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GMing Overhaul

Posted by Apostate on 09/02/20
Requests and some of the backlog are going to be moving a bit slow, as I'm working entirely on an overhaul of GMing tools and some of the underlying game mecahnics needed to support that. There will be some significant changes I'll go into later, but @harm, @check, and healing will be markedly different. To briefly explain what I'm doing and why:

The current dice system we use is very, very deterministic because it rolls a lot of dice, and then chooses the best values of some of those dice. What this means is the results tend to be not very random at all, as it is working out towards a statistical average. The problem here is as things become not very random, you have really sharp divides between relatively small differences. Like most people would expect someone with skill 4 vs skill 5 to say, lose a head to head a little over half the time, as an advantage to the person with higher skill. It's actually more like a 95 percent with bigger skill gaps becoming astronomical, and this makes giving fair universal checks to wide groups of characters really difficult, because you'd have situations where people by odds virtually always succeed or virtually always fail. This also made it REALLY hard for staff to fairly create risk, as basically the range between 'everyone succeeds awesomely every time' and 'everyone is instantly dead', was razor thin. And with those kinds of issues, there was no way I could have also moved actual risk to PRPs because it would virtually never have been fair to all participants.

So much of the underlying systems there are getting replaced, and check will not be using numerical target numbers eventually, but words like easy/normal/hard/daunting, and the range of outcomes will probably feel a lot better. @harm similarly will be replaced with a range that will not really feel like 'armored target is always okay' or 'everyone instantly dies'.

Along those lines with risk:
-1. Healing will no longer be instant. There will be recovery time, which is important to let GMs tell stories that involve campaigns or series of battles.
-2. Will be introducing permanent wounds for near death circumstances, grievous injuries, etc. Potential stat loss as a result of getting extremely messed up in combat.

Will post more details as we get it implemented.