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[GameBoyBlue]

So a lot seem to have a way to improve your roll.

Yet they all/just about all have a penalty for rolling the highest possible outcome.

How does the bonus factor in to this(is there a common resolution or does it vary greatly game to game?)?

If someone is a medic and gets +2 to medical rolls, and they roll a 4, does it become a 6 if that would be a "worse" outcome, or does it stop at a 5?

Thanks much.

[~Neri]

It varies from game to game.

[DarkArtemisFowl]

I personally count the bonus to the "6."

But then again, my use of the 6 as an overshoot varies. Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don't. If it's a roll for quality or some other thing that requires a lot of numbers put together, then I just leave it as a 6 and not an overshoot. If it's a general action, then yes, an overshoot it becomes.

[Xvareon]

The simple fix to this would be to add the option to forgo that bonus to reduce the chance of an overshot; i.e, if a Surgeon's Bag gives you a +2 to treat a bullet wound, and you don't want to risk an overshot and rip the bullet out at the wrong angle, you can simply try and do without. One RtD I read involved a 'Concentrate' option where you could deliberately take a -1 to your roll to nullify the chances of a disastrous overshot, since people really really didn't like having their TK healing skill surge explosively when trying to patch someone up.

[Harry Baldman]

There's also the exploding die system. In it, 6es and 1s are handled by rolling another die to determine what happens. A 1-->4 to 6 is a standard failure, a 1-->3 is a mild critical failure, a 6-->1 is a powerful overshot, while a 6-->5 is a critical success. Bonuses aren't applied to the first roll in the event of a 6 or a 1, but the second one - so if you had a bonus of +2, then a 6-->2+2 would become a mild critical success rather than a considerable overshot, while a 1-->1+2 would become a critical failure of much lesser severity. Same applies the other way around: a 1-->1-2 would be a complete disaster, and 6-->1-2 would start to approach a critical failure in its consequences. Meanwhile, a 5+1 would still be a mild critical success, so as to not punish a higher skill level, and a 2-1 would be a standard failure.

Now, that's the method I use in most of my more involved games. There's also another method that hasn't been mentioned, which is what is used in ER.

In ER, the rules were relatively recently overhauled due to a number of reasons, and now bonuses don't apply to rolls, but to their interpretation. The d6 is almost always rolled unmodified, and the skill level merely indicates the consequences of each roll, tending toward non-disaster for the extremes and toward higher degrees of success for the middle bits. It's much more based around subjectivity and guesswork than the exploding die, but that can easily become an advantage in the correct context.

Finally, there's the practice of allowing two levels of bonus - the regular kind that contribute to overshots, and the dynamic kind that can act as a +1, 0 or -1, whichever brings you closer to 5. It's got all the hallmarks of an obvious rule patch, but it does work, sort of. Tends to trivialize rolls if the bonuses do pile up (and aren't balanced by appropriate contextual penalties).

[GameBoyBlue]

This may be like trying to sell toy mice to elephants, but I want to make a system with definite outcomes. Its a combat system so hard numbers are fine.



So players have a generic hp value, but may do something to power up an attack by +2...

so i guess i could do standard rtd success system, then just improve the damage in that case.

[_DivideByZero_]

One method I am experimenting with is rolling multiple dice and picking the largest of them, with bonuses increasing the number of dice. Well, actually I use a 2d6 system with one set of dice being the "positive dice" that choose high and the "negatice dice" that choose low.

The outcome distribution is more focused toward the center than I'd like, but it has the advantage of bonuses not increasing overshoots too much, while still being meaningful.

[ATHATH]

This may be like trying to sell toy mice to elephants, but I want to make a system with definite outcomes. Its a combat system so hard numbers are fine.



So players have a generic hp value, but may do something to power up an attack by +2...

so i guess i could do standard rtd success system, then just improve the damage in that case.

You could always just not make a six mean an overshoot (at least in combat).