Boredom levels rising.
Idly mulling about a quasi-RTD system based around "hit dice", with differences.
1 or 2 on the die is a "miss".
5 or 6, or more generally the highest two numbers on the die, is a "hit".
A roll with no hits, and less than half the dice being misses, is a plain failure.
A roll with no hits and at least half the dice being misses, is an Epic Failure.
A roll with half or more dice being misses, but at least some hits, is a "faulty success".
A roll with at least some hits and less than half the dice being misses, is a plain success.
A roll half or more dice being hits, as long as it's at least 4 hits, is a Critical Success.
A roll with at least one hit and
all dice aside from hits being misses, is an Overshot. Results vary depending on proportion of hits to misses.
A Critical Success roll that's also an Overshot can be referred to as an Overcrit, and have especially crazy results.
The number of dice rolled for a check is the same all the time, I'm thinking 6.
The outcome can be modified in two ways - adding or removing dice, or adding or removing sides on the dice.
There's also thresholds, i.e. a minimum amount of successes for not failing, which can be used to set difficulty.
Using an Excel spreadsheet here, I'm going to try and see what sort of distributions this leads to.
Results are in order of: Epic Fail, Failure, Faulty Success, Success, Critical Success, OverShot, OverCrit.
Set 1: 5 / 7 / 19 / 55 / 7 / 5 / 2
Set 2: 6 / 5 / 22 / 54 / 6 / 4 / 3
Set 3: 5 / 5 / 21 / 49 / 7 / 6 / 7
Set 4: 12 / 6 / 17 / 49 / 4 / 9 / 3
Set 5: 2 / 3 / 28 / 47 / 10 / 7 / 3
Set 6: 3 / 4 / 20 / 61 / 7 / 3 / 2
Set 7: 7 / 1 / 16 / 67 / 4 / 4 / 1
Set 8: 6 / 4 / 14 / 56 / 10 / 3 / 7
Set 9: 5 / 4 / 21 / 61 / 5 / 3 / 1
Set 10: 6 / 1 / 19 / 57 / 7 / 9 / 1
Significant prevalence of successes, with a fair amount of faults. Criticals, failures, and overshots all hovering around the same low probability.
Now let's add a die to the pool:
Set 1: 2 / 0 / 10 / 65 / 13 / 7 / 3
Set 2: 5 / 3 / 14 / 64 / 10 / 2 / 2
Set 3: 4 / 4 / 10 / 63 / 13 / 2 / 4
Set 4: 1 / 3 / 16 / 63 / 12 / 1 / 4
Set 5: 2 / 4 / 7 / 69 / 15 / 2 / 1
Set 6: 4 / 4 / 15 / 53 / 18 / 3 / 3
Set 7: 4 / 2 / 11 / 59 / 17 / 3 / 4
Set 8: 1 / 5 / 11 / 62 / 12 / 5 / 4
Set 9: 5 / 4 / 6 / 61 / 16 / 4 / 4
Set 10: 5 / 2 / 15 / 65 / 12 / 1 / 0
Significant increase in successes and criticals, while failures, faults, and overshots, all drop significantly. Good all-round bonus.
If a die is subtracted from the pool instead:
Set 1: 6 / 6 / 12 / 67 / 2 / 5 / 2
Set 2: 7 / 5 / 7 / 70 / 1 / 6 / 4
Set 3: 7 / 7 / 6 / 68 / 4 / 6 / 2
Set 4: 5 / 8 / 19 / 62 / 0 / 5 / 1
Set 5: 6 / 8 / 10 / 64 / 0 / 11 / 1
Set 6: 4 / 4 / 10 / 71 / 1 / 7 / 3
Set 7: 8 / 5 / 4 / 60 / 9 / 9 / 5
Set 8: 11 / 7 / 8 / 60 / 3 / 8 / 3
Set 9: 6 / 5 / 7 / 71 / 1 / 8 / 2
Set 10: 9 / 7 / 7 / 71 / 1 / 4 / 1
While the proportion of successes does not change much, critical successes sharply decrease, and overshots and failures of both varieties are more probable.
