"You need mechanics that support that experience"

Jeremy Forbing 

Elegant or clever game design are only relevant in service of a particular experience. Generic RPGs tend to be just that, generic. If you want a game to feel like a Hong Kong martial arts film, you need mechanics that support that experience. If you a system that simulates the deadly and horrific battles of World War I, you have to design towards that. The Marvel Heroic rules would be bad for Lovecraftian horror, but are great for playing superhero comics. How can we judge a mechanic without knowing what experience it is meant to create?

Arkham Horror and Bathtubs of D6

Matt Miller 

In Arkham, extra dice is always better. Every die in Arkham adds +1/3. But Arkham does a very nice job of limiting the dice you can add through the use of 'hands'. You only get two, and you you an only use two hands worth of spells/weapons* in a single attack.  In Arkham, things which do add piles of dice (withering, etc) also require a roll to activate, and include an additional cost. 

I recall some game that played with d10s. It made doing the mental math easy...but I think it was based on the ShadowRun style 'bathtubs of D6', where only a 1 counts as a success...which makes it worse than ShadowRun. ShadowRun, a 6d6 makes a success very likely. With a d10 system, you need 10d10. Making it a 1 or a 2 on a D10 doesn't alter it that much: 1/5 chance, vs a 1/6 on a d6--not worth the extra dice required. 

**Recalls to me, before the 'Christmas Tree' twinking out, there was a rule that players could only have one magic item.

Paen to Fate

Matt Miller

Mechanically, I'm really liking Fate of late. 4dF provides a very strong median tendency, while permitting sufficient variance to make things unpredictable. 

Rob Hicks 

The best thing about the fate die system is environmental or situational bonuses. You can creatively do just about anything to get the bonus, but you have to justify it through actions, environment and character history. It blends the strategic elements of the game with the storytelling.

Paul Goldstone 

Fate has extensive meta gaming that makes the game for me, players describing scenes, incidences etc to get mods. The end result being that if you have the skill you are more or less going to succeed. D20 for me has a huge amount of random, that doesn't cater to the if you have the skill you are most likey to succeed mechanic due to the wide possible variances. The arkham dice method for an RPG, when combined with a skill, offers the "have skill will succeed" mechanic which does seem to be popular of late. Its worth noting that ffg custom dice rpg have that, just with symbols over numbers, as does Mutant Chronicles to some extent (MC has a great system and is well worth looking at).

Nathan Dowdell 

IMHO, what makes Fate sing is the way that Aspects and the Fate Point economy turn a test from a pure risk consideration to a matter of cost - being able to spend after the fact, and suffer costs for success, changes the game dynamic hugely. Failure isn't the end, merely a chance to ask the question "how much is success worth to you?"

Matt Miller

You make an excellent point. The ability to 'burn' clue tokens in Arkham, AFTER a roll, is one of my favorite parts. It makes rolling slightly less visceral, but it still works: Clue Tokens are a representation of a generic advantage in understanding.

Damage Sizing

Matt Miller

In Netrunner, 7 points gets you victory, with points coming in packages of 1,2 or 3. Thus, any 'hit' after your second might be your last. Likewise, it might be 7 different successes. But it means that you start sweating every attack, because it might be your last. It's the same dynamic as playing with lv1 characters. In DnD, at lvl 1, max weapon being greater than max HP means a bad roll can end your character. But I think Netrunner strikes a good balance between 1st level DnD and the 'stacks of HP' problem.

Arkham Horror Math

Playing a great deal of Arkham Horror, which has a 1/3 success rate for dice; just came across the math for predicting count of successes, given X dice, an a X success rate. Begs to be used for an RPG.

Margins, Called Shot Criticals, Expertise, and Power Attack.

Matt Miller 

Before DnD adopted d20, 2d6 was the default rolling mechanism. But the 2d6 also included a margin mechanic, when how much you won by was important. Working on Mayhem, which also has a margin mechanic (for criticals) big margins were a nightmare. 

I recall there being a feat in DnD that let you take -x to rolls to get +x to damage. I don't recall it being particularly exciting. Part of what made called shots exciting was that the pay-off was big: Big risk, big reward. A -1 to hit for a +1 to damage is just...tactical.
But the idea of margins doing more damage recalls to me Called Shit Criticals, from Skills and Powers (DnD), where you could take a -4 penalty to attacks, and then enjoy ridiculous damage bonuses. Thematically, I think I prefer the 'push your luck' mechanism of Called Shot Criticals. 

