There is a fourth common system, in which you roll a d100 and try to roll less than your current skill value, modified by difficulty. These systems usually start at around 20-30% chance for regular tasks, but with time and patience you can level up your skills to have a 60-80% chance, or even higher. Usually the maximum given is 95%. Then we have systems that use a dice pool, but calculating probabilities in these can get very complicated.
Yes! I LOVE d100 systems. They're very intuitive. But my all time favorite is the dice pools, such as Modiphius' 2d20 system! But this old game named Earthdawn has the coolest dice pool system of them all. But as you said, those systems get complicated. Not only that, but the MAJORITY of people only have experience with d20 games, so for this video, I kept it barebones and simple. I'd LOVE to do a series on different games, different systems, and how they compare, but that'll depend on how much people like this video.
I started ttrpg with this kind of system, call of cthulhu 7e. You could start at any percentage for each skill, so if you wanted to invest a lot in a particular skill you could. I always thought it was perfect for this kind of game, where the outcome can depend on way more than fighting, which discourages minmaxing a lot. The way it made combat work also made it feel much more chaotic, where it's not much a duel between two opposing parties but a situation where everyone was trying to do what they could to survive
@@leothi2 I love 7e! It's slightly simpler than older versions (less crunchy), and great for newcomers to the hobby! And I agree. I've often thought about using percentile dice for a game of DnD just to experiment, but it's too much a hassle to figure out. I've also been kicking around the idea of a Call of Cthulhu campaign where the PCs are all commoners in Faerun that stumble upon a Mindflayer / Elderbrain plot. For some arbitrary reason, there'd be no Adventurers around to help. So the Players have to take it upon themselves to investigate and stop the cultists in the town. So it'd be essentially a short horror campaign set in the DnD universe, where the party has to confront DnD monsters as total normies.
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 One thing I noticed about d100 systems is that after a while the characters end up very polarized. You can have 80s in a few skills and 20s in most others, or you can have 70+ in most skills, depending on how you built your character. d100 systems also don't really like distinct character levels very much, preferring a smooth growth with much greater customization. EDIT: That campaign idea sounds really cool, and CoC would be a much better system for it than vanilla D&D, which would (depending on edition) give the players absolutely no chance, or possibly trivialize things too much.
@@cadenceclearwater4340 Low-key, this is exactly where I got the idea of this video from. I was like how can I explain probability to someone who doesn't really understand math very well? Cuz I have to assume that someone watching the video has very little grasp of the subject. I was thinking of what an easy visual might be. Then this scene popped into mind. It was a 'eureka' moment. And RIGHT AWAY, someone got the reference!!! Thanks! You made my day!
Personally, I really like the Savage Worlds way of handling things - the typical dc for any given task is 4. A skill is represented by a die type, so someone with only the most basic ability in a skill rolls a d4, while a true master might be rolling a d12. Player characters get an additional d6 to roll (called the wild die), and the higher of the two dice is the result. Also, dice explode (if you roll the highest result, roll again and add it). As a result, there’s a little bit of swingy-ness while still making success significantly more likely more skilled characters.
One thing i never understood is that "bigger number requires calculators" like why adding a 7 from the die to a +6 from a skill should be easier than adding a 7 to a +36
D&D wouldn’t feel so bad if the average DC is lowered a bit. Trying to beat DC 14 with some proficiencies boiling down to 55% chance is basically flipping a coin. But if the DM is smart about the meta math, they would lower down the DC to 11 or 12, now the success chance is 65% to 70%.
I wholeheartedly agree. And it comes down to another issue, which is that there's yet ONE MORE issue that the GM has to correct. On the fly too, a lot of the time. The system should work out of the box, without DM fiat and corrections. But this video is an excerpt from a longer video I'm making about Bounded Accuracy. I expect to have that vid out within the next week
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 Interestingly enough, I remember reading through the introductory dungeon in D&D 3e DMG. The very first room had multiple spiders that could, if lucky, very quickly debilitate the party. The second room had a secret passage, and there was no DC to find it, the players had to actually actively explore the room, listening to the GM's description and extrapolating from them. Quite a very different approach to the usual 5e adventure design, in which OOtB the encounters feel like they have a single positive outcome hinging on a specific dice roll, and player improvisation is actively punished.
