Doing Things 2

One of the things I dislike for many RPGs is their granularity - not because such granularity is bad, but because it's mostly unnecessary.

Real world realism relies on granularity because the real world is granular, and small difference can make a difference - however, the world of an RPG can never be as granular as the real world and such granularity just slows things down.

For a game of action, where flexibility and speed of resolution are desired, real world realism definitely isn't what I'm going to aim for.

Years ago I was a fan of TORG and DC Heroes, both of which are cinematic/action movie games with ungranular rules which helped speed up the game, at the cost of some real world realism.

Looking at this, and realising that RPGs are vague simulations of reality, I'm going to use one of my favourite non-linear progressions of 1, 3, 6, 10, etc. It allows me to have a broad scale of values, but keep with a narrow set of values.

Rather than having attributes and skills with values of 1-20, meaning theres a range of 1-20 slightly different results, i'm going to separate those numbers into bands - and those are the values that characters will have.

So, band a = value of 1-2, band b = value of 3-5, band c = value of 6-9, etc - allowing me to have 10 bands and values of 1-55, with the average being band c and value 6-9 for most people.

Now, looking at the values involved, characters will roll 2d10 + a value to overcome a difficulty rating.
That means an average band c will get 2d10 +6-9 [11 +6-9] when he rolls dice.

Ok, so we can see what characters will do.
As mentioned above, characters will overcome a value based on the difficulty of what they're trying to do, and it looks like the values above can be used for this !!

Looking at the average difficulty value that the average person, with a band c skill or attribute, can succeed at we have a value of 2d10 +6-9 to overcome a difficulty value of 6-9 about 1/2 the time.

That infers there are bands of difficulty, from band a = value of 1-2 to band b = value of 3-5 to band c = value of 6-9, etc.

Well, that looks promising.
But I don't think the variability of numbers will help the game run faster - so lets streamline things.

Attributes and skills have band a = value of 1 [instead of 1-2], band b = value of 3 [instead of 3-5], band c = value of 6 [instead of 6-9], etc.

This makes the dice roll to do anything 2d10 +1 or +3 or +6, etc
Much nicer and faster.

In the same way, difficulty values become band a = value of 1, band b = value of 3, band c = value of 6, etc.

Now, one of the things I've seen in game designs that I like are varying degrees of success - I feel it adds more to the game, and allows extra results for succeeding at things.

But how to implement it ??
Just a simple minimum dice roll [critical success] and maximum dice roll [critical failure] ??
Why can't the existing values be used ??

This would become, succeed by value of 1 = band a success, succeed by value of 3 = band b success, succeed by value of 6 = band c success, and so on.

that would give us...
2d10 +6 to overcome a difficulty of 6, with success value of 1, 3, 6

So, it looks like we have a set of attribute/skill values, a set of difficulty values and a set of success values.

It's not finished, but a good core is there.