How would you hack the basic die engine (2d6+) to accommodate a system where you would like to have more granular player stats?
In AW, dice rolls basically come from -2 to +3, a variance of 5. I’d like to have a game where dice rolls tend to come in from +0 to +10, for twice that variance.
I started by looking at rolling 3d6, to see what the probabilities look like. Interestingly, not much is different from 2d6. Rolling a 14+ on 3d6 is close (35/126 vs. 36/216) to rolling 10+ on 2d6, and rolling a 10+ on 3d6 is likewise extremely close (125/216 vs. 126/216) to rolling 7+ on 2d6. This is stretches out a 3 point spread only to 4 points.
Before I start running the numbers, has anyone else taken a look at things like 4d6, 2d10, or 2d12?
You can roll 3d20 and keep the middle die.
Increasing the dice size will increase the variance. Increasing the number of dice will make the distribution more bell-shaped. With one die, the distribution of the total is flat. With two, it is triangular. One of the primary benefits of Apocalypse Engine is its simplicity – if you switch to three dice, then you’re incurring a time cost of adding that one more number over and over again.
It’s hard to justify the third die as increasing drama; and “accurate simulation” isn’t one of the goals of the engine at all.
If you’d like to look at probabilities, I recommend Torben Mogensen’s Troll: http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/troll.msp
3d6 is a 5 point spread. I’ve been thinking of trying a hack that uses 3d6 with more results.
5 or less: critical miss (two GM moves?)
6-10: miss
11-15: partial hit
16-20: hit
21+: critical hit
Rather than making granular stats, the approach I took in my zombie apocalypse hack was to make more granular moves. There are only three stats that stay relatively low throughout play, and progression is defined as stacking bonuses and/or more specific results from those moves. For example, I don’t just have a generic “shoot” move; I have an auto-fire move, a shotgun move, a sniper move, etc. So a player who wants to make a good marksman wouldn’t just power up the “dexterity” stat; they’d want to collect all of those moves for his or her character. I’ve found in play that this gives an illusion of granularity without actually sacrificing the elegant simplicity of the Apocalypse Engine.
I’ve used a d20 and a dF along with Pathfinder character sheets a + or a roll over difficulty means partial success and both means full success.
Rolling 2d12, for instace, gives you a larger design space without changing the play mechanics significantly. 2d6 is very limiting as far as bonuses are concerned. You can basically never have more than one +1 move without potentially causing problems. Wether it was a specific design goal in AW in order to create a certian kind of game play I don’t know. Maybe it was because d6’s are everywhere and d12’s are not. But as a playbook designer it would be nice to be able to do more in that space. Nice, but not critical.
Thanks John Stavropoulos ! I did some calculations, and that’s pretty much exactly the variance I’m looking for.