Powers: A Dice problem

[Joose]

This morning I had a sudden flash of inspiration; an idea that would possible fix an issue with my Powers game that would also make the game easier to understand and faster to play. I think. I want to run it past some other Minds to get your impressions of it and see if my thinking is wonky somewhere before I go to the effort of rewriting what would need to be rewritten.

Its a pretty fundamental change to the way the dice rolling system works. Here's my thought process:

Initially I went for a d6 based dice pool system, like Shadowrun. This is because the system absolutely needed to be infinitely scalable. A "roll dx and add y" system isn't infinitely scalable: you can only scale either the number of sides on the dice or the number you add to the roll. If you add too many sides to dice they become a ball, and if you add too big a number to a dice roll eventually the dice roll itself becomes irrelevant. Imagine, for example, having a SLA character with a skill of 40000. As long as you don't critically fail you are always fine. Or imagine a D&D character with a +ten billion to hit. They will always hit. The dice roll has no effect. A dice pool system on the other hand can scale as much or as little as you like, you just keep adding/taking away dice and keep making the required number of hits bigger/smaller. You can even add an "exploding 6s" style mechanism to make it so that everything is theoretically possible, just increasingly unlikely. In theory, throwing edge at a roll in Shadowrun could allow you to shoot the wings off a fly from the extreme range of your weapon whilst blindfolded and under the effects of hallucinogenics with no appropriate weapon skill underwater and almost dead, you would just need to roll a huge number of 6s one after the other. You are more likely to win the lottery maybe, but its still at least possible. That level of scaling was what I wanted for this game, and dice pools seemed the simplest system for achieving that.

However, in practise you can quickly get to the stage where you need a bucket full of dice and every roll would need a five minute break whilst you count up the hits. Which would, obviously, suck massive balls. So I came up with the Tier system: after you get above a certain number of dice instead of getting more dice you go back to one and go up a Tier. One Tier 2 die becomes the equivalent of all those Tier 1 die put together. It makes the probabilities go a little funny, but its close enough for gaming purposes and it means you will never need more than a certain number of dice no matter how high up your stat goes.

It occurred to me this morning though that the Tier system preserves the infinite scaling without actually needing it to be a dice pool system any more. So I am now proposing the following to replace it:

Stats are Rank # Tier #, for example Rank 5 Tier 2. Also written r5t2.
Roll d20 + rank
Against same rank just beat the opponents roll + their rank
To beat higher ranks roll a 20 to go up a Tier
Against lower rank only fail on natural 1, same rank or higher always fails on a natural 1
Against two or more higher rank cant succeed (without special rules from specific components)
Against two or more lower rank automatic success (again without special rules from specific components)
When a skill gets to Rank 20, levelling it up again puts it back to Rank 1 on the next Tier up.

So for example:

I have something that is r7t1 and its being put against your r10t1 ability. I roll a 12 for a total of 19, you roll a 4 for a total of 14. I win.
I have something that is r3t2 and its being put against your r1t1 ability. I roll a natural 1, so I fail regardless of what you roll.
I have something that is r7t3 and its being put against your r5t4 ability. I have to roll a natural 20 to make my ability up to r4 like yours, then we roll as normal.
I have something that is r15t1 and its being put against your r2t5 ability. I cannot succeed without some special rules in place due to a power (for example, my power might have the Go For It component that allows me to keep ranking up my power through consecutive natural 20s)

I *think* this will be quicker to play, easier to understand and keep track of and yet still allow you to keep levelling up things theoretically forever, as there is no intrinsic reason you couldn't have something r1t99999. It will also massively simplify some of the issues I'm having with the more complicated Components which is why I still haven't put out a new version, and actually wouldn't be all that horrible to change to. Thoughts?

[Dog Pants]

It took a few examples before I worked out what you were on about, but now I get it. It's a nice system, simple and scaleable. You lose the extremes of probability for it that you have with exploding dice, but then so do most systems. I think it's viable enough to be worth a shot, and I've not quite seen anything like it. The only constructive criticism I can think of is to switch the annotation around, tier then rank. You're probably more interested in comparing tier first, so it's clearer whether you even need to roll, or what you need if you can. For example (and to see if I've understood):

T1R6 vs T2R4 = You can see right away that the first guy needs a 20, because he's a tier below.

Just reads easier to me that way, big numbers (in scale, not numerically) first.

[Joose]

That's an excellent point actually, I shall go with that.

I'm going to word it better in the actual rules, that was just my desperate brain-purge to make sure I didn't forget about it. Hopefully it will be a little easier to understand when I've taken a bit more time over it

[Dog Pants]

I was going to suggest using something other than numbers for scale too, but that would only really work if you had a limited scale, which you don't. There's only so many varieties of fruit out there. Banana - Orange - Peach - Apple - Lemon - Pineapple - Kiwi - Lime, and so on.

[buzzmong]

I quite like it, I second Pantsu's suggestion though of switching them around.