Some RPGs will give you a fistful of dice to roll, and when they’re 6-sided, adding up the pips fast is a useful skill. Back in time before time when West End Games had the license to make a Star Wars RPG, that was based on d6, and I got pretty good at it. Conversely, the guy I know with the worst ADHD couldn’t do it for shit. They call that dyscalculia, I’m told.
Another time I was playing that wild west RPG, but like, the post-apocalypse version, and you could reroll max results. My gun only did 3d6 damage but I scored like 52 and insta-killed a kinda tough enemy. Memorable occasions, those imaginary victories.
I’m inclined to make my own TTRPG, if I ever finish it, d6-based like that. Somebody put up an “open game license” type deal for the old WEG d6 system, which could be a thing to use. But still, what about those with dyscalculia? Rules lite is big in the indie space for a good reason.
Have I ever posed this question before? Don’t know if I have. How do you prefer to roll, if at all?
–
i said like too many times. did u know i’m from the west coast and it’s, like, after midnight?
I don’t know much about dyscalculia, and my brief attempt to look into it didn’t help much, so I don’t know if this suggestion would help or not.
Would a roll-under system work? I’m thinking something like the Basic Role-Playing system Chaosium uses for Runequest and Call of Cthulhu. You just roll a d100 and check your skill rating, and succeed if it’s equal to or under. No actual arithmetic involved. Sure, there’s some math needed to set up your character sheet (I fear that will be inevitable), but that can be done with help from someone neurotypical beforehand. If the d100 is too much with the numbers, maybe build your game around a deck of cards. You could “draw under” instead of “roll under”.
i do think he did better with d100. been a long time and my recollection may be imperfect.
You ever play Warhammer? It has you roll a ton of d6s multiple times. But you don’t really add them up, you just check take all the dice above the threshold, and use those in the next roll. I appreciate the focus on tactility in that design.
@Siggy:
Shadowrun does something similar. You have a pool of dice based on your stats and skills, and you roll them all. Every 5 or 6 counts as a ‘hit’, and if you have enough hits based on the difficulty of the task, you succeed. For some things, a 6 can be re-rolled to potentially add another hit.
If half the dice show a 1, there’s a ‘glitch’ and something goes badly wrong or at least weird. It’s possible to succeed and glitch at the same time, which means a negative effect despite the success.
If you have at least four times as many dice as hits that you need, you have the option of ‘buying the hit’ and just saying you got it. That’s the equivalent of Pathfinder or D&D’s ‘taking ten’ where if you’re not under stress and even a slightly below-average roll would succeed, you can assume the success without rolling and risking bad results.
@4 & @5: The original Shadowrun rules had another variation of that idea. In that system you rolled D6s in the hopes of hitting a target number. Any roll of a 6 was rerolled and added to that die’s total, so target numbers could be 7+. As long as you reached the target number at least once you succeed, the more times you reached it the better you did.
It scaled nicely across difficulty in that as the target number went up things became very difficult without becoming impossible. It was dumped because the math was quirky, increasing the target number didn’t have an easily understand impact on the real chance of getting success.
I really don’t have a preference for a system, it is more a question if it works well with the game. A story/role playing heavy game favors a mechanically light system, something that won’t interrupt the story to roll dice or check the rules often. A more adventure oriented system where the is party finding a way to out maneuver opponents in a fight and figuring out how to beat challenges needs more complex game mechanics and favors a dice system that allows for smaller and more numerous modifiers.
There are lots of interesting variants, though thanks to the OP framing, I was sticking to ones that wouldn’t need much math or addition.
Ars Magica, for example, uses a single D10 where a ‘0’ is an automatic 0 (and possible botch) and a ‘1’ means roll again and double the result (with a 0 on later rolls meaning 10), with repeated 1s doubling even more.
A little local gaming company run by somebody I knew (that also somewhat deservedly went under) used a 2D6 system where the dice had to be different colours: one was positive, the other was negative, and sixes on either die got re-rolled and added (or subtracted for the negative die) so the average roll was always 0 but things could get arbitrarily high or low.
And that’s even before you get into things like Champions where you could end up rolling 20D6 and adding them all up if you were playing a sufficiently high-powered game…
And on the other side you had the old Amber Diceless RPG. Yes, Diceless. Everything was done either via auctions or role-playing your way into convincing the GM to give you the advantage. It really went more for the ‘collaborative storytelling’ aspect, but also as a result it required a really good GM and trust from the players.
sig – i liked the tactile feel of sorting d6 into groups that were easier to add up, which wasn’t always by number, just whatever felt right in the moment. i got to where i could tell if a roll was average or worse based on the pairs which add up to sevens – how many 6-1 3-4 or 2-5 pairs you could see at a glance. scooting around, pinching a line of three betwixt tha fingers. mild sensory fun. i did play the warhammer ttrpg once or twice, and bloodbowl.
jen – needing half the dice to be 1s before a glitch happens is better than the way some games handle that kind of mechanic. still, it’s probably too easy to get half 1s on d6… otoh, i’ve had absurd botch results on a similar “count the successes” system that used d10s, with world of darkness games. i don’t love “disastrous result” systems, whatever their names. that buying the hit idea is kinda cool too.
j’m – interesting history there. i can’t say i lack prejudices for systems, myself. if i’m gonna gm something with a cast of more than five, i’ll probably favor rules lite every time, altho… i am really drawn to systems that allow for more elaborate description of a character’s abilities. it’s what i came up with, so maybe that’s all it is, but still…
jenagain – i liked making characters for amber but never did have a game sesh i could remember. sadly my typical experience with most of the also-rans of rpg history.