Reducing Division in BRP Games

[Atgxtg]

2 hours ago, soltakss said:

Here is a quick, and often accurate, trick:

• Take your skill and divide by ten, knocking off the last digit
• Double it for a Special
• Halve it for a Critical

It works for most instances, unless you roll within 1 or 2 of the calculated result, but in that case I'd just use the calculation as it is easier.

I just spreadhseeted this and it works perfectly for any value higher than 9. It would work for 01-09 if you include a minimum crit and special chance of 01%. 

[Atgxtg]

1 minute ago, Bren said:

Way back when in the days before and shortly after RQ1, most people I knew who roleplayed were what we called "nerds." And nerds tended to be good at arithmetic and math in general. Many of the initial players in my high school were involved in the Wargame Club where various board games were played. I think that was a second filter that tended to weed out people who were poor at arithmetic or math-phobic. I think the gamer population is more diverse or generalized than it used to be. You aren't really comparing the same types of populations.

That said, it certainly seems like kids these days, when they aren't standing around on my lawn, are not as facile or adept at arithmetical operations. The elementary math lessons I've looked at (and admittedly I haven't spent a lot of time looking) use a method that seems to compare stacks of things (beads, apples, groups of 1s, 10s, 100s, etc.) rather than focusing on rote memorization and multiplication drills e.g., using flashcards. I vaguely recall from when I was a young lad, that I spent some time in the kitchen doing flashcards and multiplication table drills with my parents. The new method seems to focus more on the meaning of numbers and arithmetical operations and less time drilling a functional rote knowledge of how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. I've met high school graduates who can't really multiply numbers. I don't recall ever encountering anyone like that way back in the Jurassic when I was in school.

Yeah, and some of that is understandable. We have machines that do most of our math for us so most of us don't need or use math as much. A similar thing happened with phone numbers. There was a time when most people knew the phone numbers of their friends and family members. Now most of us have smart phones that store the numbers for us so we don't bother to remember them anymore.

But that isn't what I'm concerned about here. 

What I've noticed isn't so much a lack of mathematical ability, but instead an aversion to math. Basically it seems like since some people are bad at math or find it hard or just don't like it, thus math must be bad and we must therefore remove it from our games. I've seen people dismiss Pythagoras' Theorem and pi, as bulls**t, despite both being provable and used countless in everyday life simply because they didn't understand them. Likewise I

I've seen people at the gaming table who reject any form of math in gaming citing that they shouldn't need some sort of degree to play a simple game just because they can't handle the resistance table. 

Now while simplicity and elegance in design is nice, if we start removing things from our games (or life) just because some people don't like, want, or understand them, we will end up playing to the lowest common denonimator. 

 

 

[Bren]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

Now while simplicity and elegance in design is nice, if we start removing things from our games (or life) just because some people don't like, want, or understand them, we will end up playing to the lowest common denonimator. 

I don't think there is a lowest common denominator. I find some level of complexity desirable in a game and, if done right, it adds to my fun. Make it too simple and it's too boring for me. Simple enough so anyone can play will be too simple for someone to enjoy. If we sidestep the "is it really a game" issue, Candyland is simple. It's not much fun to play though.

[Stan Shinn]

2 hours ago, Bren said:

Way back when in the days before and shortly after RQ1, most people I knew who roleplayed were what we called "nerds." And nerds tended to be good at arithmetic and math in general. Many of the initial players in my high school were involved in the Wargame Club where various board games were played. I think that was a second filter that tended to weed out people who were poor at arithmetic or math-phobic. 

On that note, here's a screenshot showing the math expectations in the Classic Traveler starter set 

[Bren]

Ah, original Traveller. Good times! Though I was disappointed the sector maps only used 2-dimensions. Adding in a Z-axis would have allowed us to use the Pythagorean Theorem to calculate D.

[Mugen]

I'm rather good at maths, have a good experience with BRP. I can figure out 1/5th and 1/20th of a skill quickly and with no effort.

Nevertheless, I've seen players struggling with maths since I started playing, not only kids born after 1990 or 2000. I think it's part of a game designer's job to reduce the burden for them.

[Al.]

5 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Ah, I assumed your problem was with apply a global standard to everyone, regardless of goals and needs of specific communities. Instead it's that you do not like someone elses standard and don't want to be forced to follow it - which to me seems to be the same argument, with the  difference being that it is being applied to you. 

That's a bit rude

[Atgxtg]

3 hours ago, Bren said:

I don't think there is a lowest common denominator.