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 So true. Player satisfaction is usually highest when their chance of success is around 60% to 70% at something their character is good at. That's the level where it still feels like a challenge but they're not constantly failing. With players who want that 'superhero' feel that's not quite true. They might enjoy a much higher level of success so they can feel powerful. Younger players often enjoy a higher level of success. Important to note that if a player is feeling terrible about failing rolls there could be a problem with the way failure is being handled in a game. Failure makes the game more interesting and can give players more challenges to overcome using their ingenuity and creativity when it's presented in a way that does that. The problem with the D&D system is the leveling up. Having a DM set a difficultly level and having players add two numbers to a die roll is also ridiculously clunky and complex but I won't go into that. If D&D was limited to levels 3-6 it would be a pretty good game for most people. There are variants of the game like E6 that do just that. The biggest problem with D&D is that it's just so hard to run rules as written for the DM and the higher the level of the players the harder it is to run. You just don't need all these complicated rules to tell a player they have a 65% chance of success (which is where most rolls should sit). If you're the DM remember these 3 things: If they're good at something tell them they need to roll a 7 If they're okay at something tell them they need to roll an 11 If they're bad at something tell them they need to roll a 15 Tell them not to worry about all those adds and modifiers. You've already worked it out and you know exactly what they have to roll. You can adjust the number up or down 1 so it sounds like you're changing it for each situation.
@@EpicEmpires-pb7zv Expert advice all! Especially the point about failure being handled poorly. I think DnD feels easy from the DMs side, like it's hard to challenge the players at all after a certain point. Because of this, I think DMs get thirsty as hell whenever the players finally DO fail at something, (especially if it was a critical failure), and they go balls to the wall with the punishment, not stopping to think about the fun factor. I was actually gonna do a video about failure and talk about why it's THE most important driver in any ttrpg game. I love failure in TTRPGs so much because that's where the emerging story comes from 95% of the time. I love failure so much, even when I'm a player, that my symbol for the channel IS a Nat 1. Because when you see that Nat 1, even more than when you see a Nat 20, you KNOW things are about to get real. But again, the GM HAS to manage that correctly or they WILL kill the fun. But yeah, I have a long list of vids I'll eventually get to haha
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 I think the biggest key with handling failure is giving the players interesting obstacles they have to overcome as a result of their failure. The game is a lot more fun when players have to use their ingenuity and creativity to succeed rather than just rolling dice.
This is something I honestly don't understand. If the chance of failure is so low, especially at 1st level why are we bothering to roll dice at all? It sort of takes out the game part of the game. 1st level characters shouldn't be great at most things--these are young characters who are just beginning to hone their skills. A 7th level character? Sure, they should have really good chances of success in most cases. But at 1st through 3rd level--these are the levels where things should be a struggle.
@@andrewlustfield6079 It all comes down to player preference. Cyberpunk makes it so that at first level, you can min max to start out really effective in your class. But if you do that, you're terrible at EVERYTHING else. In that case, it's more about evening out your bad skills to round your character out. Either that, or you stay terrible at everything except what your class is built for, and rely heavily on your party to fill in the gaps. That's more what Cyberpunk has in mind. Each Edgerunner is essentially a specialist at one thing, so it takes the party as a whole to tackle problems. Cyberpunk has much more brutal consequences for failure than DnD and death is way easier at low levels. A single shot can kill you. So I think because of this, it's more important to have reliable skills that you can fall back on. Other games, like DND, you start kind of middling and basically stay that way until the very late game, but death is NOT easy to come by. The nature of short and long rests make it possible to recover from death's door literally overnight, even in the middle of a dangerous dungeon. In a game like that, skills are honestly less important. They don't need to be as effective because a single skill check isn't going to be the difference between life and death in most cases. So it comes down to player fun and preference. DnD on the whole is one of the easiest TTRPGS out there in terms of difficulty. But the low difficulty allows a system where players can fail much more frequently without resulting in a game over or a TPK. So do you WANT a game that causes you to struggle more at lower levels? That can really build a sense of getting better over time. You start out as a blank slate and build up from nothing. Games that allow you high rolls at low levels have a different feel. You feel more like a fresh faced professional. You only know your craft, but you need help to do anything other than that. This is better for people who like to play in a party. It's also great for players that don't get to play TTRPGs often. If you only play once a month, you could be stuck at low levels for years. But skill based games tend to let you access what makes your character cool early on. This way, you can have a relatively weak character, but you still get to feel badass for the session. But yeah, that's the beauty of there being so many games to choose from. And after the OGL debacle, more and more new, inventive systems are coming out in droves.
