I spent half of 2023 trying out a deluge of d100 systems (Basic Roleplaying, Delta Green, RuneQuest, Mythras, and Eclipse Phase) and sold them all after the honeymoon phase. I cannot get over the following:

• Large skill lists in the 50+ range that don't center on the game's core activities.
• All modifiers are divisible by 5; thus, why are we not using a d20?
• The need for meta-currency tricks like flipping the results: 100 becomes one after spending a Luck point.
• Five-tiered outcomes and the need for a lookup table to get the math and modifiers right.

Bros, am I missing something about these systems, or did the game design just sour over the years?

Whatever the dice mechanic, fewer than about 30 skills is effectively a character class system, since each player will naturally select 5 or so more-or-less related ones to focus on. You could have Sword+2, Mace+1, Shield+3, Ambush+2 - or just have Fighter (2), it comes to the same thing.

By the same measure, more than 50 or so character classes are effectively a skill system - especially since they're usually combined with a skill system. So you get things like Rolemaster where character classes didn't restrict the skills you could get, only how easy it was to get them.

You can usually do without tables, and for example say, "a success with matching dice (11, 22 etc) is a critical success, a failure with matching dice is a critical failure." And you can leave the modifiers to the DM and have no charts at all. So as your chance of success goes up so does your chance of critical success, likewise for failure.

As to the modifiers being divisible by 5 but not using a d20, apart from the critical success/failure mechanic, this is to give players the satisfaction of progress, however small. For example you can have it that each skill used during the game session gets a tick, and then after the session they roll, if they roll over the current skill then they add 1d6% to it. This encourages them to use a variety of skills in the game session, and neatly represents "diminishing returns" without the trouble of calculating experience points as in class-based systems (and the xp needed to level up escalating). And an improvement of +1 on a d20 is like a guaranteed +5% on the d100, in each case it's fairly substantial and the characters will quickly top out. Whereas if it's just d6% or less, it'll take them longer to improve. So the d100 gives the DM a bit more flexibility in assigning improvements.

Whereas in the 2d6-based game I'm running now, basically nobody improves at all past character generation. They have to get other rewards from play. So it's all about what kind of game you're after.

Thanks for your response, Kyle.

My biggest complaint is that Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu didn't adopt that rolling doubles system, as you described below; instead, they juked tables by using 5e's Advantage/Disadvantage die system. It feels okay in play, but just okay.

I'm in a love–hate relationship with RuneQuest, as the setting and the mythology are compelling. Still, the system drives me up the wall with its tables and complicated Strike Rank initiative system.

I still struggle with the skill system thing; you either have an extensive skill list and muddle the core activity or a focused short skill list, and character roles become more defined. This may be the type of game I'm after. I don't want to run games where you effectively "make a guy" and drop him into the setting and hope a core activity is found.

I play in Venger's semi-weekly Cha'alt campaign, which has zero skills and minor character improvement, but I could 100% tell you the core activity is navigating the setting.

Man, this hobby is fucking weird.

I'm not familiar with all the twists and turns of the multiple editions of CoC and RQ. When I last played RQ, I used 3e - which has no Glorantha attached. It's the one with "Cormac the Pict" as an example character. I liked that the best, but then I come from a background of having started with AD&D1e where the rules are the rules, they're not the setting - and the DM is supposed to come up with the setting.

RQ3e didn't have the "roll doubles" system, it's just what we came up with - it had a chart where they showed up adjusted chances of a critical success/failure, eg if you had 80% skill then critical success would be 01-08 and failure 99-00. We noticed that this was always 10% of possible results, and so we adopted the "roll doubles" to simplify and save us looking up charts. As well, players like rolling dice, and rolling doubles just seems like the sort of thing that should give a remarkable result - good or bad.

So this is what you have to do with any system, add your own little touches to personalise it and make it more fun and interesting for the people around your game table.

If you want to begin with your character's role defined, then you want a class-based system. A skill system gives you some freedom to choose as you play, that's the point of it.

Quote from: Colin Conn on November 13, 2023, 10:37:03 AM

• All modifiers are divisible by 5; thus, why are we not using a d20?

I ran classic Runequest for a few years with a d20. If you roll a 1, roll again and a hit is a critical; roll a 2-4, roll again and a hit is an Impale (or whatever the special is called). While the recheck die roll took a bit of time, it meant that you didn't have to do any math as the results of this roll are exactly what you'd get with a d100.

Bushido is another game that uses 0-100 skills but rolls on a d20. It is a hybrid class/skill system but the rulebook is so poorly written that most people can't figure out how it actually works.

Quote

• Five-tiered outcomes and the need for a lookup table to get the math and modifiers right.

