2D6.
Posted by nefchast on May 14, 2009
No video game talk today. (tomorrow will see an overview of Killing Floor that releases today and unlocks on Steam at some funky time — like 1-2 PM EST) So I’ll have a brief explanation of my choice of the 2D6 for a pen and paper game system. *Fun!* I know, I know…
The first and major reason for choosing 2D6 was the availability of said dice — everyone that has a few board games lying around likely has them. Since I don’t plan on selling this mechanic or anything I might put out there about it — making the entire process as free and easy as possible sounded good to me.
Secondly, I wanted to try and make the system as simple as possible. I don’t want a lot of dice to go through, I don’t want a lot of math, I just want something that gives a random factor to the game’s actions and something to base some difficulty on.
So, that’s the reasoning. Now to the maths. It’s simple to figure out the probability of rolls using 2D6 — there’s 21 possible combinations. Of that 2, 3, 11, and 12 all have only one combination — or roughly 4.7% chance of being rolled, each. 4, 5, 9, 10 all have 2 combinations each — or roughly 9.5% chance of being rolled, each. And 6, 7, 8 which all have 3 combinations — or roughly 14% chance of being rolled, each. Using percent chances it’s pretty easy to tell the difficulty of something. So, if I set a skill check to require a 6+ to be rolled, you will know that you have a 15/21 chance of rolling successfully — or 71.4% — and it should be pretty easy, but the random factor is still there and you could just as easily fail.
The next step is determining how skills effect the chance of success, or if they should at all. Since I’m still building and testing everything, this is the portion that is still being refined. I’m not too worried about exact skills since I want this system to be generic and work in any genre — and you wouldn’t have something like laser based skills in a fantasy game, well… you could. At the moment I’m looking at skills having 4 levels and be categorised as basic and advanced. (should be pretty similar… yeah, it does work) Using a skill that you don’t have trained will provide a negative bonus to your roll, simulating the lack of the skill, while having the skill and having higher levels of the skill will add a positive bonus. I think this is likely the best way to handle them, though some skills will not effect rolls so much as other skills. (say, advanced shield training increases the amount of damage blocked)
Attributes are also a part of this unfinished portion. How should they effect the character? Skills? Rolls? At the moment I’ve only gotten down what I feel should be the basic attributes to effect characters in any given genre: Physique, Coordination, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma; and that starting stats will not be rolled to be determined, but players will be given a set amount of points to distribute. The reasoning for this is that some characters are rolled too powerful, while others will be too weak… the only problem I can see with having distributed stats is players using a dump stat or two — so I’m working on making every attribute worthwhile to have at least some points in. This will likely be done in either negative bonuses to rolls that are using that attribute, or skills that use that attribute costing more experience to gain. (and skills lower in cost when you get higher attribute points…)
Still quite basic, as you can see. I can definitely see how larger games (MMOs especially) take awhile to balance, if they ever get balanced. It’s quite a lot of work and thought, even on a simple system like this.
