[Nevercast] - Mechanics Reference
Ar Kayon:
I've taken a cold, hard look at the dice rank setup adopted by Nevercast. It worked perfectly for my fantasy game, but firearms changes everything because a lot of aspects are based heavily on chance. The dice rank system fell apart when I looked at situations when a character goes up point blank range for 1d4-1 attack die and simply cannot critically fail.
This is a sobering reality, but I can think of several alternative methods where the same outcome concept (sans the critical failure oddity) is possible. I just need to figure out which will be the most streamlined.
horomancer:
sorry for breaking your game :(
horomancer:
I was doing some thinking on your critical failure conundrum. Currently your skill system is just that, a skill system. The non-skill based chance of mechanical failure in a firearm is outside the scope of the skill mechanic. It would stand to reason that a much better method of dealing with this probability is to add an additional mechanic, loathsome as that may be for clean game design, rather than rework the skill mechanic to accommodate.
Unless you want a critical failure possibility for every action, like kung fu master slipping in mud or 1337 computer haxor pulling cord out by accident, in which case a new mechanic may be in order.
Barring that, you may want to have a fire arm failure rate that gets rolled every time an attack is made with a gun. A shitty firearm, poor ammo, or lack of proper care could boost a failure rate into the double digits on a percentile, while professionals that spend serious money would have failure rates in the sub 1% category. Rolling percentiles wouldn't be unwieldy, but it would be far from elegant.
The problem i see is that well made and well maintained firearms have issues far less than 1% of the time currently, and your dice mechanic is poor at dealing with such small percentiles, hence a d100, or better yet a d1,000 (3d10). Such low probability could be glossed over as an 'It just doesn't happen' to the combat focused characters, but I know you like simulation to much for that.
Ar Kayon:
Take note that the combat system does not simulate blow for blow mechanics. On the contrary, a combat action is actually a series of actions based upon a generalized tactic. So, when you fire a weapon, you are more than likely to squeeze the trigger several times within a combat phase.
However, I have conceived of an alternative dice rank method. In this model, the success/failure target numbers aren't fixed. Instead, one die is used for everything, and the target success ranges are based on the dice rank. The die I used for this model is a d100. I like the d100 because percentile dice seem to fit a futuristic motif, in my opinion (a combat scanner may take your firing stats in training and then model your chances as a percentage, for instance), and I also like the evenness of numerical progression. So, DR 0 could have a 50% success rate; perhaps the critical success being 90-100 percent and moderate success being 75 to 89. Critical failures could be set at 5 percent for every dice rank. Perhaps for firearms, an effect roll would be required after that, but a roll would only occur for 1 in 20 combat actions for an individual character, rather than once every combat action in your proposed model. And even then, a weapon malfunction may not occur as a quality weapon would require a high roll (if the weapon is so good that failure is 1 in 1000, then rolling 99-100 on the failure die would model that, if my shitty math is correct; the initial die is 1 in 20, so I multiplied 20 times 50: the average number of rolls it would take to score a malfunction on the failure die).
horomancer:
The only trouble i see from such a mechanic is having to keep a chart handy for your success brackets. It was nice in the multi dice mechanic knowing that 1= Major Success, 2= success, and 3= Minor success. The dice took all the thinking out of it, which is nice.
All and all that is a small price to pay, and makes for less rolls so hopefully it doesn't complicate any other matters.
Given a larger, non-changing numeric range to work with, will you keep weapon and equipment stats effecting the 'skill' number to calculate DR, or will you have them be fixed % that apply directly to the roll?
Also
http://anydice.com/
this should be helpful
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