Modifiers have always been my main issue with roll-low systems as they don't really affect the percentage chance equally through all skill levels. There is another d100 game, called James Bond 007, which works a bit differently. Difficulty of a roll is measured as a multiple of the character's skill. So if a character's skill is 10 and the difficulty is 5 then you need to make a 50% roll. If the difficulty was 2 then you'd need to roll 20% or less, etc. While this does require a bit of math (although you can put the multiples on the character sheet), it does mean that difficulty scales perfectly with skill and you don't reach a point where higher skills no longer matter.

Quote from: Colin Conn on November 13, 2023, 10:37:03 AM
I spent half of 2023 trying out a deluge of d100 systems (Basic Roleplaying, Delta Green, RuneQuest, Mythras, and Eclipse Phase) and sold them all after the honeymoon phase. I cannot get over the following:

• Large skill lists in the 50+ range that don't center on the game's core activities.
• All modifiers are divisible by 5; thus, why are we not using a d20?
• The need for meta-currency tricks like flipping the results: 100 becomes one after spending a Luck point.
• Five-tiered outcomes and the need for a lookup table to get the math and modifiers right.

Bros, am I missing something about these systems, or did the game design just sour over the years?

Well, I still have an active Lejendary Adventure campaign started 22 years ago. That's a d100 system. And none of your bullet points are applicable to it.

-The core book has 38 skills. Later supplements added 3 more for a total of 41.
-Includes skill modifiers not multiples of 5 but also without difficult math.
-No meta-currency. The game has Luck, but it's treated as a skill, not currency.
-5-tiered outcomes that require no lookup table.

I have never been a big fan of percentile, and I generally think the archetype has gone obsolete. I also think there are certain tells that the studios which originally created them...have absolutely no idea what they're doing.

I mean seriously; Call of C'thulu is a game about incomprehensible extradimentional abominations and it uses a perfectly transparent D100, while Shadowrun is a game about super-advanced cybernetics and it uses a die pool? I get that these games significantly predate this handy term, "ludonarrative dissonance," but even in the early 2000s when I was first playing non-D&D games I found this distracting.

And I'm glad Colin Conn has already mentioned (Dis)Advantage. WTC is this nonsense making a system which only has one selling point--that it has perfect probability transparency--opaque?

The problem is that players can't actually sense probability changes less than 5% particularly keenly, but even there I would say that most players can't sense that particularly well. I would actually say the "point where players can reliably sense and care about a probability change when they aren't doing the math themselves" is probably just below 10%, which is why if I were designing a linear distribution system...it'd be 1d12.

The skills bloat is something I have mixed feelings about. I like long skill lists, but I don't want players to waste their character advancements on skills we won't realistically use. I as a GM tends to not have plans which involve more than about 10-20 skills max and clever players can usually bring several more to bear. Everything else tends to get wasted. I haven't played a game with a long skill list recently, but I would probably start any such campaign with a "I only have plans for this basket of skills" included in the campaign premise handout I tend to make. Generally, players would do one or two things not on that list to make things interesting, but they should know that they're going for creativity and not core content before they spend the points.

So yeah, not a huge fan of percentile. It isn't the worst thing ever, but it's increasingly becoming the poster child of "these mechanics didn't age well."

Not to mention that, as with most ttrpgs, the combat mechanics are unnecessarily complicated compared to the non-combat mechanics. You roll to hit, compare that to your opponent's defense roll, roll damage and modify it... why is combat so complicated and detailed when all other task resolution operates on a simple "no, and"/"no"/"yes"/"yes, and" outcome per encounter?

True20 was able to abstract attack and damage into a single roll, but it seems nobody else learned the lesson.

I loved True20! Just you mentioning it is a nostalgia hit. Hearty feelings, lads.

I agree with a lot of what is being said here, d100 systems aren't aging well and ludonarrative dissonance is a fantastic term to describe the misalignment between system and setting.

Quote from: Colin Conn on November 27, 2023, 02:28:34 PM
I agree with a lot of what is being said here, d100 systems aren't aging well and ludonarrative dissonance is a fantastic term to describe the misalignment between system and setting.

The perfect d100 system just hasn't been invented yet.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on November 14, 2023, 06:13:15 PMRQ3e didn't have the "roll doubles" system, it's just what we came up with - it had a chart where they showed up adjusted chances of a critical success/failure, eg if you had 80% skill then critical success would be 01-08 and failure 99-00. We noticed that this was always 10% of possible results, and so we adopted the "roll doubles" to simplify and save us looking up charts. As well, players like rolling dice, and rolling doubles just seems like the sort of thing that should give a remarkable result - good or bad.

RuneQuest 3 didn't have a 10% critical. It had two success levels: critical success at 5% of the skill value and special success at 20%. (Runequest 3 rulebook pg 36). That's why they didn't use the doubles rule.

