Thread by @TrebuchetOps

This thread is very good and useful and you should read it. I have a lot of thoughts on this wrt why I chose to keep a d% for Pentola, despite hacking BRP so much the game is less a mod and more "inspired by" the latter.

https://twitter.com/ammourazz/status/1188164194631409664

Firstly, Pentola uses d% and blackjack roll under for determining success/failure. You wanna roll high as you can within any given outcome band. The bands of outcome are:

- botch on 100
- fail over goal
- success at/under goal
- triumph under 1/10th of goal

Why do you wanna be as high as possible within your band? Because of opposed rolls and roll-centric effects.

Pentola leverages opposed rolls a lot, and it's essentially a case where N participants roll and then compare their results in bands.

So if there's six characters with a goal of 60 and the following rolls:

A: 5 (triumph)
B: 30 (success)
C: 45 (success)
D: 68 (fail)
E: 100 (botch)

We can compare results by eyeballing them, basically. E botched and does worse than everyone, including D who failed.

A triumphed and gets the best outcome / wins the contest, but the runner up is C, not B—they rolled higher in the success band.

This prevents anyone from having to do additional calculations on degree of success (I got 50 under my goal, so that's five degrees...), etc.

The idea of "determine goal, roll once, compare" is something I wanted to wind through the game as much as possible.

Opposed rolls use it, and so does my weapon rework.

So when you roll for an attack you do your singles die in damage. With a heavy weapon, you ignore up to the tens die value of the targets armor. Light weapons are easy to conceal.

On a triumph, you do damage equal to your actual roll, ignoring armor altogether.

This doesn't apply to magic via the Craft, because those effects are specified by intentional manipulation (a topic for another time), but this same base mechanic can be applied to things like poison or environmental effects.

But granularity also applies due to the way skills advance (and lots of other subsystems are, functionally, tweaked skills - reputations, relationships, vocations, dweomers).

When you succeed for the first time on an adventure at a normal or harder test using a skill, mark it.

After each adventure, roll d%—if over your current rating, it goes up by 3. If you roll a 100 it goes up by 5 (even if it's already at/above 100).

Whenever you botch a skill in use, it goes up by 3, indicating learning from failure.

As alluded to upthread, small differences in skill bonus can make the difference - especially when they gate other abilities, like knacks.

Knacks are abilities characters mutate over time as a result of their actions and beliefs. Some are gained from vocations or skills.

In those cases, the ability cannot have a higher magnitude than the 10s place of the required skill (so, if you had a knack for, say, creating convection heat from your hand as mastery of baking, you couldn't improve that to Magnitude 3 unless your baking vocation was 30%+)

Aside: one frustrating thing about discussing these mechanics in a thread is that they sound much more complicated than they are in play, but I'm trying to compress a bunch of interrelated mechanics into tweets, sorry and 😭.

I've been retooling Pentola for the past couple months, so there's a lot of other hacks and stuff I could talk about, but I'll end things here before I veer too far off course.

I like the d% for granularity and clarity, and @ammourazz's thread has made me introspect everything.

I'm going back over my mechanics again with this all explicitly in mind because I think the points raised are really good and I'm not convinced I've done enough work to get the mileage out of the dice as I can. 💜