Just making hard rolls

[Brokensoul]

I was playing around with the little we know of the system so far and was wondering how do you just barely make a difficult roll with the Dragon Die mechanic as is.

Examples.
Player A rolls to climb up a slick wall in a huricane and needs to make a role with a target number of 20 (yes probably the far extreme of the scale of difficulty). He has a +1 from his ability score and a +2 from skill bonus. So on 3d6 he needs a "17" +3 = TN of 20. But that means his Dragon Die is at the least a 5 most likely a 6. He can not make the roll at all if the Dragon Die comes up 4 or lower, so how does he do this with the proper narration of just barely making the roll to climb the wall when he gets 5 or 6 successes?

Player B wants to attack the Elven swordmaster with a +5 Dexterity, so the TN to attack is 15. This character is a wizard with a measly -1 in ability score, and no fighting skill. So he needs to roll a "16". That means a 4 atleast on the Dragon Die to hit him. He can't just hit he has to do it very well. This gets worse with the stunt system it would seem as harder stunts are going to probably need better rolls on the Dragon Die to pull off. So the wizard will only ever hit with crazy cool attack not your basic staff swing.

Am I missing something about the Dragon Die mechanic, that they have released yet because this seems a little strange to me.

[Divyr Cousland]

It seems strange to me too, but I would wait for the system to actually be released before assuming that it doesn't correct for that.

[Brokensoul]

I believe I might have been coming at this from the wrong direction. How things work in other games was influencing my opinion on this.

What if in the example with Player A and the wall, he needs 5 or 6 successes to accomplish such a hard task, the only way he makes it is doing it amazingly well. (Like in old school world of darkness when you needed to meet a high TN on the die and needed multiple successes to do something.)

Second situation is a little harder for me to come to terms with if stunts work like how I assume they do. But what if the weak wizards only hope of landing a hit on the master swordsman is some amazing stunt, the basic strikes are no match for his ability and they just get knocked away.

So yeah even if it works like this, its all in how you imagine the action and tell the story, sometimes you just can't do something in a story of adventure without doing it very well.

[bushido11]

I was just thinking about this Dragon Die situation yesterday myself. It didn't make sense to me at first, how if you needed to make a really high roll (14 or 15+ on 3d6 roll), the only kind of success you can achieve are of the amazing variety. But when you think of it from the point of view where "the only way my sorry a$$ can pull this off is if I do something by the seat of my pants", then it kind of makes sense, sort of. It goes both ways, because you see both "success by the skin of your teeth" and "success only by pulling something completely out of left field" in cinema".

And if the wizard has to rely on melee vs. the elven swordmaster, he's pretty much fillet o' mage.

I'm still iffy about using the Dragon Die to determine degree of success. We'll see, either with the release of the product (hopefully it'll be soon), or with a future designer's journal entry.

[Batgirl III]

Most* tests will not require degrees of success. Problem solved.

* (the diary actual says "many," but I am inferring from other games)

[Brokensoul]

This game has got my hamster wheels spinning with anticipation. I am looking forward to the next design diary like a student wanting the last school bell of the year to ring and summer to start.

Anyway the issue (if any to be honest) is not that it is something to worry about on most rolls, wich will be pass/fail but on the ones you want to know how well the person did something, and if the dragon die effects rolls in combat well then that is a lot of rolls.

I also know its to soon to be thinking of house rules or anything, but the simplest solution if this is going to be an issue for anyone I can thing of is is to make the dragon die degree of successes inversed. IE a 6 on the dragon die is 1 degree of succes and a 1 is 6 degrees of success. This is counter intuitive to the way people feel about rolling high is always better, but it makes it so if you need an 18 on a roll you only succed by 6 degrees of succes, now the only way to do that is if you can make the roll on a 13 or lower.

I understand why this is not the core mechanic, first this issue might not be an issue for the majority of people, and second as a game trying to bring in new players and tap into other markets it makes sense to make the rules simple and very intuitive to grasp. The idea of the Dragon Die rolling higher is better is the default.

[Dr. Halflight]

I've been thinking about this too.

I think the easiest method is to just use the roll for many/most situations & ignore the Dragon Die as a representation of Quality.

However, you could roll a 4th D6 of a different color & make it the Dragon Die. It doesn't add to the 3 task dice, but if you succeed, the Dragon Die determines Quality. 1 would be low, 6 High.

However, I'm not planning on making any decisions until after the rules are released.

[Irontruth]

But when you think of it from the point of view where "the only way my sorry a$$ can pull this off is if I do something by the seat of my pants", then it kind of makes sense, sort of. It goes both ways, because you see both "success by the skin of your teeth" and "success only by pulling something completely out of left field" in cinema".