Rob Hicks 

Power attack. reduce your base attack bonus by 1 to get 1 extra damage. (2 extra damage for two-handed weapons.) Power attack was amazing.

Matt Miller

Ok, so expertise must have been -x damage to get +1 to hit. 

Bonus Sizing

Travis Casey

September 29, 2015

A few recent OSR games, such as Swords & Wizardry White Box, Delving Deeper, and Bloody Basic, have adopted OD&D's attribute modifiers for rolls. Those are: 8 or less: -1;  9 to 12: 0; 13 or more.

On the positive side, I like the fact that this divides up abilities into "high-middle-low". You don't get the effect from later versions, where many players seem to feel that unless their primary attribute for their class is quite high, they're "hopeless". On the negative, though, the modifiers feel too small. These games use variants on the d20 System, so a +1 is only a 5% change in the chance of success. It's such a small bonus as to be rarely useful. 

 +1 OD&D intended those modifiers to be used with a 2d6 system, not a 1d20 one. A -1 or +1 is much more significant on 2d6 than with 1d20. So, I'm suggesting that if people want to use this style, but also want to use the 1d20 resolution mechanic instead of the original 2d6, they use -2/0/+2 as the modifiers instead. I'm suggesting doubling the numbers to give a statistical impact closer to what those modifiers had in the original system.

Original D&D was meant to use the Chainmail combat system... which used 2d6. In the context of a 2d6 system, a +1 is much more significant. If you normally need a 12 to succeed, it makes you 1/18, or 5.55...%, more likely to succeed. In the best-case scenario, if you needed an 8 before the modifier, it makes you 1/6, or 16.66...% more likely to succeed. Thus, a +1 in original D&D is more akin to a +2 when you're using 1d20.  

Gygax quickly changed the modifiers, doing so in Greyhawk, the first major revision to OD&D. My guess is that he did so upon realizing that since D&D was far outselling Chainmail, most players were using the 1d20-based "alternative combat system" rather than the originally intended system. The upshot is - if you're contemplating making a system with an OD&D-style flat modifier, but are using a d20-based system, I'd suggest making the modifier be -2/+2, instead of -1/+1. That will keep things closer to the original intended effect of the modifiers. 

...I'm not talking 'double all steps, so you go +2, +4, etc". I'm talking about three tiers, period: -2, 0, +2. Nobody would have a +8 from a stat, unless you're dealing with a girdle of giant strength or the like, in which case it's really a magic item bonus... 

...The really nice thing about not gradating it like that, is that it then doesn't cause a drive toward higher stats. On 3d6, the chance of a 13 or better is 26%. Thus, with six stats, the majority of characters (about 5 out of 6) will have at least one... 

Alexander Staniforth 

I think there'd be something to be said for a little more nuance. -2/-1/0/+1/+2. That way ridiculously high stats DO matter more, as do ridiculously low stats while at the same time it's still a relatively simple gradation.

Paul Goldstone 

Bigger bonuses skew balance, especially at higher "levels". Lower bonuses also allow other "magic item bonuses" to have relevance. A +1 magic sword is irrelevant if a 18 stat gives +8 to a roll. I think the issue here is on a (3-18) system fundamentally they have made top end and low end stats irrelevant, there seems to be no (game mechanic) difference between 13 and 18. Perhaps a "roleplay aspect", but game mechanic wise irrelevant.

Attack Role Complexity

Matt Miller

The more complex combat is, the more time it takes, the more it becomes the focus of the system.Would it be possible to have three distinct steps in an attack? Mayhem  coupled the two together (one step) so that the margin of hit resulted in more damage dice.

Rob Hicks 

In Mayhem, the roll to hit and the roll for damage were two separate things, but they were interconnected based on the "crit" range, the number by which it the die hit. It worked fairly well, but I was always eyeing it wondering if I couldn't streamline things somehow.

Matt Miller

D20 has two steps for damage: Roll to hit, and then and (independent) roll for damage. My object is to get the final damage number down as low as possible.

