I've noticed that doing the mental subtraction necessary to determine DoS sometimes slows the game down a bit. Lately we've been experimenting with this idea:

If you make a Test and succeed, your DoS is simply the tens digit of the result you rolled.

It seems a little counterintuitive (Vioaltes the roll lower = good principle), but so far it hasn't altered the probability for anything and makes things a little smoother.

I suppose it complicates determining DoF a bit, but we've never had to determine DoF yet anyway.

Garawjukh said:

It does alter some of the probablity, though slightly from what I can tell. An example would be a stat of 50- if you have 50 in something, a character with your system could roll a 50 and get 5 DoS. In the RAW system, 5 DoS on a target of 50 would be impossible (a 01 would be 49 less than 50, meaning 4 DoS). Admittedly this is a slim chance, so it is unlikely to break the game, but something is unsettling about this....maybe unfounded mind you...

I would personally rather see folks use a calculator or scratch paper, or roll in advance...but that may be my fear of change and the unknown combining with my poor math skills...

Charmander said:

Abacus?

omg Garawjukh you are an actual genius, can't believe I never saw this before, your theory is sound, but you have forgotten that it is possible to succeed with 0 degrees of success ie a roll of 50 on a 50 is straight success.

an adaption to your system would be 10's digit-1 is the number of successes and it preserves probability intact. this should be in the book

[edit] I was probably a little over enthusiastic. It preserves probability for all rolls with success being 99 or less (or 95 or less if there is a probability of jamming). this actually wouldn't work for some deathwatch shooting, It would probably work in dark heresy though [/edit]

I would say that you just need to learn to subtract by 10 again. That should have been covered pretty thoroughly in elementary school.

Switch to roll under rather than roll equal to or under.

ItsUncertainWho said:

Thanks for being a smug jackass, but I can subtract perfectly fine. I'm more worried about players screwing it up when they've already got six sets of numbers floating in their heads.

One problem with your suggested change is that there are times where the degrees of failure matter, which your change does nothing to help with. Another problem is when the target value exceeds 100.

Since you don't need the exact difference (a difference of 20 is the same as a difference of 29), there is a shortcut. First subtract the tens die from the tens digit of the target value. Then compare the ones digits to see if you need to alter the DOS/DOF by one.

For example, lets take a target value of 44 and a roll or 27: Success. 4-2= 2, but since 7 is higher than 4 we have a difference of less than 20. So 1 DOS.

Target: 44, Roll: 97: Failure. 9-4=5, since 7 is greater than 4 we know that the difference is more than 50. 5 DOS

Bilateralrope said:

Yeah now that I get feedback I'm seeing a lot of problems with the idea.

Oh well, it was a thought. Guess we're just going to have to work on streamlining our math.

There's actually pretty much no problem with this idea - except insofar as it's a change from the published rules, what you're describing here is basically a "blackjack" roll-under system.

There is a *very* slight statistical difference when your skill is a multiple of ten, but as somebody pointed out, it's easily solved by switching "roll equalunder" to "roll under" (you can then count double-zero as actually zero, rather than 100).

After that there's basically no problems,lots of things become a lot easier to work with. About the only problems are degrees of failure,there your system is no *worse* than the existing one. If you wanted to streamline that to, you can switch to "fails with a roll of..." which I think winds up being roughly the same. Failing with a roll of 90+ should be the same as failing a roll by 1-10%, for example.

It does get to be an issue in that you can never get Degrees of Success in excess of 10 but really, if you're dealing with more than ten degrees of success, you're probably dealing with something too easy to be worth rolling dice for.

We already use this version in our games and have done so with no issues.

For cases where you can get over 10 degrees of success ie where the skill + modifiers is over 100 it's a simple case of adding an extra degree for every ten over 100.

For degrees of failure you just do math, since it happens a lot less than having to work out degrees of success the gameplay still wins.

We haven't bothered changing it to under rather than equal or under. Whats 1% between friends?

Another way to do this is to round all Stats to the nearest five, makes subtraction easier.

Bazleebub said:

Wicked - we have been doing the exact same thing for a long time now, and it works like a charm, and really speeds up all checks. (and I also agree on the 1% issue not being a big enough deal to make extra rules)