[Design] Why random rolls?

[Eric McKibbin]

Regarding your point about yesterday, you may be interested to know that the
Fourth Edition GURPS handling of Language is a bit more realistic, where you
have a level of Fluency depending on how many points you put into each
language.

Personally I've always believed that 1-20 is far to great a random range for
a skill, and something like 1-10 would be better. However in this case do
you have a character always fail on a 1 and succeed on a 10? Or should in
some cases people never fail/succeed?


On 10/10/05, Lev Lafayette <lev_lafayette at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
>
> What function does the random roll have in skill
> resolution? What range should that roll be?
>
> Some games, like Amber (obvious example) are
> 'diceless' which means that unless a character uses
> some director's stance technique (amusingly described
> as "bullying the GM") a character of skill 19 will
> *always* lose to a character of skill 20.
>
> Clearly this should not always be the case. But by the
> same token (and this is based on witnessing
> yesterday's game) I don't know whether it is necessary
> for a character to make a language skill roll on each
> piece of text that they read.
>
> Think also in terms of scale of the random effect.
> Take for example the Cyberpunk system where skill
> rolls are STAT (normal range 1-10) + SKILL (normal
> range 1-10) + RANDOM (1d10). Compare this to d20
> systems where the nominal range is 1-20 (stat plus
> skill) plus 1-20 for the skills roll. (i.e., 1/3 to
> 1/2 effective input of the random roll).
>
> How much effect should 'randomness' has then
> resolution of skills?
>
>
> Lev
>
>
>
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