Roll-high rules for Skills and Attacks and such?

[Kraven Kor]

Where can I find / what are the rules to make it so rolling high is always good, without it changing the % chance of things?

 

I know it reverses the usual equation a bit, but you have to change the starting number to keep the % chance the same or some such.

[The Main Man]

Re: Roll-high rules for Skills and Attacks and such?

 

IIRC, you simply change the base from "11" to "10" and you roll versus that plus any penalties for a Difficulty Class.

[Curufea]

Re: Roll-high rules for Skills and Attacks and such?

 

Or you subtract the normal difficulty from 18.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Roll-high rules for Skills and Attacks and such?

 

For Skills, the formula (21-current skill) gives a target number to be equalled or exceeded on 3d6. Apply normal HERO penalties normally to the die roll.

 

(3D6 + OCV) - (10 + DCV) turns the roll-under HERO combat mechanic to roll-over. The probabilities are exactly the same.

[CTaylor]

Re: Roll-high rules for Skills and Attacks and such?

 

I expect we'll see Hero 6th do this, so its a good idea to start practicing now.

[bigbywolfe]

Re: Roll-high rules for Skills and Attacks and such?

 

Why would you possibly expect that?

[ajackson]

Re: Roll-high rules for Skills and Attacks and such?

 

I don't really expect it, since Steve suggested that he was opposed without strong arguments, but anyway:

 

Attack Rolls: roll OCV + 3d6. You hit if you get DCV+10 or more.

Contest of Skills: roll skill + 3d6. Higher roll wins.

Simple skill check: roll skill + 3d6. 21+ succeeds. Anything that would normally be a skill penalty can instead be reversed and added to difficulty. Note that you may want to subtract 8 from current skill levels (so a familiarity is +0 and a stat roll is 1 + CHA/5), in which case 13+ succeeds.

[Markdoc]

Re: Roll-high rules for Skills and Attacks and such?

 

We use roll high for combat. It's very easy to explain (Add your OCV to your dice roll - you need to get 10 over your targets DCV to hit) - especially since this is way D20 works (OCV is your to hit bonus, DCV is AC Bonus: and AC starts at 10), and if new players have any gaming experience it's likely to include D20.

 

We experimented, way back in the dark ages, with roll high for skills and for consistency's sake also wanted 10 over for success in skill rolls. The way this worked was that you calculated a base skill level (CHA/5) and added skill levels. So a Charcter with DEX18 would have a base of +3 for DEX-related skills and if he bought three levels with acrobatics, he'd have +6 with Acrobatics.

 

Skill rolls were simply given a difficulty scale. IIRC (it's been years since we did this)

Trivial exercise -0

Normal skill use -3

Difficult skill use -6

Very difficult -9

Insanely difficult -12

Legendary feat -15 or higher

 

The GM of course could asign a number anywhere along that scale, not just in -3 steps and always, if the skill use was really routine, no roll is needed. FAMs work the same as now - you can make a roll but get no CHA-based bonus.

 

So (for example) climbing is an everyman skill, so Joe Normal, who has no skill levels could climb a small tree (trivial exercise) by rolling 10+ (he gets no bonus from DEX/5 since it's a FAM). That's equivalent to 11- in the current system.

 

Since all the probablities are the same, you can see that this system made basic tasks very easy compared to the current model, since we increased the chance of success from 8- to 11- for basic tasks. However, we also extended the penalty scale upwards, so to have any chance of success at really difficult tasks you needed a good skill roll. That meant that having 10 points sunk into a skill really meant something - a highly skilled character will amost always succeed at trivial or normal tasks. It also makes probability calculation easy for players - if a PC has +6 in a skill, he knows he can succeed at difficult tasks more than half the time, for example.

 

It was also easy to teach noobs: the basic rule was "You need to get 10 over your target to succeed in any task". We also used the steps up as a way of gauging "how successful" a roll was: for every 3 you made the skill roll by, you gained an extra degree of "success".

 

cheers, Mark