Traveller with Advantage/Disadvantage

[Bunch]

I was curious what it might be like using a A/D mechanic in a 2d6 system like Traveller

My first thought was roll best of 2d6 plus a straight 1d6. That looks like this:
Advantage
Disadvantage

vs

best 2 of 3d6
Advantage
Disadvantage

or

best 2 of 4d6
Advantage
Disadvantage


I was thinking maybe Jack of All Trades just gives you Advantage on rolls.

anyways just thinking about this.

 

[Raleel]

best 2 of 4 skews it very hard. I would avoid that.
https://anydice.com/program/1e5bd with all of them. graph view really shows it.

best/worst of 2 + roll one gives a very odd curve. https://anydice.com/program/1e5be

I added in a "straight" adv/dis with just a best/worst roll of 2. It skews a little higher, but also doesn't have quite the weird curve on the "off" side. If you are getting to the point of rolling dice for adv, i figure just roll it again.

 

[Nobby-W]

I was curious what it might be like using a A/D mechanic in a 2d6 system like Traveller

My first thought was roll best of 2d6 plus a straight 1d6. That looks like this:
Advantage
Disadvantage

vs

best 2 of 3d6
Advantage
Disadvantage

or

best 2 of 4d6
Advantage
Disadvantage


I was thinking maybe Jack of All Trades just gives you Advantage on rolls.

anyways just thinking about this.

One of the nice things about 2D6 is that you can get reasonable behaviour from the dice by just adding or subtracting numbers. No advantage/disadvantage mechanics, no contested rolls, no re-roll mechanics. Just roll 2D6 and a bit of straightforward mental arithmetic, plus it's easy to calculate the odds or do some basic analysis on a system for balance. For (say) a PbP, it is also quite good as it allows you to retrospectively add boosts without going through another rolling cycle.

Advantage is quite significant on a D20 as it substantially changes the probability density function of the dice. It make much more sense to use an advantage mechanic on dice with a flat distribution than on something with a bell curve like 2D6 or 3D6.

The best Jack of all trades rule I ever saw was one where you could use it to spread other skills. You could use skills related to some other skill at the lesser of that skill or the Jack-o-T level -1. It only started to kick in when you had Jack-o-T at levels greater than one. If, for example, you had rifle-3 and Jack-o-T-2 you could use a SMG (for example) at skill-1.

 

[Tulpa Girl]

Doesn't the most recent version of Traveller by Mongoose do this (renamed as 'boons' and 'banes')?

 

[Séadna]

Doesn't the most recent version of Traveller by Mongoose do this (renamed as 'boons' and 'banes')?

Yeah that's right.

 

[Bunch]

Doesn't the most recent version of Traveller by Mongoose do this (renamed as 'boons' and 'banes')?

Well then. I guess it wasn't a horrible idea just an unoriginal one.

 

[Voros]

I coulda sworn I read a 2d6 game recently where it had a mechanic where you could add third d6 and take the highest and in other situations the extra d6 but take the lowest. Not sure what the maths on that look like.

 

[AsenRG]

I coulda sworn I read a 2d6 game recently where it had a mechanic where you could add third d6 and take the highest and in other situations the extra d6 but take the lowest. Not sure what the maths on that look like.

Mongoose Traveller 2e, Barbarians of Lemuria/Barbarians of the Afthermath/Honor+Intrigue and probably many others I can't think of right now.

 

[Ladybird]

One of the nice things about 2D6 is that you can get reasonable behaviour from the dice by just adding or subtracting numbers. No advantage/disadvantage mechanics, no contested rolls, no re-roll mechanics. Just roll 2D6 and a bit of straightforward mental arithmetic, plus it's easy to calculate the odds or do some basic analysis on a system for balance. For (say) a PbP, it is also quite good as it allows you to retrospectively add boosts without going through another rolling cycle.

Mathematically yes, but Adv/Disadv has a particular table feel that that doesn't replicate; it's fun to throw a bad die away, it's upsetting to throw a good die away.

 

[Nobby-W]

Mathematically yes, but Adv/Disadv has a particular table feel that that doesn't replicate; it's fun to throw a bad die away, it's upsetting to throw a good die away.

That's in interesting perspective. My formative years weren't spent on D&D, so D&D-isms don't have much emotional resonance. However, if D&D has some sort of formative role in one's role playing experience I could see that sort of thing being significant. I have a similar nostalgia for buckets-of-dice systems from a few sessions playing White Wolf's Street Fighter game, although the kurtosis of a 10D10 dice pool is terrible. At one point I thought about using a buckets-of-dice system for a game, so I did an analysis of the probabilities (see the link) to see what big dice pools looked like. In the end, my conclusion is that it's quite fun to roll, but the distributions of the dice rolls wasn't all that good for a role playing game.

 

[Ladybird]

That's in interesting perspective. My formative years weren't spent on D&D, so D&D-isms don't have much emotional resonance. However, if D&D has some sort of formative role in one's role playing experience I could see that sort of thing being significant. I have a similar nostalgia for buckets-of-dice systems from a few sessions playing White Wolf's Street Fighter game, although the kurtosis of a 10D10 dice pool is terrible.

It's not so much a D&D thing, it's more about the tactility of physical dice themselves; many games have effectively trained players to think "rolling more dice is good!", which is a thing modifiers can't quite replicate on their own. There's a strong overlap with the things discussed in the re-roll thread.

 

[Bunch]

That and advantage/disadvantage always stays in the same bounds where +N can potentially exceed the boundaries of a roll.
If it's used to adjust the target number that doesn't happen unless something really silly has happened.