Gooday
While most PBTA games are 2d6, i wanted more range in the dice results and was wondering who else has done this with their games/hacks.
For Conjure Hagalaz everything is 2d8 + attribute (-1 to +2)
But there are situational mods eg if you are using water magic and its raining/you are standing in a river you get +1, if you are the bad guys evil temple then you get -1 his magic works better in his home.
Aside from slightly more range/spread of results, I just like d8 and d12s.
@Maezar has a hack of Freebooters on the Frontier that uses 2d12. I was signed up for a play-by-post but the demands of early parenthood became a bit too much to handle so I didn’t get any further than character creation. Unfortunately that means that I’m not able to give you any more details, but hopefully Maezar can pop by and talk about his experience with the “Advanced d12 World” system.
I made a couple of barebones hacks of World of Dungeons where instead of giving people stats of +1 or something, they used different sized dice. So having a good trait means I replace one of the d6s I’m rolling with a d8 or d10, effectively bumping up my result but with less math. Simple and easy. (Same average results, slightly different bell curve, but not enough to really matter in play.)
If you are simply changing the dice to change them, then the question is why? What purpose does it serve? How does increasing the range of die results help your game meet its goals?
Obviously, you’d need to adjust the bell curve slightly, so that the result you want still occur at roughly the right percentages. That’s easy enough to fix, though.
for 2d8 it was 7 to 11 for win/lose results, allowed 1-2 situational mods without over balancing the rolls too much
still prefer two dice since i’ve had tpk with d20 systems where the whole party can’t roll over 10 all night 
Erika Chappell has a game called Flying Circus where you roll 2d10s. I believe she used those dice so that adding +4 to a roll does not guarantee a hit.
It seems to work fairly well.
I like using a d20 as I like being able to calculate the odds easily.
I use 8- as a miss, 9-16 as mixed, and 17+ as a hit. So with no bonuses, it’s 40%/40%/20%. Any modifications to the roll only affect hit and miss. Mixed always stays at 40%. So a -3 makes it 55/40/5 and a +3 makes it 25/40/35. A +7 makes it 5/40/55.
I’d like to mention the Ironsworn-model: you roll 1d6 and 2d10s. If the d6 is higher than both d10s then it’s a 10+. If the d6 is higher than one but not the other, it’s a 7-9. And if the d6 is lower than both d10s it’s a 6-. This helped me in my game design of Middle World (a work in progress).
Kult: divinity lost has two d10s by the way.
That’s an unusual technique! How did it help you in your game?
Well, I had too many parameters that affected the probability of success. When you have more than +4/-4 modifiers in AW the system kinda breaks. So I needed a solution where I could both fit in the character’s equipment/experience tags as bonuses and their conditions as minus modifiers, plus getting a bonus from situational aspects and being hindered by the bad situational aspects.
Not sure if this makes a lot of sense without explaining it further, but let’s make an example:
My character Leto is going to roll for influencing other. They have an experience tag “charming and smooth talking” and an equipment tag “noble house medallion”. They have a condition “stressed out”. That means their d6 gets +2-1 =+1.
The current positive situational aspect is “people recognise me here”. And the negative one is “chased by thugs”.
So when rolling for the situation (the dice to beat with the d6) you see if there are more relevant positive aspects than negative ones. If so you roll 2d6 (easy situation) as your situational dice, if there are more negative than positive you roll 2d10 (hard situation) . If there are equally many aspects (as in this case) you roll 2d8 (normal situation) !
The player checks their tags and conditions, and the gm checks the situation.
I’ve got an untested 2d20 roll-under-stat hack of the Black Hack, rolling one under and one equal or over is success at a cost. I’m dying to try it, and it’s tough to write rules which don’t at accidentally fuel awful “grab a pair” jokes.
If you mean something like http://questingblog.com/partial-success-roll-d20-systems/ I did this with The Black Hack when I ran my Welcome to Dolmenwood series on the Gauntlet last year. It worked fine. Though I only used it for non-combat actions. I can find the videos if you’d like…
