Degree of Succcess

[septembervirgin]

If a character succeeds, by what margin does that character succeed?

 

I think that success in most CRPG is on a binary rate, except in combat (damage done should be considered a "quality roll"). Contested or opposed checks to a skill or attribute should always be rated for quality. Also, should the effort be gauged by any audience, judged somehow, it should also be rated for quality.

 

If we fail, that might be rated for quality too. A fumble table could be included in a game and is usually entertaining but I've yet to see fumbles incorporated into a computer role-playing game although I'd like to see it (with the occurrence of one tenth of a percent chance but more likely while being hampered by an enemy more capable than oneself or if unlucky trait is possessed or if a certain "feat" or spell is used against ones character).

[Troller]

haha I like the idea, and man, from all the suggestions I see here, if the devs chose to implement lots of them, we will only start playing this rpg in the year 2020

hahaha

[Nakia]

Yes, at least in side quests. In the main quest it might not work so well. If you fail a quest or only partial succeed in the MQ then I assume you have to reload and try again. That could be annoying. Side quests could be failed without affecting the over all game. Arcanum had this feature.

[evdk]

If you fail a quest or only partial succeed in the MQ then I assume you have to reload and try again. That could be annoying.

Why? This need not necessarily lead to reload, just to suboptimal conditions in further parts of the main quest. It may even open unexpected venues for progress or at least side quests.

[septembervirgin]

I'm not talking about success and failure of quests but rather in dialogue skill use and in skill checks.

[aliksy]

I'm pretty sure degree of success is pretty common in tabletop games. I vaguely remember some rules in d20 3.x (ew), even.

 

I personally don't like a whole lot of randomness in my games, so I guess it depends on how it's implemented. I don't want to lose because the RNG gods gave me six fumbles in a row and the enemy was gifted six dramatic successes. That goes more into broad system questions and math, and why I like dice pool much much much more than 1d20+stuff.

[IrishLuigi]

Idea's good. I would like to clarify that, in my opinion, t's not absolutely necessary for every single quest to have multiple levels of success/failure (that would be too much time for the devs to spend on each quest), but rather the amount of potential outcomes correlates with the complexity of the quest.