What about...a roll to hit, a damage roll, and an armor roll? Roll 1d20 (vs AC), then roll damage (vs. Armor). Rolling damage vs armor is very different from Armor subtracting from damage. Subtracting armor from damage generates 'false hits', where your attacks succeeds...but does not damage.

Players dislike those. But players like critical hits. So the trick is to make the damage roll translate into a count of criticals, with values of 1, 2, or 3. (Call them 'wounds') And that...I am not sure how to do. Not in a balanced, mathematically simple way. DMG minus armr causes 'false hits', while damage/armor is mathematically complex. Presume our damage dice will be regular polygons (d4-d12) with some use of multiple dice.

 A ranked table might work, where >0, >10 and >20 determine if its 1, 2, or 3 wounds. But the 'margin' number would vary by armor, not weapon..

Tom Vogt 

There are many dice mechanics that accomplish exactly this. Cortex Plus has a system where you roll 3d6, take the highest two for the success (hit) and the low one for damage. Or Godlike with its height+width, it evolved into the aptly named One-Roll-Engine. As soon as you look outside the boring mainstream games, you find a lot of very interesting and innovative game mechanics. I'm working on another system right now that will also have one roll to resolve both hit and damage. It's by no means a first

Travis Casey 

Quite a few older games have a roll to hit, a hit location roll, and a damage roll. Some throw in other rolls as well. BRP, in the complex case, has roll to hit, roll for the opponent's parry or dodge, roll for damage, and roll for hit location.On the opposite end, you have systems like Torg, where there is no separate roll for damage - the margin of success of the attack roll is instead added to a weapon damage value to give the damage done. Thus, each attack requires only one roll.

Paul Goldstone 

Rolemaster accomplished a lot with one roll (plus possible crit) which works nice, though a lot of tables.... I suppose there is a need to consider how important or how much of a focus is combat for the game, as well as whether the skill system will follow the same rolling premise. Finally how long it takes to work out and complete every roll. Played a few games where a "quick combat" takes over an hour for a couple of rounds for 4 players and 6 opponents can be a bit much. Finally how deadly/realistic is the combat system intending to be which is another important factor.

Rob Hicks

When I was working on Blueshift, that one used a single attack roll to speed things up, but that was also because I wanted to do automatic gunfire, which meant multiple combat rolls simultaneously, and I didn't want to have to roll multiple damage damage dice separately for each attack, and didn't want to create a huge variability in possible results by counting up lots of damage dice. If course, the other option involved multiplication, so go figure.

Travis Casey 

My own homebrew uses multiplication for damage: the amount you hit by is multiplied by a damage factor for the weapon used, with the adjustment that a zero (just barely hit) is multiplied by 1/2. The numbers involved are usually small - less than 10, so they're in the range of the multiplication tables most people have memorized.

Jesper Anderson
 Roll to hit, roll hit location, roll damage, depending on armor at hit location roll glancing (to further reduce damage). That's essentially how Phoenix Command Hand To Hand does it.

Subitizing

Matt Miller

Today I happened across a concept for mental math that says people can grasp rather small numbers (<4) almost instantly, and was wondering if there was a way to apply that to gaming. (Subitizing) 

Last week, we played a FATE-based game with regular D6's, and the additional mental time to convert the different symbols to FATE outcomes was notable. FATE uses four dice, with a bell-curve of outcomes, but does it using 3 values, with 2 symbols (blanks as null, so a player just needs to 'subitize'). Rather than explicit counts, FATE dice make it possible to subitize pluses and minuses; a substantial portion of the time, there will be only 1 symbol to subitize as well.

Tom Vogt

I've done some extensive work on dice systems, including presenations. In general, comparison > addition > substraction > multiplication. FATE balances somewhere between as theoretically you need to do addition and substraction, but with the usual low numbers, it is basically instinctive, you don't actually "do the math", exactly due to the effect you describe.

Random Attributes and Twink

Paul Goldstone

In relation to the munch/twink, that is down to the system, and more and more are seemingly point based with skills and talents. It seems long gone are the random rolls, and that difficult question on whether that 3 goes in wisdom or charisma foe my fighter. Over the years RPGs have matured with the community, and more players want input and to tailor (read munch/twink) their characters to effectively get the most out of it in a game. Having run a fair few tourney games, there have been many times i have been questioned on the character because it would have been better to have spent the points there and there and been a "better character". There can be a tendency to miss the 'role-play' aspect and focus on rolls.

