Apocalypse World Difficulty Classes
Jan. 19th, 2020 05:00 pmI know what the rules ARE, but it's taken me a long time to start to understand how apocalypse world action resolution differs from DnD.
DnD, you typically roll a d20, add relevant skills, and compare to a difficulty class set by the GM according to guidance about the sort of thing being done.
That has a bunch of features which aren't immediately obvious. For instance, all the characters vary in ability between "average human or slightly below" and "best you can be at this particular level". You could have a character who's world-class at something unrelated to adventuring, but you'd need ad-hoc rule to say what bonus they got for it. In most editions of DnD, adventurers can still be bad at things that aren't their competence, like the fun of a heist movie when the wrong character has to try to be stealthy or disguised, but in 4e, their skill is capped below more like a heroic adventure where everyone is fairly good at everything.
I still have a problem that if the characters are regularly doing things that normal human don't (even things that SOME humans do like "picking locks"), the GM is sort of behind the game at choosing an appropriate DC. Is this mostly impossible? Or really impossible? When characters do something impossible are they just that good or is it magic or something else? But everyone else seems ok with this.
In apocalypse world inspired systems, there's no difficulty class. You roll 2d6, and get a classic bell curve and 7+ is always "yes, but" and 10+ is always "woo, yes!"
That means, things you're good at, you get a +1 or a +3 (which matters a lot in a bell curve) you succeed at most of the time, and things you're bad at, you fail most of the time. Which sounds natural. But that implies, you only try things which are "average" difficulty for the sort of characters you are. Everything else has to be "the GM tells you you can just do it automatically or can't do it at all". Which is probably sensible. It probably SHOULD be like that. It guides the GM into "fun" resolutions. But I think I and many people find it confusing because it's never explained how that's important.
It's also to note that some systems the "things you're good at" are things like "being strong" or "being intelligent" and other systems it's things like "saving people" or "being dangerous". Which makes quite a difference. I think the system shines more with the more abstract/narrative abilities.
Both systems also get bodged with a bunch of rules for when characters can help each other and when tools are useful, when that makes a task trivial, when it increases the chance of success without increasing the maximum possibly achieved, when it gets a flat bonus to the roll...
A lot of these things are things a GM can sensibly just wing as it goes along but I'd *like* a system that helps that sort of improvising, rather than just assuming the GM will know when to use the system and when to ignore the system.
I've been thinking about systems a lot recently but now I'm thinking about more lightweight roleplaying, the best way of coping if you want a "roll a die every half an hour" type situation, but without making character abilities irrelevant.
DnD, you typically roll a d20, add relevant skills, and compare to a difficulty class set by the GM according to guidance about the sort of thing being done.
That has a bunch of features which aren't immediately obvious. For instance, all the characters vary in ability between "average human or slightly below" and "best you can be at this particular level". You could have a character who's world-class at something unrelated to adventuring, but you'd need ad-hoc rule to say what bonus they got for it. In most editions of DnD, adventurers can still be bad at things that aren't their competence, like the fun of a heist movie when the wrong character has to try to be stealthy or disguised, but in 4e, their skill is capped below more like a heroic adventure where everyone is fairly good at everything.
I still have a problem that if the characters are regularly doing things that normal human don't (even things that SOME humans do like "picking locks"), the GM is sort of behind the game at choosing an appropriate DC. Is this mostly impossible? Or really impossible? When characters do something impossible are they just that good or is it magic or something else? But everyone else seems ok with this.
In apocalypse world inspired systems, there's no difficulty class. You roll 2d6, and get a classic bell curve and 7+ is always "yes, but" and 10+ is always "woo, yes!"
That means, things you're good at, you get a +1 or a +3 (which matters a lot in a bell curve) you succeed at most of the time, and things you're bad at, you fail most of the time. Which sounds natural. But that implies, you only try things which are "average" difficulty for the sort of characters you are. Everything else has to be "the GM tells you you can just do it automatically or can't do it at all". Which is probably sensible. It probably SHOULD be like that. It guides the GM into "fun" resolutions. But I think I and many people find it confusing because it's never explained how that's important.
It's also to note that some systems the "things you're good at" are things like "being strong" or "being intelligent" and other systems it's things like "saving people" or "being dangerous". Which makes quite a difference. I think the system shines more with the more abstract/narrative abilities.
Both systems also get bodged with a bunch of rules for when characters can help each other and when tools are useful, when that makes a task trivial, when it increases the chance of success without increasing the maximum possibly achieved, when it gets a flat bonus to the roll...
A lot of these things are things a GM can sensibly just wing as it goes along but I'd *like* a system that helps that sort of improvising, rather than just assuming the GM will know when to use the system and when to ignore the system.
I've been thinking about systems a lot recently but now I'm thinking about more lightweight roleplaying, the best way of coping if you want a "roll a die every half an hour" type situation, but without making character abilities irrelevant.