Oh there is, but it is unplayable. It all a matter of trade offs. With detail comes complexity, and we all have to decide where the "sweet spot" is for us and our gaming groups.

3 hours ago, Bren said:

 

I find some level of complexity desirable in a game and, if done right, it adds to my fun. Make it too simple and it's too boring for me. Simple enough so anyone can play will be too simple for someone to enjoy. If we sidestep the "is it really a game" issue, Candyland is simple. It's not much fun to play though.

Exactly. While added complexity means more work, it also tends to mean more options and more interesting ones. 

[Atgxtg]

9 minutes ago, Al. said:

That's a bit rude

Well let me restate it and correct me where I stray from your intentions.

1. You do not have a problem with global standardization in education.
2. You do have a problem with the  global standards set by GERM
3. Thus you want everybody to follow global standards, but you don't want to have follow GERM standards, but rather some other standards that you like better..

Now one problem with global standards is that considering the size of the global population any one of us have a rather slight chance of being one of those who gets a say as to what those global standards are.  With global standards everybody has to conform to whatever the standard is, good or bad, and most of us do not get a say in the matter. 

 

Personally I don't think the school board in, say, Gary Indiana, should have to comply to the same standards as the school board in Bern, Switzerland, or vice versa. Forcing them both to do so doesn't serve the best interest of either community, and only really benefits those who with the power to control the standards.

 

[Nakana]

I don’t bother with special successes. 10% of your skill is a crit and it supersedes a difficult roll. The logic being a crit represents flawless execution - even if the task is normally difficult. So 10% is a crit and doesn’t change. 
 

Easy enough. 

[deleriad]

16 hours ago, Mugen said:

I'm rather good at maths, have a good experience with BRP. I can figure out 1/5th and 1/20th of a skill quickly and with no effort.

Nevertheless, I've seen players struggling with maths since I started playing, not only kids born after 1990 or 2000. I think it's part of a game designer's job to reduce the burden for them.

Middle aged adults have been complaining about how ignorant young people are since the dawn of time. Plato and Socrates did it. So I have zero respect for any opinion that includes it.

In general, people tend to be good at the things they need to be good at. 

If you're designing a *game* to sell then it needs to be engaging, fun (for some value of fun), accessible and so on otherwise no one will buy it or play it. Probably the most fundamental element of a role-playing *game* is how do you determine what happens when there is a degree of randomness present but the imaginary characters have different capabilities that might affect the outcome. If you then think in terms of a "user interface" how do you design the method of determination so that it is intuitive, easy to operate and is engaging when it happens. RQ and the percentile system came about, in part, because Stafford, Perrin et al found the d20 mechanic in D&D unsatisfying. They preferred the greater complexity and granularity of d100 which was a brave move at a time when many wargamers found buying and using a d20 to be problematic. Interestingly, Steve Perrin stuck with d100 but Greg Stafford preferred simpler systems and moved back to d20 for Pendragon, his magnum opus. 

There are undoubtedly multiple ways to design a d100 roll-under system, one of which is that which RQ pioneered: multiple levels of success and failure derived arithmetically from a [potentially modified] success chance. It's possibly also important to remember that the first two systems (RQ & CoC and, implicitly in the BRP booklet) that 100% was the cap on skill ability. In RQ you had to be a hero (Rune Lord) to get a skill over 100. 

At the most abstract level my personal preference for a d100 roll-under system is one where your skill doesn't change in-game during a test, where it is capped at 100% and where levels of success and failure can be read directly from the roll without performing any sort of arithmetical operation. You could actually argue that d100 was the first type of this system because you rolled two dice and rather than adding them up you read one as a 10's die and one as a unit die. 

Anyway, division and arithmetic in a game is fine for those who like that sort of thing. If I were designing a game now that I wanted to sell, I wouldn't include a mechanic that involved division and multiplication unless the game was about division and multiplication.

[Bren]

5 hours ago, deleriad said:

Middle aged adults have been complaining about how ignorant young people are since the dawn of time. Plato and Socrates did it. So I have zero respect for any opinion that includes it.

So you don't agree with the opinion that, in general, the young are worse at arithmetical calculations by hand or in one's mind?

Quote

 

In general, people tend to be good at the things they need to be good at. 

 

So you do agree with the opinion that, with the easy access and frequent use of electronic tools for calculation, the young, in general, are worse at arithmetical calculations by hand or in one's mind?

