Pen and Paper Games

A big part of my gaming hobby consists of pen and paper Role Playing Games. These games have some interesting design aspects, as a large portion of the rules have to the flexible to allow people to act out their own plans and ideas, rather than perform a set amount of moves. I will be talking about two systems in this post, Wizards of the Coast's D20 system, and White Wolf's Storyteller System.

The D20 system is the ruleset used by the iconic game Dungeons and Dragons. It's basic principle is that in order to do anything, you roll a D20 (20 sided dice) and add a modifier based on your natural abilities and your practiced skill at the task. For example, if you wish to hide in the shadows of a dark alley, you would roll a D20, and then add your Dexterity modifier and your Hide skill. This result is then compared against the DC (difficulty class) of the task. If the result is higher than the DC, the task is successful.

Combat works slightly differently. You still roll the D20, but you add your strength (or dexterity with some weapons) modifier. Some classes also have an inherent attack bonus, which is also added. The result is then compared against the target's AC (Armour Class) to see if the attack was a success. Damage is then calculated by rolling another dice, dependent on the weapons damage expression. For example, a dagger is 1d4+2, which is one 4 sided dice, with 2 added to the result. there is an urban legend that the reason D&D uses a wide range of dice for all it's weapons is that they made a deal with a company that made the more obscure shapes, such as D3s and D8s. I don't know how true that is, but it is funny to think about.

The Storyteller System, used in White Wolf's World of Darkness and New World of Darkness games including Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Requiem, Mage: The Ascension, Mage: The Awakening and Changeling: The Lost, is a far simpler system. Rather than having an ability score for every possible activity players can perform, instead numbers are given for a set of specific attributes and generic skills. These attributes and skills are then combined to get the dice pool for the activity. For example, firing a gun uses your dexterity and your firearms skill, so a character with 4 dexterity and 3 firearms would have a total number of dice to roll of 7. All the dice are ten sided, and each roll that comes up with a number high enough counts as a success. The more successes you achieve, the more successful the action was. On the whole, the Storyteller system requires less maths, and the flow of the game as far quicker because of this.