This is indeed how we convert an anglo-french standard deck to play Italian games.
PbtA Mechanics with d10s - improved "ladder"
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Thatâs quite interesting! Thanks!
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On the low end, we can do things worse than rolling 1d10
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If you end up rolling 0d10, you can still roll 1d10 but 8 and 9 are failures, and 10 is only a partial success.
If the game ever tells you to roll negative dice, well, câmon, youâre screwed. Tell the MC you miss.
(I wrote it out with more gradation to the deeper negatives and thought better of it)
I canât really imagine what youâd ever need that for! But, sure, I guess?
Really depends on what youâre doing with the modifiers. If this opens it up for people to put big bonuses / penalties on a board, thereâs room for long shots to go negative
If preserving â2d6-1â is important to you then rolling 1d10 and 1d8 isnât bad as an approximation.
| âHalfâ step | 2d6-1 | max(1d8,1d10) |
|---|---|---|
| Full | 8% | 10% |
| Partial | 33% | 29% |
| Any Success | 42% | 39% |
You can decide whether that âfidelityâ is worth anything. As I think about it, Iâd rather let the first bit of âhelpâ get a character well off the worst odds, rather than trying to remember that thereâs an exception at the bottom of the probability stack. (Children, we donât count 1,2,3,4 we count 1, 1 1/2, 2, 3, 4 and so on)
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Well put, Ry. Itâs my thinking as well. Not a whole lot of need for differentiation at this end of the scale (at least for a PbtA game).
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Blightburg operates with 2d10 and conditions:
14+ - Success
9-13 - Success, but/Partial Success
8- - Miss
Itâs with stats raging from -4 to +3 (practically, -3 to +2), Grit Points available to spend after roll (some kind of equivalent of Artha from Burning Wheel). Plus, this game also has advantage/disadvantage mechanics, with adding another d10 (roll 3d10 pick highest/lowest).
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Weirdly enough this is still rattling around in my brain.
One thing I personally dislike in RPGs is the secondary roll, like having to roll to hit, and then roll again to see how much damage you do. Itâs not bad but Iâd rather have the dice throw once, and tell me what happens next. For me, that keeps people focused on what happens next in the fiction rather than sticking their nose in a book to check a reference table. Of course you can also do this by rolling damage and hit in the same handful of dice (which Iâve seen my pal MikeR do at the table).
Similarly, in PbtA, when Iâm GMing I usually forget to ask for the harm move.
I bring it up because in some cases youâll want to look down at the dice rolled and pick out an orthogonal result. Like your highest die was a 10, sure, no taking away from your full success. But can we say the success âblows upâ more if there were more successes in the roll?
What about, instead of âOn a miss, take harm as established and make the harm moveâ you do âOn a miss, take harm as established, plus 1 for every 1 in your result.â
OR
âOn a miss, take harm as established. If you had a 1 in your result, also tell us how something on your person is damaged or destroyed.â
(note, picking on 1s is just one option, the math is the same for any number from 1 to 7)
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Yeah, absolutely. Iâm a big fan of collapsing things this way, as well.
Depending on what youâre looking for, there may be all kinds of clever ways of doing it.
But oracular dice outcomes like these can be great.
For some weirdo combat system, maybe you roll a d6 that represents your attack and another d6 that represents your defense or the opponentâs efforts, and those determine damage or consequences, but itâs the total thatâs read as a usual 2d6 roll (a la PbtA).
I could see doing this in interesting ways with a d10 pool as described here if itâs tied to rerolling dice.
Perhaps you choose how many dice you roll, but every 1 and 2 is a âfailureâ, which affects the stakes of loss. If you wish, you can reroll any dice that didnât fail, but on the second roll, any dice that roll a 4 or lower are âfailuresâ. You can reroll a third time if you want, but now itâs any 6 or lowerâŚ
Depending on the move, the number of failed dice might act differently based on whether you succeeded or failed (or rolled a partial success).
For instance, maybe for each âfailureâ rolled, you have to choose one bad consequence from a list.
But if you didnât even get a partial success, then itâs your opponent who chooses, instead of you.
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Thanks for doing the math! I like this.
Couple half dozen things I like in particular:
D10s are somehow more fun to me than square old d6âs. In fact I use dodecahedral âdouble d6âsâ b/c I like funny shaped dice.
Chucking a bunch of dice feels cool too.
I like the outcome distribution granularity.
No addition needed!
The possibility of further narrative prompting with additional 10s in a success or if a failing roll contains a 1 in its pool.
Any thoughts about this: What change to the dice pool would approximate the effect of rolling with advantage, or disadvantage? (3d6 and pick the two highest). Or is this a mechanic in most PBTA designs?
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This is the nice thing about this type of mechanic: you donât need a special rule for something like Advantage or Disadvantage, but you can just add a die to the pool (or take one away).
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adding a die and removing a die are good proxies for advantage / disadvantage
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We playtested our training game with the initially proposed xd10 mechanic, and I have to tell you that 4d10 and 5d10 just feel much more incredible than 2d6+2, even though they are more or less at the same ballpark.
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Nice! By âincredibleâ, do you just means that it feels good to roll them? Or something else?
What game did you play, and how did you convert the mechanics?
Yes, somehow it felt waay better than 2d6+2.
Itâs a training game. You collect dice by implementing items from a checklist into your narration.
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Nice! Makes sense to me. There is something nicely tactile about a pile of dice, and the impact is âfeltâ rather than just existing in the mind. Itâs satisfying to pick up a pile and to feel them rattle in your hand. Almost like an intimidating presence, if youâre rolling in conflict.
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Hey there!
So, this is obviously an old topic, but I found it in a round about way and it happened to match up with what I was doing when I found it, so, I thought Iâd share.
I was on Anydice to check out the odds of a âcut the highestâ mechanic in a FitD game, read its article on The Pool, googled for more Pool stuff, found your other post, which linked here. And while running my numbers, I noticed something kind of funny⌠Blades mechanic with a âCut the Highestâ as a difficulty modifier actually gives you similar numbers to your d10 pool, but with a bigger range of Partial in exchange for smaller Miss space while getting to chuck even more dice.
Makes for an interesting situation where it might be viable to keep the condensed ladder of Blades for standard encounters, and then when you drop Cuts suddenly they need to get real clever with stacking bonuses to take down a tough enemy.
2d6c1: 3%/22%/75% (Pass/Partial/Miss)
3d6c1: 7/43/50
4d6c1: 13/56/31
5d6c1: 20/62/19
6d6c1:26/63/11
7d6c1:33/61/6
8d6c1: 40/57/4
9d6c1: 46/52/2
10d6c1: 52/47/1
11d6c1: 57/42/1
12d6c1: 62/38/0
13d6c1: 66/35/0
14d6c1: 70/30/0
15d6c1: 74/26/0
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Welcome!
Thatâs an interesting idea.
What I donât love (and this goes for the d6 pools in general) is how low the chances of failure are, and how quickly they drop off. The method youâve outlined is a bit better in this sense; you could do it to extend the Blades in the Dark scale a bit (maybe 3d6c1 to 8d6c1 or so, for slightly more range), or design a game where the difference between the 4-5 and the 6 is really really dramatic.
Thatâs one of the reasons I went to d10s here - to preserve an interesting chance of failure as things scale up.
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I am wondering what are the chances of âxd10 cut highestâ?