Whatever. We didn't care. We did what was interesting, and worked well.

I know this approach is less popular these days.

Quote from: Colin Conn on November 27, 2023, 02:28:34 PM
I loved True20! Just you mentioning it is a nostalgia hit. Hearty feelings, lads.

I agree with a lot of what is being said here, d100 systems aren't aging well and ludonarrative dissonance is a fantastic term to describe the misalignment between system and setting.

TTRPGs are a pretty young medium and a very niche one at that, so it's not surprising that they're still having trouble with ludonarrative dissonance. I mean, that jargon was originally invented by video game critics and was retroactively applied to ttrpgs. For most of ttrpg history the way things operated was that you designed a system that operated on a principle of arbitrary realism (i.e. the model of attributes, skills, hit points and overly detailed combat used by 99% of games) and then slapped your setting on that, as opposed to designing your rules from the ground up to support your setting's tone.

If you want games designed from the ground up to support a particular tone and atmosphere, then video games do that way better than any ttrpgs do (with caveats).

I think this is the number 2 rule of game design: the system and the setting need to mesh; the number 1 rule is meaningful choices.

Quote from: Colin Conn on November 13, 2023, 10:37:03 AM
I spent half of 2023 trying out a deluge of d100 systems (Basic Roleplaying, Delta Green, RuneQuest, Mythras, and Eclipse Phase) and sold them all after the honeymoon phase. I cannot get over the following:

• Large skill lists in the 50+ range that don't center on the game's core activities.
• All modifiers are divisible by 5; thus, why are we not using a d20?
• The need for meta-currency tricks like flipping the results: 100 becomes one after spending a Luck point.
• Five-tiered outcomes and the need for a lookup table to get the math and modifiers right.

Bros, am I missing something about these systems, or did the game design just sour over the years?

Quote from: Colin Conn on November 28, 2023, 02:10:19 PM
I think this is the number 2 rule of game design: the system and the setting need to mesh; the number 1 rule is meaningful choices.

As a Chaosium/Design Mechanism fanboy, this thread triggers me to no end!

On a more serious note, I think the main appeal of the D100 systems (at least for the BRP-derived games, I have no experience with Eclipse Phase) is in its versatility and adaptability. Most of the games that you listed (BRP, DG, RQ and Mythras) are related to each other. 2 of them (BRP and Mythras) are generic systems that are meant to be toolkits for an enterprising GM to design his own game and so don't have core activities. While DG and RQ are massive in its scope of play, and so it's core activities are highly reliant on what the fiction of the campaign dictates it to be. In DG, you could be playing a group of WW2 commandos all the way to a FBI agents in the modern day. The same goes for RQ, but the scope is even larger since its a bigger setting. So instead of having a narrow scope, the rules of the game work to ground you into the setting. This is something that RQ does really well (and what I think DG does poorly on), from character creation, you find out who your grand parents and parents were, what they did in major historical events, and what you did before the campaign started and its all recorded in your sheet as an important part of your character. It uses Allegiance, Passions, Renown and other subsystems in order put you in a web of feudal obligations, familial relations and other connections all pulling you in different directions. It makes you feel like every major act you take has consequences and that everything immediately important to your character is connected. In that sense, RQ games tend to be highly political, in the way that early Game of Throne episodes feel but with a Mythic-Bronze/Iron-Age-Gods-Walk-Among-Us aesthetic. Because the focus of RQ is not what your character does, but who your character is and who they are connected to, the games have a massive scope. You could be playing diplomats working for a noble house all the way down to lowly mercenaries trying to make their fortune in the battlefield. Don't fall into the trap of having too narrow a scope for games, like for example Lancer. If you don't know what it is, it's like a really well designed Mech RPG. It plays like a simplified D&D 4e, but 99% of the rules are for mech combat. It's fucking fantastic, at least until the fiction of the game had us do some out-of-mech activities (which are outside of the core activities of the game), the GM had almost no rules or framework for the stuff that we were trying to accomplish and had to bullshit a bunch of the things we wanted to do. It was very clearly a major lapse in the game's design not to include more detailed rules outside of mech combat. Players expect games to be able to handle a variety of situations, or at least provide a framework that a GM could use to determine effect.

Now to try and answer some of your other questions, using D100s over D20s is a preference thing. I consider skills that are defined from a scale of 0-100 (or higher in some cases) to be more intuitive than other systems. A character with 70% skill, has a 70% chance of success. While D20 roll mechanics are only a little more complex, other dice mechanics exist that are totally obtuse and difficult to exact the chances of success/fail. Have you ever tried to figure it out in the Modiphius 2D20 systems? For context, it's a dice pool system (up to 5D20) alongside a two-tiered roll under system and I have no idea how to parse the difficulty of a roll.

