Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Comparing task resolution difficulties across RPG systems (D6 + d20 + more)

I'm hoping someone out there might find it useful to see the side-by-side comparison of skill resolution target numbers/difficulty classes for a small variety of RPGs that are of interest to me right now.

If you just want to see the tables, you can skip on ahead to the figures so you don't get bored by my introductory rambling.  If you want more detail, possibly along with a small word salad, read on.  Either way, please let me know if you see any errors on these charts.

So...when I was beginning my deep dive into RPGs around 20 years ago, I was really intrigued by mechanical systems that lent themselves to covering modes of gaming outside of just crunchy campaign play, like miniatures, card games, or even just more casual roleplaying.  The D6 System from West End Games (WEG) really caught my eye, especially once I realized that it was implemented in such diverse forms as Ghostbusters (its genesis), Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (perhaps its best-known form), DC Universe (altered to handle superpowers), and Star Wars Miniatures Battles and Live-Action Adventures.

These last two might have been the most intriguing, as they shifted the typical WEG D6 mechanics from a dice pool to [D6 + Attribute + Skill].  And somehow, using pretty much the same values as the standard WEG Star Wars RPG, that shift seemed to work in play.  It almost felt like I didn't know at the time that this kind of adjustment was even allowed in RPGs. :)

As I've looked around lately for a system that I might be able to use for a variety of gaming projects, I found myself looking really hard at Ghostbusters...and liking what I saw, a lot.  Also remembering a message board post where someone pointed out the similarity between the target numbers of the D6 System and one of the major iterations of d20 (I think it was already 5E at the time), I decided to take a look at how some of these systems stacked up in terms of difficulty classes for skill rolls.  Here are the systems included:

1.  Ghostbusters -- The point of the exercise and maybe the greatest RPG ever written

2.  Spooktacular -- A retro-clone of Ghostbusters with an associated OGL-friendly SRD (Sixtacular)

3.  FIE, I SAY! -- A traditional fantasy take on the Ghostbusters core rules, from Tim Snider; clearly constructed with love, humor, and an eye toward old school cachet

4.  The D6 System -- A generic toolkit for RPG system construction, published by WEG in 1996 and often called "the Cookbook" by fans

5.  Mini Six -- The clever and concise universal D6 ruleset released by AntiPaladin Games under the OGL

6.  Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, Second Edition -- The WEG one, not the WotC one...although the numbers are probably pretty similar considering...

7-8.  Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and 5E SRDs -- Probably the two most-referenced RPG System Reference Documents

9-10.  Mörk Borg and Shadowdark -- Some darlings of the old school RPG crowd over the past few years (well-deserved reputations, I believe); both d20-based, with toned-down expectations for stat bonuses

11.  Star Wars: Live-Action Adventures -- A system for LARPing in that galaxy far, far away; uses essentially the same stats as the tabletop game but relies on a single D6 for task resolution (same scale as the WEG Star Wars minis game)

12-14.  Live-Action Adventures, +4 and +4/adjusted -- Having found 1D6 resolution to give a narrower range of results than I would like (relative to the possible spread of attributes and skills in the system), I'm looking at using 2D6 instead; +4 accounts for the added die, and the "adjusted" values shift the typically 2-point difficulty bands for 1D6 rolls to 3-point or 4-point bands (shifting "Moderate" downward in order to move toward a standard of 10 as the target number when attacking an average, unarmed human)

Here's the full table:



Here's a quick reference on how closely Ghostbusters and the WEG Star Wars RPG actually line up with target numbers in the d20 System (which would come along around the turn of the millennium and dominate roleplaying for years):



And finally, here are the tracks for FIE, I SAY! and Shadowdark, along with the table that I'm leaning toward as the eventual model for my ongoing Monstrous Matters campaign and its associated endeavors.  I like this scale quite a bit, and it's interesting to me that a dice-pool approach (FIE!) might match up so closely with both 1D20 (Shadowdark) and 2D6 resolution mechanics in terms of skill difficulties.



Thanks for checking these out, and please let me know if you have any thoughts on improving or adjusting these!

4 comments:

  1. That jump from "this is just a normal day out" to "AIEE!" in Mork Borg difficulties is quite startling viewed in this format!

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    1. Haha...assigning a new category every two points along the way definitely gives it an ESCALATING QUICKLY kind of vibe. :) (And I didn't even use the full statements given for each level...that probably would have made it seem even more dire...)

      Now that you mention this, I am reminded of...

      https://youtu.be/NpYEJx7PkWE?si=trjaU32h5x0iJCWo

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    2. Amazing. I want an rpg with those as difficulty categories!

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    3. That's a great idea! A perfect fit for Adam Dickstein's Googly Eyed Primetime Puppet Show RPG...?

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