fuzzy dice

[quarrel]

I briefly considered reorganizing my RPG shelf Sunday. The only thing that came of it was a brief perusal of the Jadeclaw book I own. I haven’t browsed it in years and I wondered if its dice mechanic was as bad as I remember it.

It was.

In brief, to test whether your character succeeds at some effort, you gather a die for each of his or her relevant skills, traits, training, and base stats (possibly 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, or 12-sided, depending on how high the attribute is), roll them all, take whichever one die rolled highest, and compare this single number to a similarly-generated number that the GM rolled for the opposition. The side with the higher number succeeds and the other fails. If the difference is 5 or greater, it’s a critical success and failure.

That’s simple enough. Here’s where things start getting janky.

If both sides roll the same number, it’s a tie…unless one side has a higher “Quality” in the relevant skill. Then that side wins.

Rolling all 1s is an extra-critical failure. It may or may not be worse than a standard critical failure. An extra-critical failure does not automatically grant the other side a critical success. Both sides may extra-critically fail, which may be a double disaster or an ordinary tie depending on GM arbitration.

If you’re trying to do something related to a narrow field of your character’s expertise, you can reroll a single 1 for free.

Here’s more complexity: damage rolls work differently. The attacker still rolls several assorted dice based on stats, skills, gear, and training, as does the defender, but this time both sides keep all their dice and pair them off highest to highest, next-highest to next-highest, and so on. (If there are more attack dice, pair the excess with imaginary 1s.) Each attack die that exceeds its counterpart produces one hit, or two if it exceeds by 5 or greater. If the defender rolls an extra-critical failure, the attacker deals one extra hit.

There are also special rules for extra-lethal and nonlethal damage.

But here’s the worst part.

As in pretty much any RPG, rolls can have bonuses and penalties. Their effects in Jadeclaw are complex and not symmetric. Fortunately, bonuses and penalties cancel each other out; you apply only uncancelled ones. That simplifies things, but there’s a lot more that isn’t simple.

Each bonus increases all your dice by one size before you roll. d12s can’t increase, so increase the largest other die instead, or add another d4 if all your dice are d12s.

On damage rolls, each penalty removes your smallest die before you roll. On skill rolls, each penalty forces you to make a complete additional roll, and in the end you use only the worst final number.

Therein lies a big problem with the game’s dice system: bonuses and penalties have complex, opaque, inconsistent effects on the characters’ chance of success. Let’s say you want to sneak into the warlord’s camp. How much more likely are you to avoid capture if you wait for nightfall? If you don’t have a custom-made Monte Carlo simulator at your elbow, you have no idea. It might matter a lot, or it might not, and your best estimate will be a wild guess. Not what I’d call a good system.

I understand that the game’s predecessor, Ironclaw, has been revised to address this. In the new edition, a bonus gives you an extra die to roll, and a penalty gives your opponent an extra die.