What are the pitfalls, if any, with this:

1. A rollunder your own skill as a resolution system.
2. Opposed actions are determined by who is both successful and rolls highest.

Can initiative be reasonably determined by who rolls highest in an encounter/whatever - even if they roll above their target number? (Such a person, for example, is able to act quickest but their haste compels them to failure).

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;517309What are the pitfalls, if any, with this:

1. A rollunder your own skill as a resolution system.
2. Opposed actions are determined by who is both successful and rolls highest.

Can initiative be reasonably determined by who rolls highest in an encounter/whatever - even if they roll above their target number? (Such a person, for example, is able to act quickest but their haste compels them to failure).

The two examples seem to work well enough.

I don't think the initiative call works though.
you want to know initiatve before you decide what to do generally.

You incorporate the other half of the idea and have a bonus to initiative as a minus on the skill check. But I think you want to roll initiaitve first.

The main "drawback" (it might not be a drawback if your game concept, what you want to emulate, meshes well with this, but anyway) of a roll-under mechanic is that it's not open-ended. In other words, you are defining a "normal" scale of game play. Let's say we're playing Call of Cthulhu. Ok. You know that this game uses percentile skills roll under. Which means that a guy with 100% is a human at the very top of his game, an expert in something, etc, and that beyond, you're in the realm of the extraordinary, the one of a kind, the Cthulhoid entity and so on (it's mitigated in practice by special successes and the like, but bear with me). So basically you create a "scale of normality" for the world. That is, "normal people" have between 00 and 100% in any given skill. If you're beyond those scores, you're really special or weird, you're a corner case, not a usual case for which the system was built. The implication is different in an open-ended roll over mechanic, like say... the d20 system base mechanic.

Quote from: jibbajibba;517333The two examples seem to work well enough.

I don't think the initiative call works though.
you want to know initiatve before you decide what to do generally.

You incorporate the other half of the idea and have a bonus to initiative as a minus on the skill check. But I think you want to roll initiaitve first.

Personally, I like the sound of a system forcing you to choose what you're doing before setting an initiative order; combined with a short time span per "combat round", I think it better emulates the chaos and unpredictability of a fight, and how none of the parties involved are "static" and waiting for their turn to come up; melee combat is a brutal, unpredictable mess. But your table may vary, and it wouldn't work for every game.

I'd just say that everyone who fails their check loses their action, unless there was a meaningful difference between "did not take the action at all" and "tried but failed".

Ok, it's best to do that. Roll over and you lose your action, it doesn't really make sense otherwise.

However, for an action based game (which this is), I'm wondering if roll under is the way forward. I like the simplicity of the idea.

The idea is:

You have Virtue + Skill (following on from here). To succeed you roll under it as above using 2d6 (bearing in mind the bell curve might be problematic).

However: one die is always yin, the other yang. If you succeed, the higher of the two colours the outcome (somehow). If you roll doubles and succeed you earn a special bonus called Heaven's Favour.

Now, I don't want modifiers in the game which is a problem when it comes to shaping difficulty with roll under systems.

So the GM can offer the player a different set of dice (assume d6's as the default) but rolled in exactly the same way. These are known as Destiny Dice. Essentially the GM says 'this is a tough action, and the fate of the galaxy may depend on you repairing this spaceship, roll 2d8 Destiny Dice instead). The action is resolved in the same way, but if successful, the player receives some bennies. I might even say the player can refuse; the bennies form an important part of the system, more than just the usual, and are called Destiny points. They can be used to 'do cool stuff' and more.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;517394Ok, it's best to do that. Roll over and you lose your action, it doesn't really make sense otherwise.

However, for an action based game (which this is), I'm wondering if roll under is the way forward. I like the simplicity of the idea.

The idea is:

You have Virtue + Skill (following on from here). To succeed you roll under it as above using 2d6 (bearing in mind the bell curve might be problematic).

However: one die is always yin, the other yang. If you succeed, the higher of the two colours the outcome (somehow). If you roll doubles and succeed you earn a special bonus called Heaven's Favour.

Now, I don't want modifiers in the game which is a problem when it comes to shaping difficulty with roll under systems.

So the GM can offer the player a different set of dice (assume d6's as the default) but rolled in exactly the same way. These are known as Destiny Dice. Essentially the GM says 'this is a tough action, and the fate of the galaxy may depend on you repairing this spaceship, roll 2d8 Destiny Dice instead). The action is resolved in the same way, but if successful, the player receives some bennies. I might even say the player can refuse; the bennies form an important part of the system, more than just the usual, and are called Destiny points. They can be used to 'do cool stuff' and more.

I like the idea of modifying the dice used for harder / easier tasks, but it does prevent characters from doing trivial actions incredibly quickly; similarly, the higher average results of larger dice would mean they would perform harder actions "faster".

On the other hand, "I failed my skill check" can mean "I didn't do this yet" as well as "I didn't do this and that's and end to it"; sometimes it's perfectly reasonable for a character to keep doing something until they eventually succeed. D20 uses "take 10" as a mechanic for this and gives you a flat time period, but under this system, the basic resolution system would show you how long it takes.

ie, let's say that a combat turn takes 3 seconds, and I'm a shadowrunner trying to hack some security turrets. If I fail rolls along the way, I'm not necessarily just going to give up; it just represents steps along the way, so we can see how long it takes me to succeed. If it takes me four turns, that's twelve seconds of game time; it's an interesting thing to know.

The speed of the action is only really for the purpose of determining who acts first in combat so as to do away with initiative rolls. TBH I don't realy envision people rolling Destiny Dice in combat unless they are, perhaps, fighting atop a volcano or something; they already have to deal with an opponent with his own stats.
Also the different dice don't offer the opportunity to roll lower dice types. The point is that this is intended to represent something that's more challenging. Actions that might otherwise be easier are just rolled against the stat if they must be rolled at all.

Pendragon (the version I saw, anyway- 5th?) used basically the system proposed above - both sides roll to hit on d20, highest roll goes first. If you fail by rolling over, no one cares when you would have gone
I'm not sure how it resolves actions that don't require a roll, though.
 
Its abit weird in that you can't have a character whos' fast and yet not super-skilled in combat, although you could possibly have a "speed modifier" that applies a bonus to the "to hit" die roll just for the purpose of who goes first.
 
Pendragon is also "open-ended" in scale despite being roll-under - skills that are >20 add an extra bonus onto the die roll e.g. I think Lancelot has a combat skill of 39 or so and gets +19 to his d20 roll.

Not sure about characters that aren't rolling for an action, but ORE seems to manage.

Characters that are fast but not combat skilled; well combatants will be as fast as their actions. If we assume that in such situations most characters will default to what they are good at/want to do/enjoy doing, they are as fast as that skill allows them to be, so in that sense there is balance. But that doesn't preclude having a dodge action: where a player seeking only to defend and perhaps move can make a roll. That gets opposed by the person trying to hit him. If he succeeds, he moves out the way.