I'm not following you. Would you please clarify what you mean by these two statements? 

[Atgxtg]

9 hours ago, deleriad said:

Middle aged adults have been complaining about how ignorant young people are since the dawn of time. Plato and Socrates did it. So I have zero respect for any opinion that includes it.

So simply because the opinion has been around for thousands of years you have no respect for it? That makes no sense. By that reasoning you shouldn't believe  the world is a sphere either. The age of an argument does not invalidate it, in fact it does the opposite.

[Ian Absentia]

Oh, my God, ding-dongs.  Follow the fire, not the smoke.

13 hours ago, deleriad said:

If you're designing a *game* to sell then it needs to be engaging, fun (for some value of fun), accessible and so on otherwise no one will buy it or play it.

[...snip...]

If I were designing a game now that I wanted to sell, I wouldn't include a mechanic that involved division and multiplication unless the game was about division and multiplication.

While I've lamented the resistance of many to simple arithmetic in RPGs (and far from just "young" people), I really can't argue with the assertion that people won't do it they're not motivated.  And arcane methods of reading the dice isn't a solution, either.

!i!

Edited May 15, 2023 by Ian Absentia
Fact vs Assertion

[smiorgan]

Yes, we should reduce division in BRP. What unites us is much more important than what divides us. 😁

That said... I think...

Good old Stormbringer got it right with 10% critical. And I have to say this was one of the (very few) things MRQ got right. 

Success levels is also something CoC7 got right. 

Dice reading tricks are OK. Games such as Jackals and Revolution d100 use them to great effect.

Full disclosure, I am a kinda slow mental calculator. So not a great fan of dividing by 20 in game. I can do that but it slows me a tiny bit when I GM. Players don't notice but I do.

 

 

[Mugen]

1 hour ago, smiorgan said:

Good old Stormbringer got it right with 10% critical. And I have to say this was one of the (very few) things MRQ got right. 

Success levels is also something CoC7 got right. 

As I said earlier, I prefer a mix of these two, with good success as 1/2 skill, and better success at 1/10 skill.

Steve Perrin's Quest Rules had those, along with a 4th success level, at skill/100. Which obviously meant 1 for a lot of people...

[deleriad]

3 hours ago, Mugen said:

As I said earlier, I prefer a mix of these two, with good success as 1/2 skill, and better success at 1/10 skill.

Steve Perrin's Quest Rules had those, along with a 4th success level, at skill/100. Which obviously meant 1 for a lot of people...

Ultimately that comes down to determining what the levels of success "mean" and what the ratio of them is. For example, if a "good" success happens in about 1/10 of all successes then how much "better" should it be than a normal success? Probably not 10 times better but clearly, because it is a pretty rare occurrence it needs to be significantly better. If a good success happens about half the time that you succeed then it will clearly be better than normal but possibly not "twice as good". To a large extent, the whole random number element of the game hinges on this.

As a historical note, D&D did not originally have criticals (or fumbles) and Gygax argued against them for as long as he could. He believed in limiting randomness and extreme cases. RQ definitively proved that players love the drama of extreme results. As a game, the moment of rolling the dice is (or at least should be) one of the most dramatic parts of the game. Some players hate and fear it; some love it and embrace it. 

For me, I like the notion that a "special" success is almost non-existent for a novice but quite common (or maybe even more common than a normal success) for a master; that means the chance for a special success needs to be non-linear in some fashion. Probably then we should use log tables. It was good enough for DC Heroes. 2D10, exploding doubles with a log base e lookup table is where it's at.

[RosenMcStern]

22 minutes ago, deleriad said:

For me, I like the notion that a "special" success is almost non-existent for a novice but quite common (or maybe even more common than a normal success) for a master; that means the chance for a special success needs to be non-linear in some fashion. Probably then we should use log tables. It was good enough for DC Heroes. 2D10, exploding doubles with a log base e lookup table is where it's at.

As you know, Revolution D100 does it without disturbing Neper, and keeping mathematics to an absolute minimum: no computations, just comparison.

The problem is that this method requires a total paradigm shift from "I want to roll as low as possible" to "I want to roll as high as possible within my skill". The game feels different. Some people will object that it is a different game.

[deleriad]

1 hour ago, RosenMcStern said:

As you know, Revolution D100 does it without disturbing Neper, and keeping mathematics to an absolute minimum: no computations, just comparison.

The problem is that this method requires a total paradigm shift from "I want to roll as low as possible" to "I want to roll as high as possible within my skill". The game feels different. Some people will object that it is a different game.