"What is the proper number of base attributes for an RPG?"

Paul Goldstone

Dnd got the number of attributes/stats right imo with 6. It enables a decent description pretty much covering all angles. 

Rules and Setting

Matt Miller

The trouble with Dresden files is that there is too much stuff you had to make up on your own. Playing Dresden files reminded me of playing DnD early on, we had the books, but...much of what was actually played was furnished through a combination of FF6 and Dragon Lance, and adapting the published rules.

Which brings out the importance of setting--once you have a setting, a description of how the world works, then you can start making rules for it. Garth Nix's Sabriel would make an excellent setting--the 'rules' for the game exist in the books, and merely need numbers put to them. DnD itself grew in this way--start with the Chainmail combat engine, add clerical powers, add a Vancian magic system, and on and on.

Porting Deadlands to FATE

Matt Miller

Bought Fate Core, thinking about porting an AEG setting (Deadlands, 7th Sea, L5R) to it. All systems share what I'll call the 'Roll then Keep' mechanic; roll X dice, keep (and sum) the y highest dice. My memory of playing it was that it was...clumsy. Mentally, you have to perform a sort operations, which involves !(x-1) comparisons, and then sum three or four dice. So making a simple roll takes quite a bit of mental math.

Complicating this, 10's explode. While doing so makes it theoretically possible to reach much higher target numbers, the chances are small. Ie, reaching 30, on a d10 is a 1/1000 chance. 

The 'Keep' system does a lot of unintuitive things to mean and variance. 10k10 is the same as 10d10. But 5k10 generates a distribution where a normal roll is 8±2, rather than 5.5±4.5. Higher mean and smaller variance. Translating the difference between steps is thus difficult. Is 6k4 better than 5k5? Not intuitive. Presenting such information requires a table.

Rob Hicks

Several worlds desperately need functional systems. Top of my list for doing so would be shadowrun. Cyberpunk fantasy. Suuuuuper tasty.

Attribute Score Distributions and Associated Bonuses

Robert J. Grady

Small plusses is one of the strengths of OSR games, as it keeps expected target values within a certain range. That said, basic D&D went up to +3, which is a nice range.

Alexander Staniforth

I think there'd be something to be said for a little more nuance. -2/-1/0/+1/+2.That way ridiculously high stats DO matter more, as do ridiculously low stats while at the same time it's still a relatively simple gradation.

Paul Goldstone
Bigger bonuses skew balance, especially at higher "levels". Lower bonuses also allow other "magic item bonuses" to have relevance. A +1 magic sword is irrelevant if a 18 stat gives +8 to a roll

Travis Casey

I'm not talking 'double all steps, so you go +2, +4, etc". I'm talking about three tiers, period: -2, 0, +2. Nobody would have a +8 from a stat, unless you're dealing with a girdle of giant strength or the like, in which case it's really a magic item bonus. A few recent OSR games, such as Swords & Wizardry White Box, Delving Deeper, and Bloody Basic, have adopted OD&D's attribute modifiers for rolls. Those are:

• 8 or less: -1
• 9 to 12: 0
• 13 or more: +1

What I'm pointing out is that OD&D intended those modifiers to be used with a 2d6 system, not a 1d20 one. A -1 or +1 is much more significant on 2d6 than with 1d20. So, I'm suggesting that if people want to use this style, but also want to use the 1d20 resolution mechanic instead of the original 2d6, they use -2/0/+2 as the modifiers instead. I'm suggesting doubling the numbers to give a statistical impact closer to what those modifiers had in the original system.

Matt Miller

The varied gradiation provides a mechanism to make characters more directly comparable. A first level wizard with an 18 is better than one with a 12. At some point, players are unwilling to keep lousy characters, and just re-roll until they get something acceptable. 

