Exploding Dice

[Opal]

 

17 minutes ago, steriaca said:

Anyone else think that?

  

 

I thought IED

 

 

 

 

[DentArthurDent]

Things that novice role-players have an intuitive feel for, and expect to be in a game:

        And us old folks, too. Actually, we all do.

 

A) Damage to a living thing tends to be widely variable.

 

Damage to a non-living thing tends to be fairly consistent.

 

C) An Olympic fencer (or shooter) is going to kill me every time. Usually with one shot.

The same is true of a chess master or cybersecurity expert or …

 

D) The “one in a million” when the Olympic fencer trips on a wrinkle in the carpet should be just that: one in a million.

 

E) Experts are much, much more likely to achieve a “critical” success than an average person. And they are much less likely to “critically” fail.

 

F) Most of the time our results are pretty average for our skill level.

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

 

Oh, but HERO can do that, too.  It takes an add-on, of course- an extra step, but if we call them switches and levers then the time dilation factor might go unnoticed.

 

 

Every game has optional rules and things you can use or choose not to (critical hits, for instance), its not like Hero is the only game that has options to choose what sort of game you want.  What makes Hero distinct from most other games is that it allows a much wider range of types of games with these options -- which are not addons, but part of the base rules, you aren't downloading a mod from someone to add to Hero -- instead of being a given prebuilt setting that you make characters in.

[Ninja-Bear]

Well not exploding dice per se but the “If you roll a 20 on a d20 then you do something neat”.  I’ve used that a couple of times in Basic Fantasy to the enjoyment of the kids.  My youngest suggested that if he rolls a 20 then the dagger he throws at the retreating Kobold M-U hits him before he closes the door. And he got it! So the next game I was telling him his brother and cousin the story and his brother was like “pfffts riddiculous!”. But then he goes if I get a 20 I get to pull a dagger and hit the retreating Bullywug! And lo, and behold, he got it! The excitement in the boy’s eyes when someone pulls out a lucky roll is great!

[Cancer]

Our group has dabbled with lots and lots of systems, including a broad variety of dice mechanics.  Playing around with probably distributions, frankly, is something I do for amusement, and exhaustive analysis of what the RNG element can do to you is one of the first things we wrap our heads around when we try out a new system.  That necessarily includes understanding the rules for exploiting edge cases in the RNG (e.g. critical hits and/or failures, exploding dice, and so on).  In short, we think of that sort of thing as a feature to be explored, rather than something to grumble about because it isn't familiar.  HERO's 3d6 is a symmetric, centrally-peaked distribution, something I greatly prefer to the flat distribution of the D20, where the RNG can completely override whatever skill adds/brilliant scheming/favorable situation modifiers you might have.  (The real reason D&D Wizards have an excessive reliance on Magic Missile?  There's no to-hit roll.  Punky damage, but the guilty-of-incestuous-rape dice can't take that away from you.)  By contrast, exploding dice give you a distribution with an asymmetry toward large numbers, as does things like 4k3 rolls (roll 4d6, keep the best 3), though the asymmetric "tail" is nowhere near as extended in x-keep-y systems than in typical exploding dice systems.

 

I've got some pretty bizarre ideas for the RNG element for systems, each of which has its own individual flavor.  Example 1: roll 2d6, and take the difference of the two (subtracting the low value from the high value always).  That gives you a triangular distribution with zero being the lowest AND most probable outcome, and the highest value happening two times in 36.  Not sure how I'd use that, but it's in the mental toolbox.  For that matter, things like the I Ching are in the toolbox as well.

Edited March 29, 2023 by Cancer

[Old Man]

11 hours ago, Cancer said:

Our group has dabbled with lots and lots of systems, including a broad variety of dice mechanics.  Playing around with probably distributions, frankly, is something I do for amusement, and exhaustive analysis of what the RNG element can do to you is one of the first things we wrap our heads around when we try out a new system.  That necessarily includes understanding the rules for exploiting edge cases in the RNG (e.g. critical hits and/or failures, exploding dice, and so on).  In short, we think of that sort of thing as a feature to be explored, rather than something to grumble about because it isn't familiar.  HERO's 3d6 is a symmetric, centrally-peaked distribution, something I greatly prefer to the flat distribution of the D20, where the RNG can completely override whatever skill adds/brilliant scheming/favorable situation modifiers you might have.  (The real reason D&D Wizards have an excessive reliance on Magic Missile?  There's no to-hit roll.  Punky damage, but the guilty-of-incestuous-rape dice can't take that away from you.)  By contrast, exploding dice give you a distribution with an asymmetry toward large numbers, as does things like 4k3 rolls (roll 4d6, keep the best 3), though the asymmetric "tail" is nowhere near as extended in x-keep-y systems than in typical exploding dice systems.

