PBP-Friendly Dice

Hey, all!

So, I'm in the *very* early stages of developing a homebrew system that makes forum gaming easier. Would you rather have one die to roll at all times (like a plain d6), with a variety of possible modifiers (to account for character leveling), or various dice options (to account for leveling), and fewer modifiers? Why?

Thanks!

Either one would be fine, I think, as long as it's clear when to use which dice/modifiers

I'm opinionated, but I think if your goal is for streamlined play, optimized for forums like this, you're best going with a system like Fate. In Fate every time you roll, it's 4 fudge dice, no need for discussion, no figuring out what you need to roll, always these four dice. Modifiers can be figured out after the roll, and even what skill you were rolling against can be adjusted after the roll has been made.

Contrast this with trying to roll in a White Wolf game, where you need to determine the number of dice, roll the dice, explode the results rerolling both 1s and 10s. You can have three or four posts for a single roll. That can be great fun around the table, seeing critical results stack up, but it's cumbersome on the forums.

I say definitely have more than one dice though. Rolling a single die gives you a flat distribution of results. A 1 on a d20 is just as likely as a 10, and just as likely as a 20. Critical hits happen 5% of the time. The more dice you roll the more uniform your result will be, making average results more likely and great results extraordinary events.

So a few things to consider...

There is no way to arrive at The One Best PbP Dice Mechanic, because just like IRL games; different people want different things out of any given PbP experience, including what the dice do. PbP isn't just one thing.

Furthermore, the way these things tend to work, tuning down the mechanical resolution effort often requires a stepped up narrative resolution effort OR very little actual RNG involvement/importance. It's just a matter of where do you want your time spent, before or after the roll? What do you value more for this campaign; the dice deciding things or fiat deciding things?

And I'm not saying all this to discourage your effort, but rather to demonstrate how/why you should reframe the way you're going about it.

Define design goals first, things you want your system to achieve conceptually, and work backwards into the mechanic from there. Rather than starting with a mechanic and saying, what does this look like?

Personally, I'm partial to a PbtA-like system. 2d6 + modifiers (depending on the game, it will cap at +/-3 or +/-4), with the usual spread of results like 6- is a miss, 7-9 is a success with a cost, 10+ is a success (or like Vagabonds of Dyfed where a 10-12 is a success and 13+ is a critical success).

To jump in, the Cypher System (including The Strange, and Numenera) games are always a d20. There are almost no modifiers, and any can be applied after the fact.

No Thank You, Evil, their kids level game, is the exact same mechanics, but with a d6.

Interesting - thank you! I am aiming for a narrative-heavy game, from the GM and the players, so the dice are really just to settle disputes.

I guess I could also add Open Legend. While the dices are a bit more complex than anything else mentioned above (but not overly so), in OL, every roll counts. So if your player searches for a secret passage and fails his roll, there is no "I'll search too then" from other player. You find a way for the narrative to continue. Perhaps while failing to search for a secret passage, the character made too much noise which attracted a random encounter and the party simply cannot stay here, or perhaps he did found something but the secret passages requires a key to open which the party doe not possess and as such must continue to explore the dungeon...

This a good example of exactly what I was talking about by starting with game design principles.

What kalajel is talking about here is not a dice mechanic. You do not necessarily end up with a narrative facing game mechanic like this by starting with the questions you were asking about dice.

Start with a principle like this and then ask, how do we shape the dice to make this principle the most powerful tool that it can be?

Thanks, all!