That's why I always hated the, "You can play any kind of game using 5e". Unless you want to play a game where characters consistently perform well in their areas of expertise.

Its one of the reasons why GURPs never really launched beyond the GURPs player base it established. Only the people that like GURPs like using GURPs for any genre

100% agree. System implies setting and flavour/style of game and what is realistically achievable or not.

Agree, I played EON (from Swedish roleplaye company Helmgast) when grew up. They use a 6d system with 3 dice trying to get under a skill check. I played that from 12 years of age to 25 without even knowing about a d20 dnd system... played dnd for years now and as you say - there are strengths to different systems. EON does now excist in english, with a new rule set thats left the d6 system and will be more easy to get into as a dnd player. I hightly recommend trying EON, low fantasy masterpiece!!!

Yes, they are absolutely similar except ont the scale increase.

There's a fallacy (implication that Trevor accepts) that a percentile roll has a curve distribution vs. a d20 because it involves two dice - which is simply not how statistics and probability work. If they're added, sure - but with d100, even though two d10s are rolled, every single result has the same probability as any other - one in 100.

Yeah, my big issue with d100 is simple: if you're dealing in 5s, why not use a d20? And if you are calculating every percentage point, why be THAT granular. It's either unnecessary, or more granular than I like.

@@MrDrumStikzBecause it is more intuitive for a lot of people to just see the chance they have to sucedd in the number they have to roll under.

@@saschafeld5528 Humans actually have a bad time dealing with probabilities and percentages. Any videogame that deals with probability/percentage has to adjust the odds behind the curtains in order to make the players FEEL that it's working correctly. We have a lot of bias when it comes to it and it's really easy for players to get upset when they're inexperienced.

I thought they called step dices system

@@johnholmes7038 I've seen them called that a few times, but "Step Dice System" is a 4-lane pile-up on the tongue; lol.

@johnholmes7038 generally they divide the ladder into steps but yeah ladder is the more common term

Step refers to the individual die type or types in that particular section of the ladder

It's just a flat distribution. You should be able to eyeball the odds well enough after a couple of play sessions, if you're willing to do a few minutes of homework.

Funny seeing you here! Didn't know you were a fan of ttrpgs. I really appreciate and enjoy your content.

if you like blades try scum and villainy! sanme system but in space. Theyre my two favorite systems to run rn

@@johnmorse2969 high on my wish list!

I use Savage Worlds, but I agree with your comment about vagueness. There's something that rubs me the wrong way about knowing my exact chance of success in percentile systems.

I have 10 sets of dice

That's also one of the things i like most about Dragonbane. Roll-under + stacking advantage system means i'm only ever adding numbers when determining damage, all other times i can just look at the number on the dice and the number on my sheet to see which one is smaller and that's it. Very comfy, my brain is smooth enough that you could use it as a mirror so i really appreciate the lack of maths.

@@nicolejohntahup5901 💅⚧

Worst thing to throw off your dice count is the Storyteller saying "you get an extra dice for the favourable situation" or my fav player reward to give was "You get an extra die on this roll for your creative aproach to the problem." Gets the players into the Roleplay in all stages of play mentality.

I usually make spreadsheets to math out all the possibilities for my more number-crunchy systems. It's a lot of fun to see a huge table of "net change in durability of ship systems average" for my dyad system. Which is really more of a toolkit to design systems that capture the fantasy of surviving based on the function or an object and managing the stress of survivors. Think Oregon trail with its wagon, the entirety of the martian, trying to maintain a fire in the cold of a deep freeze.

I agree, Jon. I like Year Zero Engine mechanics.

I love the game and the system itself. Can be extremely punishing though as you rapidly get weaker the more hurt you are so fights can snowball a bit too much in my opinion but that's due to the implementation not really the dice system itself... But the fact that you risk both your health and future rolls when pushing your luck is exciting.

Yes, I think it's a good compromise :) Stats + Skills will be often greater than the dice roll (when you're experienced) :) There are too much randomness in D20 system :( I'm playing Cyberpunk Red and I love it

Other than the awkward critical mechanic I think the system works pretty well. It's definitely worked well for me when trying to capture more mundane travel fantasies. Or like, any journey I want to be focused on things other than combat

D20 relies too much on luck of a roll especially when it comes to damage. Say I crit and then roll 1d10, get a 1 and then double it or even if i roll 1 and 10 it's only an 11 for a crit and that's pretty useless. It takes away all the thrill of getting the crit. Almost all other systems do not have that problem.

@@rich8021 but that's a problem with D&D and it's clones, not the core D20 System itself. So using your d10 example, you could fix the issue by deciding that in a crit you automatically deal 10 damage, plus another d10 damage that you roll.

