D12 Thinking

A few given circumstances of Hack'D & Slash'D - Unlicensed... or whatever this ends up being called.

I want to first of all think about the primary mechanism. The current Hack'D & Slash'D is roll under. Roll under is so much easier, but roll over is more intuitive. Rolling high is always better, right? The other thing is that I'd like to distance myself from the d20, and the d12 is such an awesome die. Let's play with that as an option for a moment... 

D12, Roll High

If d12 is the default check, then the default target could be 10. If you roll a 10 or better, you succeed. Again, very intuitive. We know that 10 is good. Perfect 10. Scale of 1 to 10. Metric system. We see 10 as a number of completion. If you roll a 10 or better, you are successful. So far, so clean.

This means that things are rated from 0 to maybe 8. A +0 gives you a 1 in 6 chance of success. A +8 gives you a 5 in 6 chance of success. A +4 is 'average', giving you a 50% chance of success. This implies that...

• a +0 (1/6 chance of success) represents a very weak character attribute or the effectiveness of wearing no armor. 
• a +2 (1/3 chance of success) represents a lower character attribute or the effectiveness of leather armor. 
• a +4 (1/2 chance of success) represents an average character attribute or the effectiveness of chainmail armor.
• a +6 (2/3 chance of success) represents an exceptional character attribute or the effectiveness of plate mail armor.

So, this means that characters have attributes ranging from +1 to +6. A 'common' attribute would be +2 or +3. Thinking forward into the deeper parts of the system, a monster's default rating might be 1/2 level +2. A level 10 monster would then have standard ratings of +7. This means that a goblin only hits on a roll of 8 or better, or a little less than half the time. 

The windows for ratings are VERY tight - there just cannot be many ways to get a point here or there. All off the modifiers have to be built into the edge system, granting extra dice or removing dice. I'm going to go with that for play test purposes for now. No reason not to.