Paul Goldstone

I think the issue here is on a (3-18) system fundamentally they have made top end and low end stats irrelevant, there seems to be no (game mechanic) difference between 13 and 18. Perhaps a "roleplay aspect", but game mechanic wise irrelevant. There must be a reason, perhaps its all about reduction of the munch (min/max) players, but I would assume, having limited knowledge that f the games you have highlighted, that the game designers had reason for it all in this specific instance

Alexander Staniforth

That's why I'd suggest a -2/-1/0/+1/+2 approach. A point to higher stats without making them ridiculous and crucial to high-level characters. The really nice thing about not gradating it like that, is that it then doesn't cause a drive toward higher stats.On 3d6, the chance of a 13 or better is 26%. Thus, with six stats, the majority of characters (about 5 out of 6) will have at least one. I have to admit, I like luck in character gen (though I also like point-buys... either is fine by me, depending on the game) and I'm not too obsessed with games being balanced.

D20 vs. 2d10 vs 3d6

Christina Freeman

There is another key difference between a d20 system and a 2d6 system - the bell curve created by the die roll. A +1 bonus actually has a difference in effect depending upon the roll, simply because it is NOT a flat +5% chance. As such, you might find that changing from d20 to 2d10 might also work (or even 3d6, as suggested by monte cook).. I actually prefer a 2d10 system myself... the bell curve isn't as steep as with 3d6, \

Matt Miller

Bell curves are both good and bad. They make the expected range of numbers more predictable, adding bonuses to them shifts the peaks out of phase by changing the mean.

Matt Miller

The intersect between the two curves is when the blue player can reasonably expected to beat the red player. Assuming that area is equal to a third of the area under the curve, the blue player must roll in their top 1/3 at the same time the red player rolls in their low 1/3, which will only happen 1/9 of the time. This is for a difference in means of 2. The case is even more severe if the difference is larger. 

d20 has a 'flat' distribution, with much more variance. d20+2 will beat d20+4 fully 20% of the time. d20 still has a 1/400 chance of beating a d20+19. I also like the d20 'explode' rule, where 20 hits and 1 misses, better; there is always a chance of success or failure, regardless of other conditions. Opposed rolls (d20 vs. d20 or 3d6 vs. 3d6) are analogous to 2d6, where the resulting roll is very much a bell curve. 3d6 vs. 3d6 creates a very strong, very regular bell curve, where the difference in medians is decisive a very large amount of the time. Using one mechanic for 'tests' vs a DC and one for opposed rolls would not be a terrible idea...

Simplicity in mental math is its own virtue. Rolling 3d6 vs 3d6 for every roll is 7 mental operations. d20 vs DC is 1.

Julian Stanley

For the record, Monsters & Magic is 3d6 vs. Difficulty or an AC score.

Combat actions

Matt Miller 

Hence, the need for combat actions. It makes combat more than two stacks of HP chipping away at each other. And it removes the need to optimize your character to do that. I'm not saying there isn't a place for that style of play, of competitive optimization...just not  a good table-top game. It throws away the primary advantage of playing with a live GM instead of an AI: You have a referee who can decide the outcome of events that transgress the rules, or which are outside the rules.

Damage scaling and danger of death

Matt Miller 

JRPG's had highly variable damage, compensated with a high 'buffer' of HP. As levels rose, both damage and HP scaled. At lv 1, a hit was 9 damage to your 50 life. At lv10, a hit was 99 damage to your 500 life, and at lv100, a hit was 999 damage to your 5000 life.

 Matt Miller 

Part of what informed Mayhem was that high level fighters are piles of HP. I had a fighter with...112 HP? While successful toasted by a dragon, mere human weapons had small effect--even the most successful attack was never going to deal more than 30 damage. 

Keith J Davies

It makes for a steeper survival curve between levels. At any given level you'll see a comparable fight time (as measured in rounds; spell animations might take longer) because damage is a pretty consistent fraction of hit points. However, if you see a significant mismatch in levels it's going to be very unbalanced

For instance, two Ftr1, two Ftr5, two Ftr9, two Ftr13, two Ftr17... at each level, the pair might fight for about 3 rounds before one or both drop, and the outcome is probably unpredictable. However, a Ftr5 vs Ftr1 might be only a round or two and very predictable because the Ftr5 can one shot the Ftr1, while even if the Ftr1 hits the Ftr5 he won't do enough damage to matter... and the Ftr9 vs. Ftr1 might get his armor scratched but is in totally no danger..which is fine. 

