Calling all rules lawyers!

[ffutures]

Those of you who have been following the "rewriting the rules" thingy I posted on Tuesday will know that heliograph has made a very good suggestion, that I replace the rather clunky lookup table for skill and characteristic use with a rule that requires some VERY simple mental arithmatic.

Here's a first pass at the section that explains how it works, with a couple of examples. What I want is for the rules lawyers amongst us - yes, I know you're out there - to read this and let me know if you can suggest any revision to the wording, or spot any ambiguity. Thanks!

Using Characteristics

Depending on circumstances, characteristics may be used against other characteristics, against skills, or against an arbitrary "Difficulty". Skills give an edge in most of these situations, as explained in later sections, but it's occasionally necessary to use them directly. For this, and for all other use of characteristics and skills, the following rule is used:

To do anything roll 2D6: Add the characteristic, skill or Difficulty that you want to overcome. Subtract the skill or characteristic you're using. If the modified result is 7 or less you succeed. If the number to be overcome is 8 or less and the UNMODIFIED dice roll is 2 you ALWAYS succeed. A roll of 12 (ignore all modifiers) ALWAYS fails.

Example: Breaking down a door
Fred (BODY [4]) wants to break a household door (BODY [6]). The first attempt is a roll of 7.
  7 + 6 (the door's BODY) - 4 (Fred's BODY) = 9
The kick's a failure, and the door rattles but stays shut.

After a brief rest Fred kicks the door again. On a 2 the lock breaks. The referee dramatises this by describing the wood splintering and the knob flying across the room and shattering a priceless Ming vase.

Example: Arm Wrestling
Fred (BODY [4]) and Nigel (BODY [2]) are arm wrestling. In each round each should roll BODY as attacker with the other character's BODY as defender.

Round 1: Fred and Nigel both roll 10, too high to succeed. Nothing happens, apart from a slight flabby quivering of opposed muscles.

Round 2: Fred and Nigel both roll 3, and succeed. Again, nothing happens apart from more quivering. Since both succeeded this is described in terms of bulging muscles, a clash of titans.

Round 3: Fred rolls 10 and fails, Nigel rolls 2 and succeeds. Nigel smashes Fred's arm to the table and wins the match.

Comments

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

I consider my self to be a rules attorney.....

But yes sounds fine to me.

Does make it hard for a GM to make up the difficulty once he's seen the roll (which I do a lot), since you need to fed it back to the players so they can do the maths.

[armb.livejournal.com]

If you don't want the players to know just how difficult the task actually is until they have tried it a few times, the GM can do the maths instead of the player. Similarly if you are planning to feed them a predetermined result and the value of the roll doesn't actually matter except for the "always fail" and "always succeed cases".

[empressvesica.livejournal.com]

I am certainly not a rules lawyer but as an occasional gamer who is not great with math or rules involving dice, I can add that this makes sense to me. The only place I was a little lost was in your text box - I would add a space between the process steps and the "Rules" of always/never. I kept trying to read them as one set of steps rather than two additional "rules" or shortcuts.

Hope that helped a little...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's very helpful and makes a lot of sense.

[ggreig]

I would be inclined to suggest keeping the look-up table as well as pointing out the mental arithmetic way.

Although the mental arithmetic is not terribly hard, it does include two different types of arithmetic operation (adding and subtraction) rather than just one. I have played with a number of players who just can't cope with that - and although I could do the mental arithmetic, I suspect my personal preference would still be a version of the lookup table (my Ph.D. from a Maths department notwithstanding). I know GMs who are also perfectly capable of mental arithemtic, but prefer lookup tables for speed and convenience.

With my software developer's hat on, I think this is one of those cases where there will just be different user interface preferences, and it's better to cater to them both rather than go with one exclusively.

I would suggest that a little use of background colours to help guide the eye around the lookup table would increase its usability.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - as I said, it'll still be there as an appendix. Colour coding is something I'm already working on.

[ggreig]

Oops - missed that in my skim of the original post. Sorry! Just in case you haven't already spotted it, "The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon" on BBC2 at 9 o'clock this evening may be worth catching - recently discovered film of British life of largely Edwardian vintage. I think it's the first of a series, though I don't know how long.