So You Wanna Make a TTRPG? #4 The Funny Math Clicky-Clack Math Rocks

[@bannerpunk]

One of the stranger things that I've come across is that a core dice mechanic can affect the feel of a game on a thematic level as well. Additive systems see you roll against a target number set by the goal, whereas resultive systems have you roll against your own skill modified by the goal. An additive system incentivizes characters to change themselves, but a resultive system incentivizes characters to change their circumstances. It's a subtle difference, but I've found that resultive systems usually do a better job of getting players to engage in lateral thinking to achieve their goals than additive. Overall a very good video.

[@yipyipyipi]

I find it disappointing you don't even touch on non-dice systems. Dread, which uses a jenga tower to simulate the growing tension of a horror film as you know something bad is going to happen soon each time you see the tower wobble. Ten candles uses dice, but it also uses actual tealight candles to randomize scene progression and alter the dice pool. Each time a candle goes out, the scene changes, new "truths" get established, and the storyteller takes one of the dice from the players shared pool for the darkness to use now. There are systems that use cards unstead of dice, adding suits as an additional resource to trigger abilities with. The fact that cards are a matrix rather than a generator is important, and most of these systems like mine allow players a hand of cards, meaning players actually know what they will get before they ever decide to take an action. It also has the ability to modify your deck, which changes odds in interesting ways. There are even systems with no dice or cards or otherwise, simply relying on the randomness a player can give to the story in clever ways. A lot more than just the classifications here which feel rather poorly thought out, since most games fall into all three of your categories.

[@yeager1957]

I feel like the rolling 50 dice is fun until you have to count them thing is a callout to *someone*, hmmm

[@justawhim]

Shadow run?

[@psychodrummer1567]

Additive vs Resultive is essentially *Luck vs Effort* discourse. In the Additive system, the bonuses granted by Attributes & Skills will *not* grant you a Success, you need to rely on Luck (a roll of a die). In the Resultive system, the dice represents the amount of effort you put in and Skill / Attribute you roll against is the "limit of your potential", for example: [situation] I'm lifting a block of concrete to free an NPC trapped underneath and I have to roll d20 below my SRT of 12 and my result is 14, then " *I gave it all but it wasn't enough* " while with a result of 8, I succeed " *it was doable, but challenging* " .

[@bravefire4103]

I really like interpretative systems and I've watched this whole playlist 2 times already while making my own system. Thanks!

[@Xararion]

My current project is a cursed brainchild that doesn't use dice, but in general this is useful categorisation. Personally I have developed a strong hatred for narrative dice and success with consequences, but I can sort of see why others like them, yet could never put them in my own projects.

[@JACE70736]

In the TTRPG I'm making I made my own addative 3d6 system with advantage and disadvantage similar to 5e, except they add another die to the roll and you drop the lowest / highest result respectively. The purpose of this system was to make it less luck based and put a greater emphasis on your character's stats. It works pretty well...when all my players aren't collectively rolling below 8.

[@scrapyarddragon]

Fascinating, but I still cannot help but feel perhaps that the best system is whatever system resolves fastest. I play a roll and keep system mostly with friends and all the modifiers are how many die you can throw out, and whew boy, calculating how many you roll can slow things down pretty often.

[@Scribblegs]

I thought you said COGS was interpretive, but from this it'd be resultive.

[@JoniRay9669]