Rolemaster, and IIRC later editions of D&D, and several others have made similar design decisions. It encourages a degree of grittiness and caution. Even early editions of D&D had a lot of places where you could die pretty easily, even at high level (save or die effects, really big damage against hit point totals rather low compared to 3e-era D&D, etc.)...There is a place for it. Hit point vs. damage escalation works well for the heroic warrior vs. sword fodder trope. 

Other games aren't looking for that. They want to have deliberate distinction between characters of different grades. Depending on how other things work it might be a matter of hit points and damage scaling by level (which prety quickly moves low-level and high-level into different arenas), or it might be different effects trumping each other (*cough* casters in D&D 3+ vs noncasters), or different ranks being able to affect others or not (in Paranoia, low-grade weapons don't affect higher-grade characters), or defensive powers that come online and render higher-level characters functionally invulnerable (many supers games).

Matt Miller

You make good points. I think I'm less and less jazzed on benchmarking fighters. A fight should always be dangerous, even from a position of overwhelming superiority.

Bad Defaults

Matt Miller 

When making Mayhem, we mentally defaulted to 20 as a top number, after so many years of DnD. Bonuses we re scaled accordingly. It's one of the things I regret the most. The end result was that all numbers were scaled by 5x, which did nothing but make the mental math harder.The higher numbers made margins larger, and since margins affect total damage, higher HP was required to compensate. So HP gets measured in dozens, not singles. It also made skill mismatches, for different levels of enemies, much much more deadly.

 Keith J Davies 

Heh, as it happen Echelon keeps hit point totals pretty low. The attached (mocked up, lots of text is _wrong_) character sheet shows a 28th-level character (D&D 20th-level equivalient in principle) with 35 hit points. One hit point per level, one more at the top of each tier (so one every four levels, by default). If this characer built up her Fortitude more she'd have more hit points, potentially a total of _49_.(For reference: dice pool mechanism, every die that rolls 5+ is a success, every 1 is a complication, you can spend a success to cancel a complication. She's 7th-tier and thus rolls 7 dice for everything, but you don't have to add them up... adding them up would suck,)

Fate Style Conditions

Matt Miller

Wondering if it might be possible to use fate style conditions, where you do a set up that adds to your next attack.

Keith J Davies 

I really like the fate aspect mechanism, and being able to 'cause' aspects (I forget the exact term, it's not invoke, you're making a new aspect exist temporarily) is a nifty mechanism.

Arkham Horror Mechanics

Matt Miller 

I've been playing a great deal of Arkham Horror, where a 5 or 6 on a d6 count as a success. Rolling 8 or 9 dice, it takes a bit to pick out successes. But estimating how likely something is to succeed is easy; every dice you roll gives you 1/3 of a success. Which makes it tempting to adapt as a base mechanic for an RPG. But I'd like more than two ways (1) Extra dice, 2) Extra success) to affect a players roll.

Matt Miller 

Arkham has a mechanic which asks you to roll a success. Mentally, it's hard to imagine how that affects the outcome, as it is deeply unintuitive. In effect, it squares your chances. If you roll 1 dice, your chance is 1 in 9 (1/3*1/3). But if you roll 2 dice...I become confused. The probabilities get wonky. Chance of getting 1 success, on X dice, squared, is the match. X*(1/3)^2...I think. If I have 5 dice, the chances of getting 1 success, twice, is not the same as the chance of getting 2 successes on 10 dice; the first is harder.

Timing and Initiative

Matt Miller

In Mayhem, in devising round-timing we started with a DnD based 10-count round, then expanded to a 12-count 'combat clock' (with 10+ combatants, players were 'tied' too often. But our actions take 5,6,7 or 8 ticks on the combat clock. Somewhat with the idea that people would not overlap too often. But it happened often, as initial position on the clock was set so that everyone started at a different number. But after several hours staring at number systems, I begin to wonder if was a good idea.

If starting position+action is the formula, 1+8,2+7,3+6 or 4+5 all wind up on the same tick on the combat clock. Yet starting all at 1 would not help: All 'fast' actions would wind up at the same tick-mark. Increasing the magnitude of numbers makes for more mental math, not using single digits, but the biggest problem seems to be the change-over, when 11+7=6

Rob Hicks 

Actually, we started with a 100-point combat clock first. Then went down to 50, then 30, then 10, then 12, assuming my memory serves. 

