On Dice, Mechanics, and Personal Taste
Oh boy... been a bit, eh?
We've actually been pretty busy trying to polish up LevelOneRPG, which is almost ready to promote from Beta to production version. We opened it up as an Alpha some time back, mostly inspired by the 1e Manifesto, and I have to admit that having people already looking at your still-broken version does motivate one a bit!
We had a couple of good playtest sessions on Twitch if you can stand Paul's deep-fried Southern Raconteur accent (he's the one in the plaid with the ball cap if you couldn't figure it out) - not exactly epic, but fun was had by all and there were significant lessons learned, and Paul got to use his "two and a half ex wives" joke before the four minute mark. :)
So now he's working on a fresh edit which includes some alternate resolution systems, because the biggest problem seemed to be the way the novel dice system took the players out of the game for a minute on several occasions. Everyone pretty much agreed afterwards that it would be less of a problem once the players were familiar with it, and easier if they had a set of the custom zero-based dice, but while some people will probably love it, others will be put off, so Paul is mulling options.
AnyDice
L1 was built as an initial proof of concept of the OneRPG system, which was designed not to require things like class and level...so the first thing we did was build it around the idea of class and level, just to see if we could.
Turns out we totally could. The system flows, but the default dice system is maybe a little too tactical for
very casual players. That's ok, there are alternate dice, and they mostly work more like other systems, but for people who like crunchy dice, the default is pretty cool. L1's default is totally unconstrained dice. The player can roll any dice in any combination they want for any roll.
Literally any dice.
How It Works
OneRPG (and accordingly LevelOneRPG) uses "blackjack" rolling. For any task the GM figures the character's effective level (EL) based on their actual base level and any relevant roles and other modifiers and the player tries to roll as high as possible without going over that number. Since you can use any dice you want that's pretty easy - if your score is seven, then as long as you roll anything from one to seven you're ok, but six is better than five.
What to roll? Remember that AnyDice are zero-based, so a d8 rolls 0-7. Perfect, right?
No, not really. Simple, and absolutely fine if that's what you want to do... but the odds are as likely to roll a zero as a seven, or any other number. If AnyDice is your thing, then you could just as well roll 7d2, which is damned unlikely to total up to zero...but equally unlikely to roll the optimal seven. You could roll a d6+d3, which will roll 0-5 + 0-2 for 0-7; or 10d2 for a pretty stable average of five or six, but a fair chance of going over, and failing.
Weird, right? You can literally roll anything you want to tweak the odds.
That means that depending on what you choose, you can make the odds of a failing roll pretty low. Even if your EL is only one, you can still roll a single d2 for a 50/50 chance.
I hear you saying "That can't be right... some things are harder than that!"
You're right.
Opposition Rolls
Every task gets to resist your character's attempts to get it done. The task gets it's own difficulty level, and rolls with that, and by default the GM also gets to roll any dice they want against the character.
If an EL4 PC rolls against an EL3 task the PC has the advantage, but the final rolls are compared. If the EL3 task is a goblin the PC is fighting, each rolls and the lesser roll is subtracted from the higher. If the goblin rolls a 2 and the PC rolls a 1, the goblin hits the PC for 1.
It isn't always that simple, but it usually is. Picking a lock? Jumping a gap? Trying to win an argument? Same rules. The final odds are determined by the PC's roll as it compares to its opposition. The same EL4 PC attempting an EL0 task will have much better odds than attempting an EL15 task.
Other Options
Not everyone wants that much flexibility.
Per Factor
It isn't hard to simplify it - EL is always the total of a discreet contributing factors, and each can be represented as one die. If the PC is level 5, Warrior 3, with a created Higher Ground bonus of +2 (EL10) then the player can roll a d6, a d4, and a d3 for a total range of 0-10.
What if he's level 6? There's no d7 with a range of 0-6, but the player can either use the safer d6 (0-5) or a d8 which might roll higher, but that maybe drives up the average total.
Fixed Dice
Every roll can use a standard type of dice. Rolling a number of d2 or even d3 equal to the PC's EL always works. Using d2s is only likely to fail on opposition, though d3s will generally create better rolls most of the time.
Options, Options...
There are more, including entirely diceless versions. There should be something for anyone, and it isn't even necessary that the GM uses the same type of rolling as the PCs.
Are you one of those people who does not want to think about the dice so much?
Pick a simple rolling system and use that.
...but if you do like crunchy dice, we have you covered.
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