Looking for some thoughts on the dice system I came up with. It's mostly narrative based and classless, describe what you want to do, then use a competitive system when trying to take a action that can be resisted by someone, and difficulty system when performing a action when there's nothing to resist you. two dice are used for both, one dice for a relevant attribute the other for relevant skill, both are on a scale of 1 to 5, using the, d4 for 1, d6 for 2, d8 for 3, d10 for 4, d12 for 5. so a competitive check to attack might use your strength attribute of 2, and sword skill of 3, meaning you use a d6 and d8 for your roll, the person your attacking does a check with there dice, lets say 2d6. every competitive roll is ether at advantage, disadvantage or locked. let's say the player has advantage, this means he rolls his two dice and takes the highest number, so a min of 1 and max of 8, the npc being attacked is at disadvantage, min of 1 max of 6, they take there "generally - i'll get to that later" lowest number rolled. Success is having a higher keep number, rolling significantly higher leads to a better out come, vs only slightly higher, matching in a tie leads to a neutral outcome often starting the next roll being in a locked state, meaning both take there highest roll, rolling lower is a minor fail, and rolling significantly lower is a complete fail. often giving the opposing npc advantage next roll. this system uses your attributes and skill vs the attributes and skill of npc's while still adding in luck of the dice, but in general the better your states the more likely you are to succeed, while also rewarding smart moves that keep your advantage up. The difficulty system uses those same dice one for a relevant attribute and one for a skill, all difficulty actions are ether stressed/disadvantage or calm/advantage, difficulty is set by the DM ether by set number or using two dice, and is to be decide biased on the individual trying to make the check. Difficulty is 1 throw 20, something that would be considered normal difficulty for a average PC, meaning rolling 2d6 would be 3 with about a 88% chance of success, a 10 being impossible with that low of attribute and skill, while being a hard check even for a max level character so 2d12 with only about a 44% chance to succeed. if you notice that even a max level character can only roll a max of 12 not 20, This is because there are other things going on that require a higher difficulty for gm use so I wont get in to that. other things to note, rolling the same number on both dice is normally a good thing, it improves the out come of that roll, even if it was a failed roll, also in combative rolls it gives you advantage next turn, there for is considered a minor crit. rolling both dice to there highest number is considered a true crit, doing the same as a minor crit, but with the bonce of advancing you charterer closer to the next level. the only time rolling the same number is bad is in the case of snake eyes, 1 and 1, being a critical fail making the out come far far worse, and giving you disadvantage, In a fight facing a opponent above your ability level this is a death sentience, but there's still a way out, the player can instead chose to have it reduce there progress to the next level, to improve the outcome slightly, giving them a fighting chance. one thing to note, when it comes to charterers of vastly different levels in there ability's, lets say a normal humanoid vs a grizzly bear, how ever many time's great that attribute or skill, they get that many extra dice -1 on there roll. so a grizzly bear being about 4 times stronger then a human, with at lest 2 times better natural grappling skill would get 4 of there strength dice, and 2 of there grappling skill dice in a grappling check vs a human. "that generally earlier - here it is" If the bear was at disadvantage they don't take there lowest number instead taking there second highest. And for difficulty checks, base it around the individual, lets say a big rock needs moving, the check would be harder for the human then it would be the bear. other things to keep in mind this is a narrative mostly way to play, in order to allow flexibility for the chaos of the game, there are no hit points, or even true level's, everything is biased on the attributes, skills, actions, and equipment. Only thing levels track is how many times you've increased attributes or skills so we can track how difficult it will be to increase them again. anyway what do you guys thing, I had to come up with this system due to a very chaotic fast playing very homebrew game not dnd, and other systems were just to slow or not flexible enough.

[@LeFlamel]

