + 5% crit rate enough? Evidently not, since the design has needed to be reworked to include dice bonuses as well as combat mastery. My sense is that at the low end, a meaningful chance of success shouldn't drop below about 20%-25%, whereas at the high end, a meaningful chance of failure shouldn't be less than around 15%-20%

So let's look at some options, for success rates vs. DC10:

• 3d6: 62.50%
• 2d10: 64.00%
• 2d6+3: 58.22% 
• 1d6+1d10: 45%

You'll notice I included that last one, since it's the mechanic that TNP uses for skills; when you apply advantage to the d10 portion, the success rate increases to 66.83% or decreases to 23.17% with disadvantage. The 2d6 expression is meant to model "what if we replaced the 3rd d6 with something like an ability modifier?"
So what happens with the other mechanics? Let's say they all use the same idea of "highest/lowest [X-1] of XdY" as sort of an "advantage/disadvantage" mechanic.

• 3d6: 82.48% / 38.35%
• 2d10: 84.60% / 37.80%
  
• 2d6+3: 80.56% / 31.94%

Now, it's here I'll say that I think I can rule out the d10, for a couple of reasons. First, if we were to add something like a +1 modifier to it, the success rate would become too high. The other reason is that "roll 3d10 and keep the 2 highest" sort of loses the ergonomics of a straightforwardly 2d10 advantage/disadvantage mechanic, such as the one used for skills in TNP.

So what happens if we apply some kind of an "ability" modifier to the d6 candidates?

• 3d6+1: 89.51% / 51.23% (74.07% normal)
• 3d6+0: 82.48% / 38.35% (62.50% normal)
• 3d6-1: 73.07% / 26.93% (50.00% normal)
• 3d6-2: 61.65% / 17.52% (37.50% normal)
  
  
• 2d6+4: 89.35% / 47.69% (72.22% normal)
• 2d6+3: 80.56% / 31.94% (58.22% normal)
• 2d6+2: 68.06% / 19.44% (41.57% normal)
• 2d6+1: 52.31% / 10.65% (27.78% normal)

We find a couple of things:
3d6+1 is pretty comparable to 2d6+4, but both are a little high, with advantage applied.
3d6+0 and 2d6+3 are both kind of in the sweet spot, for all three expressions.
3d6-1 is definitely workable -- but at 2d6+2, disadvantage is at risk of taking the numbers too low.

Overall, the math makes me lean towards 3d6... but having modifiers that scale from -2 only to +1 is a little bit unconventional. The 2d6 mechanic being based around having only positive modifiers is intriguing, but at the far ends of that scale, it starts to flounder; advantage on 2d6+4 is really high, and disadvantage on 2d6+1 is really low.

I think if I were to use either of those for combat, I might consider using the existing TNP mechanic for skills -- otherwise, the obvious temptation is to just build the entire system out of d6s. Having a skill mechanic that at least uses d6 and d10 would incentivize using both in parts of the rest of the system. At this point, I realize I probably sound like I'm campaigning to reinvent my previous RPG. I haven't decided what "the next next project" is going to be, so anything is still possible, at this point.

...

Next post is due on Nov. 30th, when (if all goes well) we should be unveiling the Spellbinder and Warlord classes -- so check back then!

The Conundrum of Class Dice Bonuses

Since the summer break, I've been trying to figure out a solution to the problem with the d12 bonus. What it comes down to is that because d12 is such a large damage bonus, it has to be a relatively small attack bonus, in order for the DPR to be balanced against the other (smaller) dice bonuses -- to wit, in the current iterations, the d12 does not provide an attack bonus at all. This creates a problem, because it does not bestow the multiplicative effect to "extra damage" that dice bonuses with an attack bonus offer. I came up with a fix, but in the process I realized I should also clean up some of the nomenclature a bit.

Class dice bonuses are bonuses to attacks, which use class dice; they can be bonuses to attack rolls and/or to damage rolls. When used as a bonus to an attack roll, the class dice bonus is referred to as an attack bonus, and when used as a bonus to a damage (i.e. base damage) roll, the class dice bonus is referred to as a damage bonus (or bonus damage, depending on grammatical considerations.) Extra damage is something entirely separate from bonus damage; extra damage is only ever represented by d6s and/or d10s, can only be used for damage (not for attack bonus), and is in addition to both base damage and bonus damage.

Now, it's important to remember that while all 5 of the class dice bonuses may be applied to a given attack, only one may be used as an attack bonus -- and you can choose which one to use, after rolling all bonuses. Some of the class dice bonuses have special functions that work "as an attack bonus," meaning that in order to benefit from said bonus, no other attack bonus may be applied. Specifically, the d8 bonus when it ties the attack roll (d20), or using the d10 roll in place of the d20 (i.e. a 10 on the d10 being used to make a hit.) Remember this for later.

The general rule is that a class dice bonus can be used for an attack bonus OR a damage bonus, but not both -- however, there are exceptions (which is partly why to simplify things, one of the reworks I was considering was to just allow all dice to be used for attack bonus AND damage bonus.)

As I had said from the top, the d12 bonus:
a) does not have an attack bonus component, and;
b) does not properly scale with extra damage dice

So how do we fix this? Well, what I've come up with is this:
"As an attack bonus, the d12 bonus allows all extra damage dice to be treated as having rolled their maximum value."

Essentially what this does, is take the base hit chance (50%) and crit chance (5%) without an attack bonus (or, when applying the d12 bonus, which has no attack bonus component) and instead of multiplying those chances by the random roll of the extra damage dice, you're multiplying them by the maximum value of the extra damage dice. The result is that the extra damage scales up, more in line with the other class dice bonuses.

As mentioned in a previous post, since each class dice bonus (with a base damage of 1d8) produces a DPR of about 7.3 we then need the extra damage dice to work out to at least another 16.7 DPR, in order to hit our "1 KPR" number of 24 DPR. By using the d12 bonus this way, we're multiplying the maximum value of 5d6 or 3d10 by 50% (hit) and taking double that amount, multplied by 5% (crit):

(30 * 50% = 15) + (60 * 5% = 3) = 18

So this means that with the d12 bonus in play, the DPR from extra damage can be increased to 18, finally putting it just about on par with the other bonuses.

Now, this may seem a bit unintuitive and weird, since objectively the roll of the d12 is doing nothing to provide the actual attack bonus. But we do need to treat it as an attack bonus, to keep other attack bonuses from being applied in addition to this one. Since the ~7.3 DPR from the d12 bonus comes entirely from damage, this also means that the rule for the d12 bonus must be that it can be used for attack AND damage, in order for this math to work out.

Essentially, I think of attack bonus and damage bonus more and more like two separate buckets, that can each be filled in specific, different ways. Attack bonus is more like a "typed" bonus, in the sense that, for example, a "feat bonus" to attack can be stacked with a "power bonus" to attack, and a "circumstance bonus" to attack... but not with another "feat bonus" to attack; if every class dice bonus to attack is considered a "feat bonus", then only the highest/best would apply. Bonus damage is more like an untyped bonus; all of them can be stacked (unless they specifically don't apply, such as when using one for an attack bonus prohibits using it as a damage bonus.)

...

Anyway, hopefully that doesn't muddy the waters too much; it was the simplest fix to the class dice problem, short of reworking the whole scheme from scratch.

Next post should be up on October 30th, so check back then!