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 With D&D, I'm much more old school, so death is always a real possibility regardless of level. The jeopardy has to be real for actions in the game to matter. I'm really glad to see you're exploring and sharing that on your channel. The alternatives have always been out there--from Cyberpunk to James Bond, Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars and Star Trek games, etc. Or more direct fantasy role playing games like Warhammer Fantasy, Rune Quest, Paladium, Middle Earth---those have been around a long long time. And of course, GURPS
@@andrewlustfield6079 That's what this channel is all about! It's not, nor has it ever been a DND channel. My earliest videos are actually criticisms of 5e. Everyone is stuck on that one particular game, which DOES have its capacity for fun, like any relatively decent RPG, but it's far from the only option. I run games professionally on Startplaying.games and I ALWAYS have players request to play DnD, but they almost always want some homebrewed custom game that totally emulates a game that already exists, and already does the things they wish 5e did. Funnily enough, my most popular videos are all based on homebrewing DnD 5e into something that it's not. It's almost like people want to play other games or something. I figure the issue is that most casual gamers don't KNOW other games exist. They think DnD is synonymous with TTRPG. My channel is small, TINY compared to Bob World Builder or DnD Shorts, but someone somewhere will hear what I have to say, and on that day, a true gamer will have been born. And I'm okay with that :) So my mission lately has been bringing eyes to as many other deserving games as possible. The new edition of DND is coming out so that's gonna bring more attention to the TTRPG space as a whole. There'll be plenty of opportunities to compare the new edition to other TTRPGs.
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 Excellent! We need more voices like yours and Dungeon Craft, WeLoveTTRPGs, etc that cover D&D but also a lot of other games out there--there's a wealth of games that deserve a lot more oxygen than they are getting. Kudos.
There is a fourth common system, in which you roll a d100 and try to roll less than your current skill value, modified by difficulty. These systems usually start at around 20-30% chance for regular tasks, but with time and patience you can level up your skills to have a 60-80% chance, or even higher. Usually the maximum given is 95%.
Then we have systems that use a dice pool, but calculating probabilities in these can get very complicated.
Yes! I LOVE d100 systems. They're very intuitive. But my all time favorite is the dice pools, such as Modiphius' 2d20 system! But this old game named Earthdawn has the coolest dice pool system of them all.
But as you said, those systems get complicated. Not only that, but the MAJORITY of people only have experience with d20 games, so for this video, I kept it barebones and simple.
I'd LOVE to do a series on different games, different systems, and how they compare, but that'll depend on how much people like this video.
I started ttrpg with this kind of system, call of cthulhu 7e. You could start at any percentage for each skill, so if you wanted to invest a lot in a particular skill you could. I always thought it was perfect for this kind of game, where the outcome can depend on way more than fighting, which discourages minmaxing a lot. The way it made combat work also made it feel much more chaotic, where it's not much a duel between two opposing parties but a situation where everyone was trying to do what they could to survive
@@leothi2 I love 7e! It's slightly simpler than older versions (less crunchy), and great for newcomers to the hobby! And I agree. I've often thought about using percentile dice for a game of DnD just to experiment, but it's too much a hassle to figure out.
I've also been kicking around the idea of a Call of Cthulhu campaign where the PCs are all commoners in Faerun that stumble upon a Mindflayer / Elderbrain plot. For some arbitrary reason, there'd be no Adventurers around to help. So the Players have to take it upon themselves to investigate and stop the cultists in the town. So it'd be essentially a short horror campaign set in the DnD universe, where the party has to confront DnD monsters as total normies.
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 One thing I noticed about d100 systems is that after a while the characters end up very polarized. You can have 80s in a few skills and 20s in most others, or you can have 70+ in most skills, depending on how you built your character.
d100 systems also don't really like distinct character levels very much, preferring a smooth growth with much greater customization.
EDIT: That campaign idea sounds really cool, and CoC would be a much better system for it than vanilla D&D, which would (depending on edition) give the players absolutely no chance, or possibly trivialize things too much.