It took me awhile to put my finger on it, but I'm starting to ask myself whether this whole framework is kind of hair splitting? The main thing you say about additive systems is that it's focused on changing the player's chance to succeed against a given DC. Interpretive systems are more about what the dice "mean," like there's no difference between a 3 and a 4 because they're both "fail with boon." PbtA is the given example, but even it has mods to the roll. So is it hybrid? If Pathfinder has degrees of success with the critical thresholds, is it interpretive? Or a hybrid again? There's no difference between a 12 and a 13 if the DC is 15. You use Fate as an example of interpretive, but one's skills/aspects additively adjust odds towards success. If I were to be charitable, the difference between additive and interpretive is just binary vs non-binary resolution. Resultive just makes these categories even more muddied to me. The proposed definition is that it modifies the target rather than the die. For CoC, does it logically matter whether or not your target is going down by 10% or your roll is increasing by 10% to call it additive? For the Poker dice example, how is rolling a better "hand" not interpretive? Or is it a hybrid, since increasing the number of poker dice would increase the likelihood of all possible hands, so it could be considered additive as well. For the Center system you mentioned, that's just an excuse to use odd-sided dice. You could invert Fate dice to build similar degrees of success around 0. In both the Poker dice and Center system examples, modifying the number of dice gives the same statistical result as adding or subtracting from a single die, but with some form of curve. You described additive systems as requiring strong mathematical understanding around "averages, curves, and realities," but I feel like that's increasingly true for everything you listed after d20+mods. Just because the player is doing more math doesn't mean the math is actually more complicated for the designer. If I had to summarize your categories: - Additive - the players have to do math (the actual statistical complexity is an entirely separate factor), and it doesn't qualify as one of the other categories. - Interpretive - non-binary resolution, so regardless of whether or not the players do math, they have to interpret what their roll means relative to some table. - Resultive - the TN is a factor under player control through some mechanic external to the dice (so kind of unfair to call it a type of dice mechanic). I think your categories would be better framed as: - DC decided by GM fiat. - DC determined by designer hard-coding in a table. - DC is generated by mechanics that the player can engage with.

[@stevemanart]

I feel almost shallow now chosing my xd6k3 system purely out of the tactile pleasure of throwing lots of dice while wanting a 3d6+mods system...

[@willnorman-bargo]

I would say my d468 system is an added system right?

[@Drudenfusz]

First video of the channel here I stumbled upon. I like that you put the fudge dice in the interpretative category, since that is how I use them for my own deign as well. However, I feel like that FUDGE and FATE both use those dice only in an additive manner and do not really make use of the potential there.

[@Karak-_-]

I saw a system Which I call "Roll high but not above" If pleyers roll below their skill, they succeed and if they also roll above the target number, they do it without extra cost or penalty. I"m not a fan of set Roll below your skill, because the chance to fail is same for all the rolls, but this one doesn't sound so bad.

[@mistery8363]

Hell yeah classroom video.

[@Ygardmage]

The classic Whitewolf system is additive, then ? But it avoid the probleme of complexe math by adding only smalls numbers of dice _before_ the roll. Admittedly, the curve break a bit at >15 dice, becoming _too_ swingy. The interesting bit is that the newests Storypath (trinity continus, They came from ...) games allow then to spend excess success on more results. i wonder how you would classify that

[@LeFlamel]

FATE dice are just additive, don't let the funny symbols fool you.

[@johnd1441]

I like d20 roll over and d100 roll under. Controversial, I know.

[@drewwilson8756]

Dice Stuff math fatigue at scale roll under aversion more dice = more expectation of success Additive manipulate the result, not the goal the dice sum averages, curves, realities Resultive manipulate the goal, not the result unaltered dice roll with altered results Interpretive interpret the result to reach a goal the Game Action Idea success/fail with consequence nuanced rules and results

[@black_flame_studios]

You included the L5R d10 keep system, but you forgot the most popular d10 keep system: THE FADE TABLETOP, NOW IN STORES, now featured by being shilled in the comments section. But for real. That dice system is wonky to tailor math with. Fun, but wonky.

[@AyameAkito]

I have been toying with the idea of a 3dX dice system but for the love of god I can't decide on 3d8 vs 3d12 on one hand I want to distance myself from people just rolling 1d20+1d4 out of laziness, i debated myself about 3d6 but i can seem to make up my mind about the dice, what I know is that I want the result to be less dependant on the dice roll and more on the character's skill so additive is definetly the approach I want for my Fantasy game with a non-vancian magic system bc Vance can go to hell with its stupid ammo centric magic

[@matthewparker9276]

d12s are underappreciated.

[@mistery8363]

the video's chapters are borked here too goddammit.