Dice, Dice Baby

I’ve always had Resolute as a 2D6 system because I liked the compact nature of the bell curve it provided. I liked that it scaled well with abilities rated from +0 to +10 (what I see as an ideal sweep of ability ranges). However, in the last few days I’ve been thinking about what would happen by moving over to the D12 as the base resolution mechanic for the system. This drops a bell curve in favor of a linear progression, increasing the likelihood of results on the extreme ends. It makes it more likely that the unusual will happen, but also makes having a low ability when fighting a character with a higher ability less of a killer. While theoretically you can make up the difference on up to a 10-point difference in abilities with the dice when rolling 2D6, the statistical reality of this is that you won’t, and in essence I’ve come to see 5 points as a breaking point for most situations; if you have a +7 in an ability, any foe with +2 or less opposing you has very little genuine shot of getting any consistent results. Now, even if you have a 10 point differential between your ability and a foe’s resistant ability, you should still have an 8% chance of success. A human firing a rifle at the Flash gets an 8% chance to hit? I’ll take those odds... it’s a long shot, but it can happen.

You can actually layer this one change on the previous editions of all Resolute systems with pretty much no effort at all; the game is designed to perform within a result of 0 to 12 on the dice. This doesn’t change much.

I’m also a fan of this reducing one step of math. I know it’s not much, but adding 3+5=8 rather than just rolling 8 straight up is a small mathematical process, but it’s one that you repeat 1,000 times while playing. Something to consider...