Mental Trauma
Jan. 26th, 2005 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kingandyHave been re-reading the BESM rules, on the off chance. This always makes my head hurt.
It's a relatively simple system - in order to make high stats good, you roll 2d6 and try to get equal to or less than your stat. There are two factors that make my brain ache. Firstly - less of a brain ache than a vague concern - the stats section lists Adult Human Average for all stats as 4. This means that, all things being equal, an average adult human will succeed at tasks of average difficulty only 1/6 of the time. Of course "average difficulty" does not mean "commonplace" or "trivial", since that comes under the heading of "times when you do not roll". And of course "average human" doesn't mean "average PC" because after all this is Manga. But still, it's a concern.
The other point of headache is that all difficulty modifiers are applied to the roll, not the target number, which is probably only confusing me because it isn't the way d20 does it (and it means skill bonuses, if applicable, are negative - they subtract from the roll, making you more likely to succeed). From one point of view it's easier, since you just give the player a difficulty modifier ("This is a hard task, +4 to your roll") and they get the headache of subtracting skills, rolling and working out whether they've succeeded or not.And all you have to do is compare your result - after addition and subtraction - with the relevant stat, which is written down in front of you, so there's less chance of "what was the difficulty again?" But it all seems terribly inverse to me, and the whole thing is confused by the awkward bell-curve distribution of the 2d6 mechanic.
Maybe I'll lie to my players and say you have to roll under stat-plus-skill, which would have no mechanical difference but make my brain ache less for some reason.
And all this is just from two paragraphs in the rules section, I haven't even got into combat rotation yet. For which there is a flow chart.
It's a relatively simple system - in order to make high stats good, you roll 2d6 and try to get equal to or less than your stat. There are two factors that make my brain ache. Firstly - less of a brain ache than a vague concern - the stats section lists Adult Human Average for all stats as 4. This means that, all things being equal, an average adult human will succeed at tasks of average difficulty only 1/6 of the time. Of course "average difficulty" does not mean "commonplace" or "trivial", since that comes under the heading of "times when you do not roll". And of course "average human" doesn't mean "average PC" because after all this is Manga. But still, it's a concern.
The other point of headache is that all difficulty modifiers are applied to the roll, not the target number, which is probably only confusing me because it isn't the way d20 does it (and it means skill bonuses, if applicable, are negative - they subtract from the roll, making you more likely to succeed). From one point of view it's easier, since you just give the player a difficulty modifier ("This is a hard task, +4 to your roll") and they get the headache of subtracting skills, rolling and working out whether they've succeeded or not.And all you have to do is compare your result - after addition and subtraction - with the relevant stat, which is written down in front of you, so there's less chance of "what was the difficulty again?" But it all seems terribly inverse to me, and the whole thing is confused by the awkward bell-curve distribution of the 2d6 mechanic.
Maybe I'll lie to my players and say you have to roll under stat-plus-skill, which would have no mechanical difference but make my brain ache less for some reason.
And all this is just from two paragraphs in the rules section, I haven't even got into combat rotation yet. For which there is a flow chart.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-26 10:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-26 10:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-26 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-26 04:00 pm (UTC)I think on balance I'll use the rules in the book ... if I don't like it I can always change it later.