However, I'm stuck on a largely mathmagical problem involving probabilities and dice, two things I'm fine with individually, but which start to break me when put together. Halp.
The concept of the game will need dice rolls to be both easy and massively scaleable. The trouble is, there are basically two kinds of dice systems in RPGs; rolling higher/lower than a target number (like SLA/DnD) and hit dice (like SR).
The target number system is nice and simple, but has hard limits to how much it scales. If you are using big dice, like d100, that hard limit is pretty high, but the higher you make the upper limit, the harder it is for people on the low end of the skill spectrum.
The hit dice system is massively more scaleable. In fact, it's essentially unlimited, as long as you have an infinite number of dice. However, it's a lot less simple than the target number system, especially when you are using a lot of dice. SR players will attest to how much of a pain in the ass counting hits on a dozen dice can be; imagine if you were rolling 50, or a hundred?
The possible solution I've thought of is a kind of tiered hit dice system. Effectively, a system where you can swap x of your dice for one die that is worth x hits. So if, say, x was 10, then in the above example you could roll 5 dice and multiply the results up.
This should keep the system a lot simpler (in case you are worried, I'm planning on there being a lot less modifiers and such than SR. If you normally roll 20 dice for something, you will almost always roll 20 dice for that thing. Realism is not the focus of this game). I'm a bit worried about what this will do to the probabilities though. I know that rolling 10d6 is not exactly equivalent to rolling 1d6 and time sing the hits by ten, but what I'm not sure about is *how* different that is? Are you at an advantage, or disadvantage, or is it a wash in the long run? What about if there is a mix, like if your dice pool was 13. Is 13d6 going to give you more hits than 1d6x10 + 3d6?
My guess is that the results you can get, you are about as likely to get, it's just more polarised.
In case it's still not clear what I mean, here is a more solid example:
You have 12 dice. 5 & 6 count as hits, and you need 4 hits.
I know from shadowrun (and basic maths) that a third of dice will be hits, so with 12 dice you will avage 4 hits, so you will, on average, pass this test if you roll normally. Does that mean that you have a roughly 50/50 chance? Not sure. Mathfail.
However, with this system, you could choose to roll 3 dice, with one of em counting for ten.
I know this changes the range of possibilities, because rolling normally you could get anything from 0 to 12 hits, whereas this way you can get 0 to 2, or 12, but nothing in between. But does that make it more likely to pass, or less?
Evey time I come up against something like this, I get a little more forgiving of gaming loopholes being missed in released rpg's.