As for metacurrences, I can't really speak to them as the BRP-derived systems are notoriously old school and don't feature them at all. Mythras, however, does use luck points (being a distant cousin of it's other BRP brethren). I personally don't like them and consider it a sin against Mythras, although I like nearly everything else about the system.

The five levels of success/failure are more intuitive in play then what first impressions upon reading them would lead you to believe. I like to think of it as a ladder with Critical Success => Special Success => Success => Failure => Fumble. In situations of opposed roll, you would roll and hope to land on one of the levels of success while your opponent is trying to use his roll to drag it down to a lower step on the ladder in order to turn a Success into a failure or to downgrade it to a lesser form of Success. In combat, the levels of Success determined how much damage you dealt, if you bypassed his armor etc. It's very meaty and detailed and shines best in Mythras, where your levels of success allows you to impose special effects onto your opponent. This makes every attack/parry you make really matter, which is perfect for a heroic fantasy type of game.

Quote from: KPhan1212 on December 30, 2023, 01:41:42 AM
Don't fall into the trap of having too narrow a scope for games, like for example Lancer. If you don't know what it is, it's like a really well designed Mech RPG. It plays like a simplified D&D 4e, but 99% of the rules are for mech combat. It's fucking fantastic, at least until the fiction of the game had us do some out-of-mech activities (which are outside of the core activities of the game), the GM had almost no rules or framework for the stuff that we were trying to accomplish and had to bullshit a bunch of the things we wanted to do. It was very clearly a major lapse in the game's design not to include more detailed rules outside of mech combat. Players expect games to be able to handle a variety of situations, or at least provide a framework that a GM could use to determine effect.

Never played Lancer, but I downloaded the free rules and looked them over.  I'm going to have to disagree with you here.  Lancer is nothing like 4e (and that's not a bad thing).  It's far more like Shadow of the Demon Lord (down to renamed boons and banes and succeed on a 10+).  I agree that what it does is give you a tight combat system with few areas that need adjudication, and then a system for non-combat activities that leaves a lot of wiggle room.  You present this as a negative, but I think that's only true from a BRP-style mentality.  Having played lots of SotDL, I can say that there is a lot of flexibility for players to think outside the box when you don't have a ton of mechanics weighing you down, and all the GM has to do is decide which attribute, does a background apply, any boons/banes, are you 10+?  This keeps the game very smooth and flexible, and has the advantage of getting through lots of game without much rule or look up time spent.  So I think this design is a pretty big positive, actually.

Quote from: KPhan1212 on December 30, 2023, 01:41:42 AM
As for metacurrences, I can't really speak to them as the BRP-derived systems are notoriously old school and don't feature them at all. Mythras, however, does use luck points (being a distant cousin of it's other BRP brethren). I personally don't like them and consider it a sin against Mythras, although I like nearly everything else about the system.

The five levels of success/failure are more intuitive in play then what first impressions upon reading them would lead you to believe. I like to think of it as a ladder with Critical Success => Special Success => Success => Failure => Fumble. In situations of opposed roll, you would roll and hope to land on one of the levels of success while your opponent is trying to use his roll to drag it down to a lower step on the ladder in order to turn a Success into a failure or to downgrade it to a lesser form of Success. In combat, the levels of Success determined how much damage you dealt, if you bypassed his armor etc. It's very meaty and detailed and shines best in Mythras, where your levels of success allows you to impose special effects onto your opponent. This makes every attack/parry you make really matter, which is perfect for a heroic fantasy type of game.

I think these paragraphs are almost self-contradictory.  Part of the complaint against meta-currencies is that they allow the player a hand in shaping the outcome of their actions beyond what is traditional for an RPG.  This is, admittedly, a matter of taste.  Differing levels of success rubs close to this problem, especially in systems where the player is encouraged to "help" determine what the levels of success mean (and I'm talking specifically out of combat).  I haven't played a BRP-derived system in decades, so I honestly don't remember if it applies to that game rules-as-written, but I seem to remember that being part of what my GM did.  So that's one issue.

The other is the same issue that FFG's Star Wars games always had for us: sometimes you just want to succeed or fail, dammit!  Levels of success always leave you feeling like you got cheated on a roll if you don't get the best outcome; you can "succeed" all night but never get the really "good" result for anything.  Now, this is more pronounced in the newer "Yes, but..." style games, so it's not as bad in this system.  But there's still a psychological hurdle that you rolled well enough to succeed, but still missed out on something cool (it's actually a serious issue with any system that gatekeeps cool abilities behind "critical" successes, and one of my few criticisms of SotDL).

Either way, I don't think your explanations of the system really did much to address the post you were responding to, at least in terms of the mechanical issues they didn't like.  But that's more a matter of taste, really...