We have been discussing moving 4e from a d100 scale to a d10 scale but it came up that a d20 would give all the benefits of a d10 and mitigate the problems with the lack of granularity. This fixes a large number of problems and would only slightly make math in the system harder. This math most frequently includes adding a skill value to an attribute value.
Only then it became apparent that even that math could be eliminated if skills became an Advantage roll. Currently in 3e an advantage is a percentile value. You roll against your attribute and if you have an advantage, you roll to get under it’s percentage. If you make it, you get an extra success.
Skills have always had the problem that they don’t really integrate well with the success columns. Making them an advantage roll means they’d dovetail in nicely.
But isn’t that too many rolls? (It’s not like there are any shortage of rolls here) Yes, that’s going to slow things down too much. Unless…
Rolling looks like it’s going to change a lot here. This is where I think it’s going to be. We already talked about rolling a d20 for your attribute. You’d then collect anything that gives you an Advantage while your opposition collects anything that would give you an Impairment. For each Advantage you pick up a d10. For each Impairment your opposition picks up a d10. All the dice are then thrown.
Here’s were it gets a little weird, but a good weird. You know what Advantages you’re using. They’re simply values of 1-10. For example, a TF E-Suit pilot scanning with their sensors, they’d have one Advantage at 2 for their skill (1d10) one for the TF’s sensor array 4 (2d10). The player rolls a d20 and 2d10. On the d20 they get a 19 and fail that roll. On the 2d10 they get a 7 and a 3. The seven doesn’t do them any good, but they assign the 3 to their sensor advantage of 4 and get one success!
At the same time the opposition (The GM or maybe another player) rolls for any Impairments and gets to assign the dice values just like the player got to assign the Advantage rolls.
I like how that looks at the table. The difference in dice sizes indicates which die goes to the attribute roll and stacking a bunch of Advantages just makes them more and more valuable. In one toss, the values are compared and the task is resolved.
Then there’s the talk about guaranteeing an Advantage by spending an action. I was debating if you could do that with the main attribute check but with skills being an Advantage, an action can guarantee that as a success. It’s elegant and fits.
The other thing I’m working on is possibly making stunts and consequences universal across different situations (personal combat, vehicle combat, social interaction, tech challenges, hacking etc). It would reduce the need to memorize different lists but it would generalize a lot of the descriptive and prescriptive value of the stunts though. Right now, harmonizing personal and vehicle combat is something I definitely want, the others may have to remain separate but I think they can follow along similar lines of each other. I don’t know if that makes things any easier though.
In all Stunts will require some look up (which would be on the back of the character sheet) or memorization but they’re intended to remove the need to roll on charts or tables while in play.
I have the feeling that I want to move hacking to something more immediate and have it follow something like the social interaction conditions that I’ve talked about before. I haven’t done any real work on that yet though. It just seems promising.
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