Next let's add a side to the dice:
Set 1: 6 / 5 / 11 / 68 / 4 / 4 / 2
Set 2: 5 / 9 / 17 / 60 / 6 / 2 / 1
Set 3: 10 / 2 / 12 / 68 / 5 / 0 / 3
Set 4: 8 / 7 / 16 / 57 / 6 / 3 / 3
Set 5: 6 / 5 / 18 / 63 / 3 / 4 / 1
Set 6: 10 / 11 / 14 / 54 / 5 / 5 / 1
Set 7: 6 / 12 / 13 / 63 / 2 / 3 / 1
Set 8: 5 / 4 / 10 / 74 / 3 / 3 / 1
Set 9: 7 / 4 / 11 / 66 / 8 / 3 / 1
Set 10: 6 / 5 / 16 / 69 / 4 / 0 / 0
Increasing die size seems to reduce the probability of overshots, criticals, and faults. Makes sense. The difference seems to settle more in the failure side, however.
And then let's reduce the die size instead:
Set 1: 3 / 0 / 24 / 32 / 10 / 22 / 9
Set 2: 2 / 0 / 25 / 36 / 10 / 18 / 9
Set 3: 1 / 1 / 23 / 36 / 11 / 18 / 10
Set 4: 2 / 1 / 23 / 41 / 9 / 17 / 7
Set 5: 5 / 0 / 28 / 36 / 10 / 15 / 6
Set 6: 3 / 0 / 33 / 35 / 9 / 14 / 6
Set 7: 3 / 1 / 24 / 38 / 10 / 18 / 6
Set 8: 3 / 1 / 25 / 30 / 9 / 17 / 15
Set 9: 4 / 0 / 30 / 36 / 8 / 15 / 7
Set 10: 3 / 0 / 25 / 41 / 8 / 12 / 11
The probability of regular success sharply drops compared to default, but so does the probability of outright failure. Instead, there's faults, overshots, and overcrits all around.
Rolling sets of d4s is hilarious, there's 2/3rds overshots, 1/3rds overcrits, and the occasional critical success or epic fail.
So, some interesting data. What does it all amount to?
The default dice toss is likely to be a simple success, or a faulty success, with low chances of failures or criticals/overshots.
Increasing dice pool size decreases the likelihood of the result going askew, either as a failure or a fault/overshot. Equivalent of having better skill, or less stressful conditions. Larger pools overcome thresholds easier.
A smaller pool increases the chances of things going wrong critically, and has trouble with thresholds.
Increasing the die size makes it harder to land hit or miss on them, so things that depend on particular amount of hits or misses are affected. Critical successes are the first to go, but with bigger increases critical failures drop too, and things settle into either success or failure. I feel like this represents the approach to doing an action - a calm, slow approach will either succeed or fail, whereas a frantic, or hot-blooded rush will mean more likelihood of messing up, but less chance of outright failure if the person is skilled enough. That's also a thing that happens, how these two alterations interact with each other, and how they interact with the threshold.
For instance.
Low-skill character (dice pool 4), rushing (d5) into an easy task (threshold 0):
14% chance critfail, 2% fail, 18% faulty success, 43% success, 3% critical, 20% overshot.
Same character taking their time (d8): 8% critfail, 15% fail, 7% fault, 65% success, 0% critical, 5% overshot.
Same character, taking their time on a difficult task (threshold 2): 16% chance critfail, 70% chance fail, 8% fault, 3% success, 1% critical, 2% overshot.
Same character, rushing (d5) into the difficult task: 13% critfail, 29% fail, 17% fault, 19% success, 1% critical, 20% overshot.
Since they're low on skill, taking their time does not improve their chances on a difficult task as it does on the easy one - but going all-out they might accomplish something, even if still likely to mess up or critically fail.
Now a higher-skill character (pool 8), same things:
Rushing into easy task: 1% critfail, 0% fail, 26% fault, 23% success, 35% critical, 11% overshot, 4% overcrit
Taking time on easy task: 1% critfail, 9% fail, 4% fault, 73% success, 12% critical, 1% overshot
Taking time on difficult task: 1% critfail, 57% fail, 7% fault, 21% success, 14% critical.
Rushing into difficult task: 1% critfail, 6% fail, 35% fault, 17% success, 25% critical, 14% overshot, 2% overcrit
Skilled character will most likely succeed in doing an easy task the long way, and is very likely to spectacularly succeed if rushing into it. And even with a difficult task, taking time significantly reduces the chance of doing something wrong - it's just doing, doing well, or not doing at all. Rushing into a difficult task reduces the chance of failure significantly, but results in a large chance of doing it wrong (or very right).
I dunno, I was just bored at work and decided to torment OpenOffice Calc with a self-calculating random Shadowrun-style rolls spreadsheet. Not sure if this can even go into anything as it is. But feel free to discuss. :3