I'd say this is probably the best way to describe it (at least as far as I'm envisioning it).

When you're trying something against nearly impossible odds, like needing to roll a 17+ on 3d6, regardless of how you actually accomplish the task, it's amazing.

I'll use a famous story from mountain climbing called "The Belay". In 1953 on an attempt of K2, 6 climbers were descending with their comrade who was suffering from various forms of altitude sickness. One climber slipped, taking the climber he was roped to with him. That guy fell on the rope connecting two other climbers, one of whom fell on the rope connecting another climber to the injured man. That's 6 people in total falling. The last guy who wasn't falling managed to grab one of the ropes, while at the same time wedging his ice axe between two rocks. It was an absolutely incredible thing to pull off and it couldn't have "barely succeeded", it was something that took tremendous strength, quickness, experience and speed of thought.

Another way I would think about it, if a roll needs a 17+ to accomplish, I'd equate that to what you might see on the list like the top 10 plays of all time in the NFL, NBA, MLB or any other sport. Even when they barely happen, they are executed to perfection.

[Divyr Cousland]

Nice story, Irontooth and illustrates it well. I've been pondering this problem for a bit and lo and behold, Dr. Halflife comes up with an absolutely BRILLIANT inverse solution. Well done! I would have never thought of that.

Hard Rolls are tasty wth butter!

[Warden-UK]

Yes but this doesn't accomodate for those really pathetic success results.

Are you saying if I only just succeed at painrting the Mona Lisa with an incredible 17+ roll, it would be a work of classic art? Or if I barely succeeded at fixing my car's engine with an 18+ it would be working perfectly? I think not.

What I'm trying to say, is that these 'succeedijng by the slimmest of margins' do not allow for the crude, inefficent, and quite ponderous quality of successes as well.

Are you saying that every 17+ success is going to be a jaw dropping wonderful quality end result? Or are you saying that be it a 5 or 6 on the die, we should perhaps read the end result as being not so much a fantastic result with a truly incredible end product, but an indication that one has barely succeeded by the skin of hs teeth with mimimal success?

Personally I'm going to go with a 4th Dragon dice that has no bearing on the other 3d6 result.

[Divyr Cousland]

That's the beauty of inverse dragon dice idea.

If you fix your car engine with an 18 and you don't know an alternator from your battery, it would be a partial success. On the other hand, if you are excellent at it and require a 12, get a 14 and the dragon dice is a "1", you not only fix it, but increase the fuel efficiency. just an example.

[Irontruth]

That's the beauty of inverse dragon dice idea.

If you fix your car engine with an 18 and you don't know an alternator from your battery, it would be a partial success. On the other hand, if you are excellent at it and require a 12, get a 14 and the dragon dice is a "1", you not only fix it, but increase the fuel efficiency. just an example.

I understand what you're saying and it's an interesting concept. The better you are (skill bonus) the more likely you are to succeed with a low result on the dragon die. With a high skill though, it's really just random what degree of success you have. For instance, if you have +5 to your roll and need a 12 total, you're probably going to succeed no mater what is on the dragon die, so the degree of success is random using either method. Not having seen the system though, I don't think I'd use this.

I'm only talking about raw rolls for the next part.

If you need an 18 to fix the car, it's an amazing feat that you fixed it at all. Even when you "barely" succeed, it's an amazing success.

If you go back to the climbing story, it's extraordinary that he saved those men. The degree of success becomes inherent in the task itself, so using these extreme examples, I think the dragon die is less of an issue and more just a matter of success or failure. Usually in RPG's, degree of success only matters in how you describe the action, not in what actually happens and if you read the design diary, I think thats what you're going to find here as well.

[bushido11]

For the most part, having a separate die (especially when included in the three that are required for task rolls) determining degree of success apart from whether or not the roll is successful just seems silly to me. Perhaps they want the action to go fast so that rather than having to determine degree of success, you simply look at the Dragon Die to determine it.

"Did you beat the difficulty? (Looks at dice roll and adds modifiers.) Yes you did! How good was your success? (Looks at Dragon Die roll.) A 6! Holy smokes, you did awesome!"

I understand the appeal (from my limited knowledge of the Dragon Die) from the above prospective that I mentioned. If the inverse Dragon Die idea by Divyr Cousland were presented, it may help out with the discrepancies of either succeeding like an all-star or not at all, to a point (as Irontruth pointed out). I have another idea to eliminate the need to determine degree of success from a roll (borrowed from L5R): Determine how good you want your skill attempt to be, adjust the difficulty, and THEN roll. Success means that you've succeeded as planned, but failure means that you blew the attempt. No need to figure out degree of success after the roll and no need to deal with the (for now) wonky Dragon Die.