The One Where I Choose My Dice

A Friends reference? Because I'm making a game about sitcoms? Who could've thought of such a thing? Some kind of comedy genius, that's who.

The Clickety Clack of Shiny Maths Rocks

In theory, on any given roll of a 20-sided die, any number from 1-20 has an equal, 5% chance of appearing.

See?


This is actually applicable to any die: any result on a d4 has an equal 25% chance, a d6 has a 17% chance, a d8 has a 13% chance, a d10 has a 10% chance, and a d12 has an 8% chance.

So, while using my chosen system of Attribute scores that are each paired with an opposite, any given roll will be just as likely to crit as any other. This is good, this is fair. But it also favours a player character whose Attributes are 10s across the board.

This is because Attributes of 10 grant you a success chance (not a crit chance though) of roughly 50%, regardless of whether or not you're using your highest Attribute in the pair, or your lowest. Each of those rolls, from 1 to 10, has a 5% chance each of succeeding, and you have 10 possible "success" states, equaling 50%.

If you have, for example, a 16 in Friendliness and an 4 in Rudeness, you're always gonna want to put your best foot forward, using your 80% success chance in Friendliness. However, always succeeding at everything you do is boring. Maybe not to YOU, but certainly for everyone else at the table. As a result, your GM is going to want to challenge you from time to time, putting you in situations where you have no choice but to be rude. A crying baby on a long flight that drives you to the point of frustration, a telemarketer who won't take "no" for an answer, a romantic partner who doesn't understand that you're breaking up because you're being too nice about it. In these situations, that 20% chance of success is going to be challenging to overcome!

So, players might favour making bland, middle-of-the-road characters who don't have any strong personality traits one way or the other.

And you know what? I'm into that. It really replicates the metagame of early Sims titles, where the Sims with the Cancer star sign (5s across the board on their 1-10 Personality spread) where just likeable enough, just tidy enough, just athletic enough, to succeed at pretty much anything they tried roughly half the time.

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

Funnily enough, any die I chose would've had the same 50% chance of success; if I wanted to go much closer to the Sims formula and use d10s for Attribute scores, a character with 5s across the board would still have a 50% chance of success, and the same is true of d4s, d6s, and so on.

But in Nobody Poops on TV, this is just a baseline; the chances that a character with zero skill points has of success. It's up to Skills and Applause to put their fingers on the scale.

The Skill System

One of the main things I wanted is a "learn by doing" skill system. When you match all of your Skill dice, you should gain a rank in that skill. But I still need to figure out how these Skill dice WORK.

Now, Applause? Applause is easy. Another d20, of which you can have multiples. "Advantage", seen in games like D&D is a proven concept. You can do something with a chance of success, or you can do something with multiple chances of success. The difference is, in my system, I'm gonna let Applause stack, to simulate the idea of varying levels of applause; your "golf clap" all the way up to "raucous hooting and hollering".

As measured on this applause meter, which I bought on eBay while I was on pain medication after oral surgery.

One d20 has a 50% chance to succeed on a Personality score of 10, and this is only going to increase, the more d20s you add. So, we don't really need to compound this by making Skills also use d20s.

For Skills, I like the idea of a smaller dice than a d20, so as to better differentiate between the two, and allow players to more easily figure out which dice have been applied from what source.

It should be something that most gaming groups will have multiples of. D6es work well for this, as everybody has a d6 somewhere in their house. Play Monopoly? Snakes and Ladders? Mouse Trap? You've got a d6. Warhammer 40k? Oh you BETTER BELIEVE you've got d6es.

You don't even have to be part of a gaming group to have a couple of these clattering about, and they're the easiest dice to buy. For a d20, you'll probably have to go to a specialty hobby store, but everywhere sells d6es.

Wot's in the bukkit? I'll give you one guess.


So, how should these d6es work?

I've discussed this before, but essentially, a character with d6es to add to their d20 pool will be able to gain a level in their skill with a frequency that decreases pretty gradually over time. A character can match 1d6 to itself 100% of the time (if we're defining a "match" to mean "all d6es in the pool have the same face pointing up"), 2d6 16.67% of the time, 3d6 at 2.78%, 4d6 at 0.46%, 5d6 at 0.08%, and 6d6 0.01% of the time. 7d6? That's a big, fat zero percent.