 

I've got some pretty bizarre ideas for the RNG element for systems, each of which has its own individual flavor.  Example 1: roll 2d6, and take the difference of the two (subtracting the low value from the high value always).  That gives you a triangular distribution with zero being the lowest AND most probable outcome, and the highest value happening two times in 36.  Not sure how I'd use that, but it's in the mental toolbox.  For that matter, things like the I Ching are in the toolbox as well.

 

You see the difference mechanic sometimes with opposing dice rolls.  For 2d6 it's the same curve as addition, except you subtract 7.  But it's more elegant in a way because it directly gives a bell curve around an average value, with a range of +-5, that's just easier to design a system around.

 

I've been looking into dice mechanics lately (which is why I was trying to remember how Rolemaster "worked") and man there are a lot of bad systems out there.  I am especially not fond of systems where you roll a single die, thus combining granularity with a flat distribution.  Only slightly better are lossy systems like the one where you throw a pool of dice and only count 6s.  And then yesterday I encountered the Genesys "generic" system that requires custom dice and is almost entirely incomprehensible.

 

Probably the most novel dice mechanic I've come across lately is the one from Reign, where you throw a bunch of d10s and look for sets.  So if you roll three 7s it's considered three "wide" by seven "high", and each dimension corresponds to a different aspect of success--typically width corresponds to speed while height corresponds to magnitude.  Unmatched "waste" dice still get counted for certain things so they're not actually wasted, and there's an opposed roll mechanic as well.

 

What's innovative about Hero is that it incorporates multiple ways to use d6s and even (in the case of damage) multiple ways to read the same roll.  Reading STUN/BODY off the same dice saves time and gives related, but still different, results for separate mechanics.  It's elegant in a way that few systems are, and honestly HERO really doesn't take full advantage of it.  There's no reason you couldn't read the "BODY" off of a skill roll to determine some secondary effect, for example.

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

On 1/17/2023 at 11:15 PM, DentArthurDent said:

 

C) An Olympic fencer (or shooter) is going to kill me every time. Usually with one shot.

The same is true of a chess master 

 

 

 

How the #$%€&× do you play chess?!

 

Because I think I play it way differently, Sir.   Way, _Way_ differently....

 

 

 

[Scott Ruggels]

 The MEchanic of "Exploding dice" I am not a fan of, and I disliked my experiences with Savage Worlds. I tend to dislike narrative systems intensely in general.

[dmjalund]

8 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

How the #$%€&× do you play chess?!

 

Because I think I play it way differently, Sir.   Way, _Way_ differently....

 

 

 

It's exactly like Wizard Chess

[Cygnia]

Battle Chess!

[Old Man]

Chess Boxing

[Cancer]

On 3/29/2023 at 9:46 AM, Old Man said:

Probably the most novel dice mechanic I've come across lately is the one from Reign, where you throw a bunch of d10s and look for sets.  So if you roll three 7s it's considered three "wide" by seven "high", and each dimension corresponds to a different aspect of success--typically width corresponds to speed while height corresponds to magnitude.  Unmatched "waste" dice still get counted for certain things so they're not actually wasted, and there's an opposed roll mechanic as well.

 

I've seen that wide-by-high mechanic somewhere, but it was years ago and I don't remember anything else about the system now, even the name.  The name "Reign" doesn't ring any bells for me.  I'll ask the gang at gaming tonight.

[IndianaJoe3]

On 3/29/2023 at 12:08 AM, Cancer said:

I've got some pretty bizarre ideas for the RNG element for systems, each of which has its own individual flavor.  Example 1: roll 2d6, and take the difference of the two (subtracting the low value from the high value always).  That gives you a triangular distribution with zero being the lowest AND most probable outcome, and the highest value happening two times in 36.  Not sure how I'd use that, but it's in the mental toolbox.  For that matter, things like the I Ching are in the toolbox as well.

 

Was it you that came up with the idea of 2d6+2d6*3? Flat distribution in the middle, but tapered on the ends.

[Cancer]

Not me.  Sean Waters used to have lots of crazy RNG ideas, though.