Episode 101: Fundamental GURPSiness

Role-playing games Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice
21

Ouch! DoubleZero is a complete clunker, which I would find unplayable. The Easy Mode supplement would seem to address the problem with characters tending to fail too often. The fatal flaw is that in any difficult task the only possible outcome is a high-quality outcome. Easy tasks add the chance of getting successively inferior successes, but don’t alter the probability of an Excellent result.

Suppose that we have a typical player character with a Dex of 12, who has the Fire Combat skill with the Handguns concentration, and that they take a shot at someone with their pistol. The GM rules that this is a Standard difficulty Skilled check, so the PC gets a +1 Modifier Adjustment for an applicable Concentration. The adjusted Mx is 4 and the PC has a 48% chance of hitting. If the percentile dice roll is

  • 01–12 the effect will be Excellent (double damage)
  • 13–24 the effect will be Above Standard (rolled damage +2)
  • 25–36 the effect will be Standard (rolled damage)
  • 37–48 the effect will be Below Standard (rolled damage -4)
  • 49–00 Failure (miss)

It is not possible to get a result of Acceptable (half damage) on a task with Mx 4.

Now suppose that that character is forced to take a Skilled Hardest shot (because of range and other conditions) with a rifle. They get no bonus for their Concentration in handguns. The adjusted Mx is 1 and the PC has a 12% chance of hitting. If the percentile dice roll is

  • 01–12 the effect will be Excellent (double damage)
  • 13–00 Failure (miss)

It is only possible to get poor results on easy tasks. On hard shots you always either bullseye or miss the target completely.

DoubleZero is not the RPG for me.

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22

Ah, bah! I’m sure there’s someone out there who’d argue against this, but I agree: if you have only a tiny chance ot success, it shouldn’t automatically be the best-possible if it happens. I’d go further and say that ideally the distribution of success quality should be the same within the success space, whether that space has a high probability or a low one.

(One way of doing this would be to have one roll for success and a second for quality.)

(And something blatantly unrealistic like Pendragon doesn’t even try to do this.)

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23

A better way, when you are using percentile dice (which DoubleZero does), is to use the units die as an effect die.

If you read successful rolls ending in “0” as QR1, those ending in “5” as QR2, those ending in “2”, “4”, and “6” as QR 3, and the rest as QR4 you get a result that is a bit more generous and rather like the distribution in JB007, or to be a bit nicer mathematically and easier to learn: make final “0” give a critical, “4” or “8” give a special, “3”, “6” or “9” a solid, and the others a bare success.

That will not produce the nice effect in JB007 that as chance of success rampages on above a hundred your proportion of excellent results and beautifully-placed shots rises a at the cost first of bare and then of merely competent successes. But DoubleZero is rigged not to produce success chances above 90 anyway (and there is a hard limit placed at 99 in the Easy Mode). So they presumably wouldn’t care about that.

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24

Sounds like JB007 or Classified still hold the Walther