Resolution system

[aia]

Hya! I posted this very interesting essay on dice mechanics on another board with no or little success:

https://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/systemdesign/torben_rpg_dice.html

I find this essay really well done and covering the topic under several different views (not only the quantitative!).
I used it to have a cross check with the system i designed for my game and i was fully satisfied...
Any thought about it? Is there any fellow in search of a new dice resolution system?

 

[xanther]

My unvarnished thoughts....

The general description is to me D&D biased and lacking in knowledge of other approaches. Find the ideas too simplistic to be very useful.

Poor categorization of dice pools. Linear vs Non-Linear is a very poor way in my view. Rather a better categorization is "add together" or "count success."

Completely misses the first add together examples: Traveller and TFT.
(perhaps because these are very streamlined and go against the bias that dice pool = complicated = new fangled)

Count success dice pools operate differently than add together, very different statics calculation. They also miss some seminal games that use this mechanic. Heck, most old miniature war games used this approach, such as Chainmail

So as an aside...a very brief history of dice resolution mechanics for RPG and it's progenitors is roughly:
d6 dice pool count success: Chainmail (IIRC) but a lot of miniature war games of the time used it
d20: D&D
2d6 add together: Traveller
then... "BRP" d100, TFT 3D6 add together


The statistics math looks like copied from wikipedia. Not useful in that if such math is difficult it will be gibberish; and if such math is not difficult these formulations are trivial and add nothing practical.

The mini program may be useful, don't know, but suspect.

What would be more useful are links to sites that can do the calculation for you if looking for roll dice and add them together stats, there are many.


Yes I am always in search of dice resolution systems, and love to do statistical calculations (but I will do math for fun). Could go on and on about it
Personally, in 40+ years of playing RPGs I find count success to do everything I want; which is very weird in a full circle way as that is what did in the 1970s with miniature war games. It does depend on what you want and some dice resolution mechanics are harder to work with than others.

 

[PolarBlues]

John Kim is a knowledgable, well established historian of our hobby. He's been doing this forwever and his work is always well reseach.
I can't fault the analysis, I can't follow the maths.

I do my hobby hacking using Fudge, so that the maths is already worked out and I can focus on the creative stuff. And that is fine as long as I am not trying to design a game that is not natively well-suited to Fudge. Fudge was the first, but now there are a lot of open game engines for different purposes. So while I would never deny someone the pleasure of building a entire system from scratch, it's not necessary in order to create your game.

PS Do we need to compile a Grand List Of Open Source Systems?

 

[aia]

Yes I am always in search of dice resolution systems, and love to do statistical calculations (but I will do math for fun). Could go on and on about it

Well, in this case as soon as i have completed my game i will be happy to send you an abstract on the main dice mechanics for the action resolution (which is applied extensively on every situation, be it combat or non-combat) so that you can provide me with your educated evaluation!