MOAR Dice Rolling

This page was imported from a forum post dated March 30, 2016 in the category Chatterbox by Dylan Locke. Its content is likely to be out of date!

Wed, 03/30/2016 - 14:33

DICE ROLLING

I have so many of these posts over the years...

Anyway, I found (another) dice rolling method people might be interested in. It's actually fairly simple and strait forward.

Here's how it works

You roll 1-5 six sided dice. Each added dice represents the effort your character is putting into the action, be it combat, picking a lock, or convincing an angry mob that he did not steal their sacred cookies.

As long as you don't roll a single 1, your action is successful.

HOWEVER. If you roll a 1 your action fails, or backfires with as much potency as you rolled for.

1 - 2die =minor success / minor failure

3 die=moderate success / moderate failure

4 die=outstanding success / horrible failure, KO, broken bones, etc etc

5 die =instant ko / death.

It's like a gamble. The more dice you roll the greater your potential for reward, but also the risk of failure.

Dice rolling is collective so several minor successes can over come a challenging enemy or problem or you can go all in with a single dice roll.

OPTIONAL HIT POINTS

You can also give players hit points if you so desire. If you are running a combat scene I recommend that players start out with 10 hp in each scene, losing the amount of HP they failed to roll. Example, if you rolled 4 dice and failed, you lose 4 hp.

You can also give challenges hit points, say if your character wants to pick a lock he will need 3 success, be it in one dice roll or 3 separate dice rolls.

If you wish to put hp to npcs to decide how long they last in battle I recommend the following.

Nameless mooks =1 hp

More challenging enemies = 3 hp

Boss fights =5 hp

Boss fights with multiple protagonists =8-12

PVP

For when one PC faces another :D

The attacker rolls to see if it hits. If he rolls a single 1 the attack misses completely with out penalty to the player, except that he can not roll for 1 turn.

If he is successful the player being attacked rolls dice to mitigate the damage. For every successful dice roll he roll rolls it subtracts 1 damage from the other players roll, even does bonus damage if he rolls more dice than the attacker and succeeds.

But if the defender rolls a 1 the attack hits with full force, despite the other success he might roll.

Again it's a gamble. Do you try to deflect the attack completely, or roll less dice than the attacker simply to shrug off a few hit points of damage. Or do you risk taking damage by rolling higher than your attacker?

It's actually rather strait forward and easy to use and adds a bit of skill to the mix rather than random chance :)

As always, comments are welcome!

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