Matt Miller

That seems...not unreasonable. Why did we ditch 30? It was such a reasonable number. Divisible by 15,10,6,5,3,2,1...60 might actually have been even better.

Matt Miller

Given that the virtues of the Fibonacci sequence are that two numbers in it add up to a third number, I am thinking we'd have been better to use non-Fibbonacci numbers, viz: 4,6,7,9. Rounds take a long time, so I recall estimating HP on the basis that no battle should average longer than 10 rounds.  I tried a number of combinations, and they all overlap to some degree. 56789 just happens to overlap a great deal (20%) in the first two moves, which always bothered me. But alternate numbers are as big a head-ache: Either ratio between the highest and the lowest becomes too big, or the numbers become too big to do mental arithmetic with. 6-10 or 7-11 both have better ratios, but both still have the same 'overlap' problem. (7+11=8+10=9+9). Adding gaps between the numbers (1,3,5,7,9) fixes the overlap problem, but either generates speed ratio problems (9:1) or (using 5,7,9,11,13) mental math problems. The speed ratio was a problem because...players get bored when they take a 9 speed action, and someone else takes 9 1-speed actions. 

This was particularly true because there were a couple of effects in the game that adjusted speed slightly. Even a speed adjustment of 1 was HUGE at the lower ranges. An action at speed 3 becoming a speed of 2 is a massive boost across the combat wheel, where a 5 becoming a 4 was a little more reasonable and easier to plan effects around. Gave a boost without being a relative game-changer. 

Keith J. Davies(?)

...given 7, 9, 11, 13, your fastest is not quite twice as fast as your slowest. I'd probably consider a 1-20 scale for this (which happily aligns with a commonly-available die... not that that's really important)(and is still about twice as big as you're looking for) 

 Matt Miller 

Why is 12 better than 10, or 30?  Even fractions of APR, I guess. 60,30, 20,15,10, 6,5,4,3,2,1. So why not 24 or 18? Both are still 'hex'.

Rob Hicks 

Heuristics. Convenient Mental representations. People who do statistics for fun and profit tend to have no problem with number crunching, and don't understand why people who don't can't wrap their heads around them. 30 is as good as 24 or 18 for them. 10, however, is iconic in human math. Decimal counting system, fingers and toes, very easy. 12 only slightly less easy, but was a little kinder than 10 on the backend, and had the added parallel of the clock, both represented in the fact that it is a time-tracking system, and is something that people could reasonably count around. 18 and 24 have neither advantage.

Keith J. Davies

10 or 12 are good, 24 might be too big (but D&D 3.x-style initiative is d20+Dex mod+stuff and can easily reach that high).Perhaps use prime numbers for your speeds. Not 5, 6, 7, 8. 12-step scale, speeds 2 (really really super fast, probably not seen often), 3, 5, 7, 11 (really really slow, probably not seen often). If you start on phase 12 (*cough* HERO) you end up with everyone using the same speed actions hitting the same points and staying together. If you randomize, even slightly, then you might find that people at the same 'speeds' never overlap (if they didn't in the first place), while those acting at different speeds who overlap do so _once_ before they need to lap the field. That is, speed 3 and speed 11, once they sync, will need to go 33 phases before they sync again (11 actions and 3 actions respectively). These might be too far apart; being able to act so many more times than an opponent is pretty brutal. 30-phase rounds with actions 5*, 7, 9**, 11, 13, 17*** might be a better fit. 

* aligns with round, will always be on the same phases each round. Perhaps not desirable. 

** not prime, but _relatively_ prime 

*** maybe too big, less than two actions per round

Rob Hicks

Makes sense. Didn't think of primes, which is very interesting mathematically. Part of the reason actions varied from 5-9, (very fast, fast, average, slow, very slow,) was because the lower numeric end of the scale was trickier to balance for weapon damage. A weapon with a speed of 3 would be 3x faster than one with a speed of 9, where 5:9, was a little less than half as effective. Made the numbers easier to balance on weapon damage and such, when we were trying to get relative efficacy.