Indeed. The "mouth-feel" of a die rolling mechanic is definitely part of the intangible element of a game. It's sort of RNA vs DNA. If the DNA of the game is its basic building blocks then, mechanically you have various ways of implementing d100 roll under but they can feel very different. Likewise a skill list is in BRP's DNA but the name of the skills, the granularity of them, splitting into common/advanced feel like variations in expression rather than fundamentals hence thinking of them as RNA.

I would say RD100 has some variations from BRP in its DNA (especially non-linear scaling of special results) but is mostly difference in expression. Same with Mythras with the major variations being combat and "POW economy". 

Technically, if you have a d100 roll under system where you always have a 5% chance of success if you can roll then whether you set the actual die results of 1-5 as auto-success or you say any roll within 5 points of your skill is an auto-success or some other auto-success mechanic then the DNA of the mechanic is the same but how it feels in practice can be quite different. (D&D went through agonies with THAC0 charts and AC.)

It will be interesting to see what happens with various BRUGES fantasy heartbreakers now that ORC is here. It's the first time that (unlamented Legend aside) it's been easy to homebrew traditional BRP. 

[Stan Shinn]

I appreciate all the amazing feedback! Here's what I'm thinking for my 'reducing division' house-rules. Let me know what you think!

Dice Rules

• Remove the Special Success and only have Critical Successes
• Success: Rolling <= Skill
• Failure: Rolling > Skill
• Critical Success (Succeed and Roll Doubles or 1): If you succeed and also roll doubles (e.g., 11 or 22), or if you roll an 1, it is a critical success. [I know that this doesn't scale linearly with skills over 100%, but if you split a 150% skill into two 75% skill rolls for example, each of those 75% skill rolls independently can crit if they roll doubles. I think it would still feel fun. Alternatively, you could cap skills at 100%.].
• Fumble (Fail and Roll Doubles or 100): If you fail and also roll doubles (e.g., 88 or 99), or if you roll an 100, it is a fumble.

Difficulty

• Hard Difficulty (Requires Odd Number to Succeed): Instead of rolling 1/2 your skill, successes that are an odd number succeed (e.g. 13, 27); successes with an even number (e.g. 14, 28) are treated as a failure.
• Extreme Difficulty (Requires a Critical to Succeed): Instead of rolling 1/5th your skill, you need a critical success to succeed normally. If you do crit it is treated as a simple success with no special benefit. If you roll a success without a crit it is a failure. Normal failure and fumble mechanics remain unchanged.
• Impossible: No roll or 1% regardless of skill.

Yes, I know some will still prefer to have solutions that require division, but I'm mainly interested in determining what sort of dice tricks could produce similar results without using division. I've also found that people still enjoy games even if they have non-linear progression (check out the math on the Savage Worlds wild die; totally weird and non-linear, but it's still a really popular game and fun to play). So easy math and fast gameplay is my goal here, even if the math isn't consistently linear.

Thoughts on my approach? 

Edited May 16, 2023 by Stan Shinn

[el_octogono]

Personaly I don't like the Odd number approach for the Hard Difficulty roll. It makes me change my mindset and pay attention to a different thing. My take (and one I'm using for my ND100 version) is just half percentiles for "hard" success, I think it's pretty easy to eyeball half your skill, and roll under the tens digit (as percentiles) for critical.

Edited May 17, 2023 by el_octogono
Clarification

[Atgxtg]

On 5/15/2023 at 7:19 PM, Ian Absentia said:

Oh, my God, ding-dongs.  Follow the fire, not the smoke.

While I've lamented the resistance of many to simple arithmetic in RPGs (and far from just "young" people), I really can't argue with the assertion that people won't do it they're not motivated.  And arcane methods of reading the dice isn't a solution, either.

!i!

Yeah, I think it boils down to trying to keep things as simple as possible while still maintain options and differences in outcomes (i.e. degrees of success, random damage etc.). It's quite the juggling act, and we won't all agree on just what the right mix is. In fact the right mix might even vary depending on what sort of genre and setting you are playing in.

 

In fact, I'd say the mechanical differences between RQ2 and CoC1 illustrates just how much of a difference there can be. Both are basically the same game system, but RQ2 was more detailed and 'crunchier" than CoC. Most of this doesn't matter much in CoC since it's emphasis is on supernatural alien horror where things like sectional armor won't stop a Shoggoth.