Fudge/Fate is the dice system I've come to like best in gaming as well.

WEG Star Wars was the first RPG I owned and I still love it and think it doesn’t tend to get the recognition it should. It would be a nice candidate for a Sage’s Library episode.

@@crazycaleb D6 Star Wars was both the first RPG I played and the first I bought. I played the first edition for awhile before the campaign migrated to second edition, which I bought around the time it came out. The big difference I remember between them being in how scales were handled - for example starfighter vs capital ship, which was the one that seemed to come up most often in the games I played.

The original material they created for the expanded universe was GREAT

Well I mean it is not like fixed roll systems don't have any housekeeping, it is also farily easy to make something look tedious by listing every aspect of it. In a fixed roll system you need to roll the dices, remember your modifer, remember outside modifier, add them all together with your dice roll, remember the target number, remember the modifer that apply to the target number, add them together, then finally compare your roll result to the target result. When you say it like that fixed roll sound tedious but in practice they aren't because you don't have that many modifier to track and in most case the work is divided amongst two people the player take care of his roll and modifier and the DM take care of the target number and its modifier. This is also true for some of the most popular dice pool systems. They often use only a single type of dice and try to stay below 10 dice, so you can assemble your dice pool fairly easily as long as you are decently equipped to play them, the target number for sucess is often fixed so it is not hard to remember it either, and you don't need to remember such number in a additive dice pool. and it is often the DM that does the comparison to the target number so player don't need to care about it either, and in some sytems the target number of success is often also fixed and you just need one success. One of the differences between most of the common dice pool is that they often transform the math into physical manipulation, and some player prefer that. You aren't wrong for prefering it the other way, but not everyone is like that. And comparing two number and counting up tend to be faster than doing multiple addition and substraction back to back, especially for people that are less mathematically inclined. Also it is a matter of experience, when you play a lot of dice pool systems you tend to become faster at it. Another differences is that dice pool can often offer more axis to modify a roll, and this can make it easier to track larger numbers of modifier. In fixed roll like DnD the only modifer you can have are either bonuses or maluses for the roll or bonuses or maluses to the target number, in dice pool you can add bonuses and maluses to the number of dice, bonuses and maluses to the success target and bonuses and maluses to the number of success needed. That's one more axis and it help in keeping everything clean, and that's probably one of the reasons why dice pools are so popular that for wargaming, that's and they also make rolling for multiple character at once easier. One thing to note here Is that I just gave to you two contradictory argument back to back in the first I said dice pool are simple, and in the second I said they were more complex. Well that's one of the thing we need to keep in mind when talking about dice pools, it is varied genre, with some systems being simple and some system being complex, and some sytems are just plain hyrbrids. When you think about it DnD 5e is close to be an additive dice pool systems, I mean they are multiple abilities that allow you to add bonus die to your roll. That's technically a additive dice pool systems.

Agreed. I'd say the variation within dice pool systems is greater than the difference between d100 and d20 systems.

The curve is one of the things I always loved about D6. d20 always has two big problems for me. At lower levels the dice matters too much and the randomness can lead to wiff-fests. But at higher levels when your skill are all at, like, +25 or something, the die barely matters at all anymore, especially with opposed tests. WEG D6 gets around both, because the bell curve means that even lower level characters are going to consistently hit reasonable target numbers, while the lack of modifiers means that even an advanced character is never guaranteed success. Add in the wild die for an extra bit of spice and you end up with a system where characters are reliable at their jobs, but even experienced characters can't let their guard down or get too cocky. It's only real sticking point is having to add up all the dice. I've met a lot of people who wouldn't even give d6 a try because of the idea of having to add up 6-8 dice at a time.

@@TheRavenArchon IMO the best part is that it just makes sense unlike a lot of other systems. Like someone who is experienced in whatever skill is so usually many times more likely to succeed an advanced task than someone who isn't trained in real life. Always was annoyed at d&d where you could be an actual fucking wizard and only have a few % more chance at success to succeed an arcana check than some random fighter

I was about to post the same thing. So easy to play, a very low barrier to those who want to try it and allows a strong focus on the role playing aspect of the game.

Played Forbidden Lands a while and wasn’t happy with it. Your character always succeeds since you just need a success and most characters have at least 10 d6 in their focus skill at creation. Also combat is a slog when you roll 5 times for one attack.

I do find the percision of d100 useful on occasion. Like with my dyad system, tracking stress as a number that you add to your roll (trying to get low) wouldn't work as well in d20 because each +1 is such a big swing. Other than that you're right though. I would add that d20 is a subset of d100. Not the other way around. Squares are rectangles and all that.

