Initiative Rolls? (Pillars of Eternity P&P)

[Blathergut]

Is anyone actually trying to play these rules? This may be a totally dumb question, but: On p75 it mentions making initiative rolls, but doesn't say what to use to make them?

 

Is 2d10 the same as 1d20?

[Amentep]

Which game rules are you referring to?

2d10 is not the same as 1d20; the obvious difference is that the minimum roll on 2d10 is 2, while the minimum on 1d20 is 1. There are other differences in the probability of other specific rolls as well.

[Blathergut]

Pillars of Eternity Pen + Paper...thought that was what this forum was for!!

 

[Amentep]

This forum is for all Pen&Paper games, including Pillars of Eternity's P&P.  I've added Pillars to the thread title to make it clearer.

[Boeroer]

Often 2d10 is used for rolling stuff on a percentage basis. So you don't add the two dices but read them as a number. 01 is 1%, 10 is 10% up tp 99 = 99%. 00 can be seen as 100%. Or simply view them as number from 1 to 100 without the percentage. 

So with two d10 you can actually make one d100 if you will. D100 would be awful to produce I guess...

Maybe the two d10 are used in the sme way when rolling for initiative? Makes more sense than just adding two d10 results. Because the results would be more granular and that's what you want when rolling INI I guess (so there's less collision when two guys roll the same INI).

Edited December 5, 2019 by Boeroer

[ABearIsHere]

I think 2d10 in this case just means 2d10, if it was a percentile roll it would probably be indicated in some other way.

Rolling multiple dice with a smaller number of faces is common in a lot of roleplaying games as it changes the probability curve and makes the very lowest and very highest results more rare. I can't even begin to speculate as to why *specifically* 2d10 was chosen for that roll, but 3d6 is, for example, a *very* common roll in a lot of modern RPG, especially those that are based on the Apocalypse World ruleset (usually abbreviated as PbtA).

I don't know the specifics of the PoE ruleset because I haven't had the time to pore over it in detail and it seems to still be in a state where it's iterated on very heavily.