Rob Hicks

In the final release, we left it at 5-9, because ultimately the "tied" locations didn't affect things as much as they were initially thought to do. Everyone started on the same spot, and we broke the initial tie by going in order of Agility scores. When two characters tied, we broke the ties in the same way. When those ties were allies, it didn't usually matter. If one wanted to go first strategically, they lost nothing by letting one go before the other.

Matt Miller

We were also trying to keep it to keep the actions speeds to 'counting numbers' under ten. 

Andy Klosky

What is the purpose of having such a convoluted initiative system?  Does it make the game more fun? More realistic? Simpler for player or GM? Emphasize a type of combat, such as ranged or melee? Balance other game mechanics? 

Matt Miller

Mayhem was designed pre-4E DnD, so we made a lot of the same mistakes as 4E. So it has a very crunchy war-game style of mass combat, focused on melee. It also had a very extensive weapons list, with something like 60+ weapons, all of which had unique stats, yet all of which had to be roughly comparable in the amount of damage they did. 

Rob Hicks

The combat clock allowed an initiative system that was actually very easy to track and intuitive for players to run, but allowed for faster and slower actions in the game that had tactical meaning.  That in turn let us adjust the damage for various weapons, so that daggers fought like daggers. Less damage per hit, but faster attacks and more strategic maneuverability. A maul, by contrast, took ages to swing, but hit like a truck. It really, really improves the cinematics and style of combat, giving different play styles that highlighted different character concepts. In addition, working on a timing-based system, rather than a bonus-based system, meant that where you were on the map and when you were going to act next was strategically important. It gave a great deal of depth in combat for those that like the wargamey tactics style of play, but kept the mechanics still relatively simple and smooth for the people that were more interested in the style and cinematics of the game.

 Rob Hicks 

Ultimately, people were very aware of who had the better agility as combat went by, so ties on the combat clock didn't end up slowing things down at all, and it gave Agility a particularly nice perk for stat balance. Additionally, characters acting at the same spot on the combat clock often had other advantages. Team attacks, for example, getting an extra bonus for simultaneous whelm attacks, or for big cinematic clashes where two characters struck simultaneously, like a classic samurai duel.

Armor and Shields

Matt Miller

Players tend to forget penalties, so all numbers were bonuses, with no "maluses", so rather than -3 to +3, we had 0-7. Given that players could always default to 'bare hands' at +0, all weapons had to provide a better bonus than that, so our range was only +1..+7. But the 'big numbers' made weapon very difficult to balance, so in the final list, the numbers were much compressed, even as it made weapons much more similar to one another than I would have preferred.

Rob Hicks 0 to +3 is what we ended up with for skill bonuses. +3 ended up being rare.Ultimately, for simulation, we ended up doing Jake's method of multiplying the damage of a weapon at a specific die result by the probability that such a result would happen and summing them for average damage. That let us calculate relative bonuses for two opposing dice rolls and two opposing bonuses. (What if your opponent has a shield? For example.)

Keith J Davies Ah, shields are easy. I think. "Shields must be splintered!" rules: sacrifice your shield to prevent a hit. Done.

Or, since armor is a function of coverage (die size: d8 means it applies half the time, d12 means it applies 2/3 the time) and quality (leather is 1 die, steel plate is 3 dice), a shield might simply count as another die of armor (or, more likely, give you new options in the fight; as far as I'm concerned a shield is actually a weapon, specialized to defensive purposes).

Rob Hicks  Matt Miller always pushed for shields as a piece of armor, while I always pushed for shields to be treated as a weapon. My logic to justify my stance was to buy a padded shield and attempt to beat him with it. tongue emoticon

Matt Miller My reply was to build a viking shield, and then Rob attempt to beat me around it....which left only my head and legs uncovered, demonstrating that the Greek hoplite gear (Helmet, shield, greaves) is (1v1) astonishingly effective.

Matt Miller I had forgotten the wrinkle of different defense numbers.

Keith J Davies In previous efforts, I've found that it often is beneficial to treat a shield as weapon specialized for defense...it let me collapse a surprising amount of mechanics.

Matt Miller Yeah, the combination of armor+shield can form a near-wall. Which, while realistic...isn't that enjoyable for gameplay. Armor mechanics are a head-ache all their own.