Goodman Games

After a couple of sessions of DCC there is a lot that I enjoy, including the funky dice. However it seems as if the approach isn't going the whole way.

I'd really enjoy seeing a far more extensive use of dice steps in terms of how you differentiate expertise, or deal with traditional modifiers. It would be great if as many modifiers as possible got scrubbed from the system and instead replace it with just doing dice-steps to represent those modifiers. I'm sure some modifiers would still be needed, but if they could be minimized and instead have players rolling along a spectrum then I think the system would really nail the old school design stance on polyhedrals, but with the expanded list of dice provide the granularity that can't quite be pulled off with D&D.

I actually do not think this is possible without totally rethinking the base die: d20. There's no headroom. Attack are based on d20. There is no d18 or d22 so the initial jump d16 or d24 is enormous. Also, there's not much higher you can go but you can sink like a stone to d3. If the game was d12 based, it would be feasible to have a step chart since d12 is closer to the center:

1 / d2 / d3 / d4 / d5 / d6 / d7 / d8 / d10 / d12 / d14 / d16 / d20 / d24 / d30 / d40 / d50 / d60 / d100 (and the top end of this has some serious issues as well)

Where I think DCCRPG could make use of a sliding scale chart would be in DAMAGE. A sword should not do d8 damage, it should do base damage of d8 on sliding scale. Instead of damage modifiers adding +1 or -1 to the die roll, they could modify the die type. Even ARMOR could modify the die type. The only problem here is the problem I've stated in other "play those funky dice geek boy" threads is the player never knowing what die to roll. That could get old really fast at the table.

You could do it like Alternity and add or subtract the die from the d20 roll.

etc
d20-d4
d20-d3
d20-d2
d20
d20+d2
d20+d3
d20+d4
etc