SF + SWL Mash-Up Part 3

Crunch

Now that we have established the proto-skill system of AoEs, we need to have a means of determining what happens when Joe or Jane Player can’t quite convince the Referee that their Space Specialization should let them know if a local plant is poisonous.

Over at Delta’s D&D Hotspot you will find one of my favorite formulas for attack rolls:

d20+HD+AC ≥ 20

I want to incorporate the basic gist of this idea. When making any kind of roll involving what RPGs generally call a “skill,” including combat, a character succeeds when the player rolls a d20 adds their bonuses and arrives at a total of 20 or more.

This necessitates determining what a base success looks like. In SWL there are three places where we can start to get an idea of how often a player can expect to succeed: Combat, Turning Undead and Thief Skills.

• The average AAC of all the monsters in SWL is 13.
• A 1st level cleric needs a 10+ on 3d6 to Turn a Skeleton, a 13+ to Turn Ghouls & Zombies, a 15+ to Turn Shadows & Wights and a 17+ to Turn a Wraith.
• A Thief has a 1 in 6 chance for most skills, the exceptions being Hear Noise (3 in 6), Read Languages (4 in 6) and Climb Walls (5 in 6). Demi-human Thieves have some skills at 2 in 6. 

Thus, there is an average 40% chance to hit in combat, and average of 25% chance to Turn all undead and most Thief Skills have a 16.7% chance of success. The average of all of these is approximately 27%. Bump that up a little due to the various other Thief Skills and we are rather close to the 2 in 6 (32%) chance that feels very familiar to those who have played older versions of D&D.

Translating that into a d20 roll means a 14 or a 15 + bonuses to arrive at 20+ in our formula.

This means I have wiggle room to assign variable “Base Action Bonuses” to each class:

• Fighter +7
• Cleric +6
• Magic-user +5

This means that Fighters will be the “skill” class. I justify this because there really isn’t any justification for limiting clerics to blunt weapons or magic-users to staffs and daggers when weapons are described as laser, sonic and conventional as I plan to do. Thus all three classes will be able to use any weapon.

In addition, I am toying with the idea of allowing the spell-casters to use their spells multiple times per day with two different options:

• To use a spell immediately requires a successful roll.
• To use a spell that will automatically succeed requires 10 minutes to cast.

Therefore, Fighters get that extra bonus when trying to do the “impossible” stuff.

To sum up, everything in this SWL + SF mash-up will rely on the following formula:

Success = d20 + Base Action Bonus + Situational Bonuses/Penalties ≥ 20.

This also opens the door to this formula:

Critical Success =  d20 + Base Action Bonus + Situational Bonuses/Penalties ≥ 30.