_Baldric, if you have two beans, and i give you two more beans, what do you have?_
_Enough for a small casserole, Sir!_
@@cadenceclearwater4340 Low-key, this is exactly where I got the idea of this video from. I was like how can I explain probability to someone who doesn't really understand math very well? Cuz I have to assume that someone watching the video has very little grasp of the subject. I was thinking of what an easy visual might be.
Then this scene popped into mind. It was a 'eureka' moment. And RIGHT AWAY, someone got the reference!!!
Thanks! You made my day!
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 You're welcome 😊
Personally, I really like the Savage Worlds way of handling things - the typical dc for any given task is 4. A skill is represented by a die type, so someone with only the most basic ability in a skill rolls a d4, while a true master might be rolling a d12. Player characters get an additional d6 to roll (called the wild die), and the higher of the two dice is the result. Also, dice explode (if you roll the highest result, roll again and add it). As a result, there’s a little bit of swingy-ness while still making success significantly more likely more skilled characters.
I missed your videos, good to see you're back at least for a while!
@@greyaperture1926 Thanks for the kind words!!!
One thing i never understood is that "bigger number requires calculators" like why adding a 7 from the die to a +6 from a skill should be easier than adding a 7 to a +36
D&D wouldn’t feel so bad if the average DC is lowered a bit. Trying to beat DC 14 with some proficiencies boiling down to 55% chance is basically flipping a coin. But if the DM is smart about the meta math, they would lower down the DC to 11 or 12, now the success chance is 65% to 70%.
I wholeheartedly agree. And it comes down to another issue, which is that there's yet ONE MORE issue that the GM has to correct. On the fly too, a lot of the time. The system should work out of the box, without DM fiat and corrections.
But this video is an excerpt from a longer video I'm making about Bounded Accuracy. I expect to have that vid out within the next week
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 Interestingly enough, I remember reading through the introductory dungeon in D&D 3e DMG. The very first room had multiple spiders that could, if lucky, very quickly debilitate the party. The second room had a secret passage, and there was no DC to find it, the players had to actually actively explore the room, listening to the GM's description and extrapolating from them.
Quite a very different approach to the usual 5e adventure design, in which OOtB the encounters feel like they have a single positive outcome hinging on a specific dice roll, and player improvisation is actively punished.
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 So true. Player satisfaction is usually highest when their chance of success is around 60% to 70% at something their character is good at. That's the level where it still feels like a challenge but they're not constantly failing.
With players who want that 'superhero' feel that's not quite true. They might enjoy a much higher level of success so they can feel powerful. Younger players often enjoy a higher level of success.
Important to note that if a player is feeling terrible about failing rolls there could be a problem with the way failure is being handled in a game. Failure makes the game more interesting and can give players more challenges to overcome using their ingenuity and creativity when it's presented in a way that does that.
The problem with the D&D system is the leveling up. Having a DM set a difficultly level and having players add two numbers to a die roll is also ridiculously clunky and complex but I won't go into that.
If D&D was limited to levels 3-6 it would be a pretty good game for most people. There are variants of the game like E6 that do just that.
The biggest problem with D&D is that it's just so hard to run rules as written for the DM and the higher the level of the players the harder it is to run.
You just don't need all these complicated rules to tell a player they have a 65% chance of success (which is where most rolls should sit). If you're the DM remember these 3 things:
If they're good at something tell them they need to roll a 7
If they're okay at something tell them they need to roll an 11
If they're bad at something tell them they need to roll a 15
Tell them not to worry about all those adds and modifiers. You've already worked it out and you know exactly what they have to roll. You can adjust the number up or down 1 so it sounds like you're changing it for each situation.
@@EpicEmpires-pb7zv Expert advice all! Especially the point about failure being handled poorly.
I think DnD feels easy from the DMs side, like it's hard to challenge the players at all after a certain point. Because of this, I think DMs get thirsty as hell whenever the players finally DO fail at something, (especially if it was a critical failure), and they go balls to the wall with the punishment, not stopping to think about the fun factor.
I was actually gonna do a video about failure and talk about why it's THE most important driver in any ttrpg game. I love failure in TTRPGs so much because that's where the emerging story comes from 95% of the time. I love failure so much, even when I'm a player, that my symbol for the channel IS a Nat 1.
Because when you see that Nat 1, even more than when you see a Nat 20, you KNOW things are about to get real.