That "finally, other systems!" reaction in the online D&D community is so weird to me because there have been thousands of other games on the market since the early 1980s. Every time I see a D&D KZfaqr suggest a homebrewed rules addition or tweaked mechanic, I wonder if they realize that they're just reiterating an actual rule from a preexisting game. I've seen people say, "why not get rid of spell slots and use a point-based spell system?" Yeah, that's a lot of games. "Instead of spell slots, why not make an Arcana roll to cast the spell?" Um, has this person never looked at Savage Worlds? Trevor used that version of the rules in season 1! There are all sorts of incredible games out there, and as Trevor says (quoting Ron Edwards), "System matters." The right mix of character stats, procedures, and dice mechanics can make one game feel so different from another -- and so much like the kind of story each is made to tell. I wish Powered by the Apocalypse and Blades in the dark had been around when I was a kid. They're here now, and everybody who enjoys D&D should give them a try just for the new experiences.

Candela Obscura isn't "kind of" BitD. It's BitD. There are some clever changes, don't get me wrong, but where its DNA lies is very clear. We could say it's Blades with the stress system split up into like six different tracks.

The Candela quickstart rules mention Blades in the Dark & Vaesen as mechanical inspiration.

@@SingularityOrbit " *That 'finally, other systems!' reaction in the online D&D community is so weird* " What a lot of heavily invested ttrp'ers and ttrpg veterans don't seem to understand is that large chunks of the 5e crowd came into roleplaying through D&d as a fad and "lifestyle brand". Its why they don't know much about ttrp'ing outside D&d. Hence the response thats discussed in this thread

@@insertnamehere8121 I get that a lot of the regular players today grew up during the D&D 3.0 to 5th period, with WotC's marketing dominating the space. What confuses me is that there are so many KZfaqrs who can talk for weeks straight about 5th Edition or the entire OSR scene, but seem surprised that Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, even Savage Worlds and World of Darkness exist. Aren't the content creators looking at DriveThru RPG and rereading RPG websites in their research? How have they avoided this stuff?

I'd consider position and effect another facet of the dice system it uses, though it's definitely the most misunderstood/misapplied part of the game.

I was going to say the same thing. Certainly the stated downside of D20 (swinginess) applies equally to D100 systems. I would say the difference is more that in some systems you try to hit a target that your skill and abilities modify (MERP (IIRC) or D&D) and in others you roll against your skill which can be modified by the difficulty of the task (WFRP or Pendragon). That tends to bring its own issues as in the latter case often any adjustment gets overlooked.

One reason to do this is to get a 'real' bell curve. Adding 2d6 feels a bit bell-like but it's actually a triangle. You need 3 dice to get a bell shape, and as soon as you're adding 3 things, you're slowing down gameplay. Now, taking the middle value of 3 d6's doesn't provide much range at all... which is a perfect reason to pull out d12s or d20s. And D20s are iconic, right? But nobody would want to make a dice curve by adding d20's. So rolling 5 d20's and taking the middle hits a nice sweet spot: Not much math, yet rolling a nice handful of iconic dice.

@@dranorter There exists a Spanish system called 1o3, middle one of 3 d10s. It can have a bit too much math if the rules are interpreted a certain way, but it can also be tinkered with fairly easily. It's amazing. I like actual bell curves too, and middle values are so interesting. 1o3 has also has rules for exploding dice and matching values.

@@EmptyKingdoms That's awesome, thank you!

@@EmptyKingdoms OK, that seems really hard to google, any idea how to point me in the right direction?

Seconded

Great comment! And advantage/disadvantage is really just a roll and keep mechanic applied for a certain purpose. Earliest writings about roll and keep mechanics that I've seen was by Gary Gygax back in the late 70s.

I forgot to say "Great video!" its so good to see non-d20 systems get some exposure and this was a good breakdown.

I really love the way they tweaked the system between games. It really does add a lot to the feel of each game and helps create the atmosphere they're going for. One of the beauties of the system is how simple changes do so much for building that atmosphere round the table.

I have been running the Fallout 2d20 RPG for my twin daughters, who are 20. We really like this system.

Ironsworn/Starforged uses a dice system I'd never seen before, but it's quick to learn, gives results that are fair and in accordance with the character's traits and situation, and best of all, still has the potential for amazing successes or failures - all without being as binding as most dice systems.

@@HeadHunterSix indeed. The challenge dice system is pretty innovative, and really fun. I've hacked something like it for my own game, but I'm still debating whether it's good or not (for my own game, not Ironsworn)