Okay, so I've been having a confidence problem with A Wilder World for a while now... about a year, in fact. It has to do with the numbers at the heart of the game system.
I started off with a simple 1d6 mechanic because I wanted the random number generator to be fairly predictable and I wanted each and every +1 to have a hefty and thoroughly appreciable impact to it. In the typical d20 system, the difference between +0 and +1 just isn't that much. The difference between +0 and +5 isn't even necessarily much to sneeze at.
The problem is that while 1d6 magnifies the impact and is less swingy in that there's a smaller range of results, there's also a very narrow "sweet spot" in which it works. There were also some smaller problems in the system I was using for exceptional results ("acing/flubbing" checks), in that some of the relationships between numbers were non-intuitive. They extended the range of results, but they also added overhead to the game.
In the days since I started to shift back to AWW, I've been mulling over a couple of different alternatives. One is a variation on what I've always called the "fistful of dice" approach, and while I did come up with a system I like for that, it's too cumbersome for a game that involves more than occasional rolls.
The other is sort of a mashup of d20 and GURPS, and after bouncing the ideas off another person (so I could make sure they actually made sense outside my head), I think I have the confidence to develop this.
This post is going to be a bit longer and more circuitous than an actual write-up of the rules would be, as I'm still feeling things out and I'm going to be making digressions about probabilities and my purposes here that won't be necessary in a finished write-up.
First, I'll still be using the same attribute scale I've been working with, ranging from -2 to 5 or 6 for starting scores, and a close to hard limit of 9 for high level player character scores.
The actual dice check mechanic is this: roll 3d6, add your attribute score, meet or beat the target number.
The use of 3d6 instead of a d20 is the key to this. Because it generates a bell curve which the attribute modifier does not in any way follow, the impact of each point difference is quite a bit more than the 5 percentage points you'd get on a d20 scale, and each point's impact in either direction is also greater than the one before it.
Let's say the target number for a "vanilla difficulty" task--one that's meant to have an appreciable chance of failure but still be doable for the average adventurer--is 10. With an attribute of 0, the mean human score, you'd have a 62.5% chance of success. That's pretty close to the "worth it" sweet spot but not by any stretch of the imagination "on first try" reliable. With an attribute of 1, though, the odds become 74%. Marked increase! If the maximum starting score is 6, that would give you a better than 99% chance of success. Not guaranteed, but as close as it gets with dice.
Then let's consider a task with a target number of 16. That's still within the realm of possibility for a score of 0, but with less than a 5% chance of success. On the other hand, our specialist for the task with an attribute of 6 has a 62.5% chance, the same as a character with a score of 0 doing that difficulty 10 task.
So the predictability I'm going for is preserved and possibly even heightened, but the range of numbers we have to work with is increased.
And it has the virtue of simplicity. Roll three smallish dice, total them up, add a number.
Exceptional Results
The first complication comes in when you roll a 6 on any die. When this happens, you add your stat modifier again (once for each 6). Yes, this means that if you have a -2, a 5 is better than a 6. Obviously this rule skews the raw probabilities I referenced above. My thought here is that like the ace/flub rules I had before, it further magnifies the impact of a higher or low score. But it won't add much in the way of overhead because it doesn't trigger additional die rolls, and since a die coming up a 6 is exciting to begin with, I think it will add to momentum rather than stealing it.
Flubs
Each 1 that you roll in your 3d6 indicates that you might some sort of mistake or misstep. If you succeed, this doesn't undo the success, but you might suffer a consequence ranging from looking foolish to alerting enemies, as makes sense for the situation.
If you have a negative score, than a 6 also counts as a flub.
Trained Checks
I'm keeping with the single level of skill theme of recent editions of D&D and the existing iteration of AWW. Rather than a flat +1 or +2, though, the result of having the appropriate skill among your character's details is that you get another die. So skill has an average impact of +3.5, which is comparable to a pretty hefty attribute increase but a middle of the road one in terms of adventurers' exceptional abilities, but it's not a guaranteed impact. You'll always do better with skill than without, but someone with an attribute of 6 and no skill will outshine someone with an attribute of 0 and skill training.
This might seem counterintuitive (training should be more reliable than innate talent), but the skill system in AWW is meant to be a bonus on top of an already highly detailed attribute system. That is, a character with an Agility of 5 shouldn't need a half dozen skills to be an agile hero.
You can conceivably have the benefit of training from multiple sources that could apply to a given check, but the benefits don't stack. A check is either trained (4d6) or not (3d6). The extra die is affected by the exceptional results rule above, so training further magnifies the impact of an exceptionally high or low attribute score.
Training does have one reliability edge: when you make a trained check, you can ignore one 1 for purposes of flubbing. This ability is not tied to a particular die that is designated the "bonus" one.
Safety Dice (We Can Dice If We Want To...)
Safety dice are another wrinkle, one that is commonly granted by your character qualities. This is part of my attempt to pare down the number of individual abilities each quality grants in order to make things snappier. Safety dice are extra dice you roll on a check without increasing the total number of dice that go into the result.
As an example: a level 1 acrobat gets 1 safety die on every agility check. If you rolled an untrained agility check, you'd roll four dice and throw out the worst one. If you were to roll a trained one, you'd roll five and throw out the worst one. Only the dice you actually use count for exceptional rolls and flubs. Unlike merely being trained, safety dice can stack.
The point of safety dice is to make it so that characters are transcendentally good within their areas of expertise, and by "transcendentally" I mean "in a way that transcends the normal rules of the random number thingy". An Acrobat with an Agility of 4 to 6 and a non-Acrobat with an Agility of 4 to 6 would be limited to the same range of results, but the Acrobat would be more reliable.
The existence of safety dice provides a simple and even scaleable way to make characters markedly more reliable at performing certain tasks without completely deforming the random number generator. It also makes the more general/generic character qualities (like warrior, archer, acrobat, et cetera) a lot easier to establish without the need for a half dozen specific special abilities.
Safety dice will also replace most "roll twice and use better result" abilities, which simplifies a lot of the trickier questions about how different special abilities would interact with each other.
So it's a bit more involved than 1d6 plus attribute, but that required a lot of appendages to really make it work anyway. And while the probabiility mechanics of it can be quite complicated, the actual applications are pretty straightforward. It has the predictability that I'm looking for, it's harder to break, and hopefully it will prove to be easy to understand and quick and snappy enough in play.
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