Thread by @AlexandraErin

I was re-reading the rules for the tabletop RPG Strike yesterday and I read some of the back matter for the first time, and the author thanked another game for teaching him that it's okay to make a game that doesn't have difficulty/target numbers.

Strike uses a simple 1d6 roll for resolving success/fail checks, using one table if you're skilled and another table if you're not. Apart from advantage and disadvantage (a game term for rolling two dice and taking the higher or lower), there's no different difficulty levels.

Which, in practical terms, amounts to five different difficulties:

Trivial: No roll necessary! Obviously doable.
Easy: Roll with advantage.
Normal: Roll for it.
Hard: Roll with disadvantage.
Impossible: No roll necessary! Clearly not happening.

I'm working on a game system where there are more levels of skill than "yes" and "no", represented by having different sized dice, from 1d4 (untrained) to 1d12 (legendary master).

And it wasn't until I was reading the bibliography of Strike and saw that acknowledgment that I really felt good about one aspect of this system, which is that success is always a roll of 3 or higher.

There really is something kind of powerful about not just seeing another game doing something that breaks with an established convention, but also seeing a game maker say outright "Yes, this is allowed. You can do it."

Just seeing that acknowledgment changed my mindset from "Maybe I should figure out how to work in a range of difficulty levels" to admitting I'm actually pleased with the statistical effects of it always being 3.

Now, one small wrinkle is that if you roll *exactly* 3, the game considers that a marginal success, which has no mechanical ramifications but is described as "you don't look very elegant or dignified doing it".

So if you're unskilled, you're rolling 1d4. A 3 is a marginal success, a 4 is a clean success. You've got a 50% chance of success, and 50% of your successes will be messy.

If you're trained, you roll 1d6. You've got a 66% chance of success, and 25% of your successes are messy.

I'm of the opinion that succeeding about two thirds of the time is a kind of sweet spot where something feels reliable enough to be fun for players, so I like how that shakes out.

Higher expertise? 1d8 = succeed 75% of the time, 16.5% of your successes are messy.

1d10 succeeds 80% of the time, 12.5% of successes are messy.

1d12 succeeds 83% of the time, 10% of successes are messy.

So higher skill levels are not only more reliable but also more likely to look cool doing it.

You might be thinking, "The best expert in the world still fails 17% of the time?" I mean, yeah, on the face of things. There are metagame ways to turn failures into successes, though.

And characters who are strongly oriented towards skills will have more access to them, while having fewer times they need to use them.