But again, the GM HAS to manage that correctly or they WILL kill the fun. But yeah, I have a long list of vids I'll eventually get to haha
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 I think the biggest key with handling failure is giving the players interesting obstacles they have to overcome as a result of their failure. The game is a lot more fun when players have to use their ingenuity and creativity to succeed rather than just rolling dice.
This is something I honestly don't understand. If the chance of failure is so low, especially at 1st level why are we bothering to roll dice at all? It sort of takes out the game part of the game. 1st level characters shouldn't be great at most things--these are young characters who are just beginning to hone their skills. A 7th level character? Sure, they should have really good chances of success in most cases. But at 1st through 3rd level--these are the levels where things should be a struggle.
@@andrewlustfield6079 It all comes down to player preference.
Cyberpunk makes it so that at first level, you can min max to start out really effective in your class. But if you do that, you're terrible at EVERYTHING else. In that case, it's more about evening out your bad skills to round your character out. Either that, or you stay terrible at everything except what your class is built for, and rely heavily on your party to fill in the gaps. That's more what Cyberpunk has in mind. Each Edgerunner is essentially a specialist at one thing, so it takes the party as a whole to tackle problems. Cyberpunk has much more brutal consequences for failure than DnD and death is way easier at low levels. A single shot can kill you. So I think because of this, it's more important to have reliable skills that you can fall back on.
Other games, like DND, you start kind of middling and basically stay that way until the very late game, but death is NOT easy to come by. The nature of short and long rests make it possible to recover from death's door literally overnight, even in the middle of a dangerous dungeon. In a game like that, skills are honestly less important. They don't need to be as effective because a single skill check isn't going to be the difference between life and death in most cases.
So it comes down to player fun and preference. DnD on the whole is one of the easiest TTRPGS out there in terms of difficulty. But the low difficulty allows a system where players can fail much more frequently without resulting in a game over or a TPK.
So do you WANT a game that causes you to struggle more at lower levels? That can really build a sense of getting better over time. You start out as a blank slate and build up from nothing.
Games that allow you high rolls at low levels have a different feel. You feel more like a fresh faced professional. You only know your craft, but you need help to do anything other than that. This is better for people who like to play in a party. It's also great for players that don't get to play TTRPGs often. If you only play once a month, you could be stuck at low levels for years. But skill based games tend to let you access what makes your character cool early on. This way, you can have a relatively weak character, but you still get to feel badass for the session.
But yeah, that's the beauty of there being so many games to choose from. And after the OGL debacle, more and more new, inventive systems are coming out in droves.
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 With D&D, I'm much more old school, so death is always a real possibility regardless of level. The jeopardy has to be real for actions in the game to matter.
I'm really glad to see you're exploring and sharing that on your channel. The alternatives have always been out there--from Cyberpunk to James Bond, Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars and Star Trek games, etc. Or more direct fantasy role playing games like Warhammer Fantasy, Rune Quest, Paladium, Middle Earth---those have been around a long long time. And of course, GURPS
@@andrewlustfield6079 That's what this channel is all about! It's not, nor has it ever been a DND channel. My earliest videos are actually criticisms of 5e. Everyone is stuck on that one particular game, which DOES have its capacity for fun, like any relatively decent RPG, but it's far from the only option.
I run games professionally on Startplaying.games and I ALWAYS have players request to play DnD, but they almost always want some homebrewed custom game that totally emulates a game that already exists, and already does the things they wish 5e did.
Funnily enough, my most popular videos are all based on homebrewing DnD 5e into something that it's not. It's almost like people want to play other games or something. I figure the issue is that most casual gamers don't KNOW other games exist. They think DnD is synonymous with TTRPG.
My channel is small, TINY compared to Bob World Builder or DnD Shorts, but someone somewhere will hear what I have to say, and on that day, a true gamer will have been born. And I'm okay with that :)
So my mission lately has been bringing eyes to as many other deserving games as possible. The new edition of DND is coming out so that's gonna bring more attention to the TTRPG space as a whole. There'll be plenty of opportunities to compare the new edition to other TTRPGs.
@@encounter-masteringdungeon4251 Excellent! We need more voices like yours and Dungeon Craft, WeLoveTTRPGs, etc that cover D&D but also a lot of other games out there--there's a wealth of games that deserve a lot more oxygen than they are getting. Kudos.