An 8-point (0-7) scale is interesting, to say the least (by which I mean I don't like it one bit). It's very lopsided, and I don't think it really seems appealing, even if the dice are easier to source.

There are alternate possibilities, however:

Using d8s, which are plumbob-shaped (How Sims-like!!), you get: 100%, 12.5%, 1.56%, 0.2%, 0.02%, followed by 0% at 6d8. That's a 7-point progression (0-6), one less than the d6, but visually quite nice to look at. A typical player will have about 2-3 points in a Skill on average, which is something quite easy to balance for. 4s, 5s, and 6es in a Skill would be reserved for masters of their craft, and something quite worth the edge you'd get from using them. You had to work for that 6! You deserve to succeed on your rolls once you get to that point!

Here's a mockup, based on a Vampire: The Masquerade character sheet:


Nice and even! You know, I'm coming around on d8s for my Skills.

Another point in the d8's favour, is that assuming I run a Kickstarter for this game, many, many years from now, after extensive playtesting, the idea of including nice, gem-like, green d8s (and maybe some red ones for bad moods) just tickles me.

(Psst, the green thing above Rylee's head is a plumbob)

I mean, imagine rolling one of these! It'll really feel like a life sim!

So, that's how we gain Skill levels, and what dice we use. The important thing, however, is how they work.

What's the Deal With Skills?

Well, the main thing is that we want Skills to make it easier to succeed. Should it be a subtraction from the Attribute score?

The average of 1d8 is 4. 2d8 is 9, 3d8 is 13.5, 4d8 is 18, and 5d8 is 22.5. This would mean that any Skill rank above a 4 is effectively pointless; who needs a roll of 18, or even 22.5 if you have to roll under an 18 Attribute? You'll almost always succeed, rendering Skills of 5 and 6 unnecessary.

Using Skill dice as modifiers kills the challenge. So, what then?

Well, what if Skills aren't used in addition to Attributes, what if they're used instead of Attributes?

An Attribute defines who you are. You're Lazy, you're Friendly, you're a Slob. You'd use these to determine behaviour. How you speak to people, how you present yourself, the state you keep your home in. The dice pools you build are all d20s, and they're a combination of Attributes and Applause. Who you are, and whether the audience can connect with that.

So, right off the bat, we don't need Skills like "Cleaning" or "Persuasion". You can intimidate somebody by being Rude. You can persuade somebody by being Nice. You can investigate a crime scene methodically by being Neat.

Your ability to do tasks, like painting a picture, fixing a leaking toilet, winning at chess, these aren't based on your personality at all, these are based on things you have learned to do. You can be a Lazy chess grandmaster, who got into chess tournaments because it beats working a job you hate, and discovered you had a talent for the game. You can be an Active chess grandmaster, who believes exercising your mind is just as important as exercising your body. These aren't mutually exclusive. Hell, you can be a supercomputer with no personality, and still wipe the floor with grandmasters!

You can be a world-renowned author whose reputation is in tatters because you can't stay off twitter, or you can be one of the kindest human beings to ever live and have a career spanning decades writing about a vaguely Victorian fantasy world on the back of a giant turtle.

Not that I'm talking about anybody in particular. Oh, perish the thought. 👀

Maybe, then, a Skill-based Target Number is defined by the averages of a d8? 
  • 4 = Extremely Easy
  • 9 = Easy
  • 13 = Moderate
  • 18 = Difficult
  • 22 = Extremely Difficult
  • 27 = You Need a Miracle
An interesting thing about a "Moderate" difficulty under this system: let's assume we combine d20s and d8s after all. 1d20 plus 1d8 gets you an average of 15. So, a Moderate difficulty could still very much be something a typical person is expected to be able to do, be they low-skilled (1d8) or averagely-skilled (3d8).

Other combinations include 2d8 plus 1d20, which is 19, and 1d8 plus 2d20, which is 25.5.

Maybe we're not combining Skills and Attributes, but we can combine Skills and Applause? With Applause, a Difficult or Extremely Difficult task is possible for a relatively low-skill character. It also generates the possibility to crit (get your Skill rank on the d20).

This is something I will tinker with more in the future--I don't think a single afternoon of playing with statistics is enough to convince myself, and I would like to look at games with alternate Skill systems.

But hey, it's a start.

Comments