rgblaine:
Genghis the Hutt:
If advancement comes through a die roll, you run into two problems:
1. really poor luck
2. super amazing luck
This can be mitigated somewhat if there is a minimal amount of incremental improvement and if the required number of increments increases with the skill level.
A minimal amount of incremental improvement will make it take longer for people to get really out of sync. The second part won't really help as adding required numbers of increment increases within each skill level just means you're basically adding more skill levels.
For instance, let's take an unlucky person who on 2d6 rolls an average of 4's, an average person who averages 7's, and a lucky person who averages 10's. I started each of them at 1/00 and put the following in an excel sheet:
A1:1 B1:0 C1:1 D1:0 E1:1 F1:0
A2:=IF(B2=0,A1+1,A1) B2:=IF(B1>=10*A1,0,B1+4)
C2, D2, E2, F2 were repeats of A2 and B2, but D2 added 7 and F2 added 10.
Then I highlighted A2 through F2, drug it down a hundred lines and hit Ctrl+D to copy the formula down. After 10 skills checks, Unlucky was 2, Average was 3, Lucky was 4. After 108 skill checks, Unlucky was 9/28, Average was 11/98, Lucky was 14/30.
However, if Unlucky was super unlucky and Lucky was super lucky (2's and 12's), then after 10 checks you still have 2, 3, 4 and after 108 checks you're going to have 6/54, 11/98, 16/00. Lucky is two and two-third's times better than Unlucky. In any skill checks meant for Average, Lucky is going to blow through them and Unlucky doesn't have a chance.
If you're trying to promote this system, get lots of people playing it, you're going to have some sort of forum or message boards or something for people to chat about the system, right? People will want to give each other ideas, feedback, etc. Well, presuming you have 1000 people playing this, which isn't too unlikely if you go to a lot of conventions and you get people from RPoL to spread the word, and you give the system away for free and try to make money selling adventures that'll run in the system, you're going to have super lucky and super unlucky people commenting on your boards. There will be a small subset of players (presuming 6 to a group) that will have played with a super lucky or super unlucky person. And all those people are going to talk about it, which could cause other people to think that your system isn't really balanced. For those adventures that you publish, Lucky will blow right through any skill checks, while Unlucky won't be able to pass any.
You might be better off going with a "every player gets roughly the same xp and they can buy up whatever they want to get better" system like White Wolf, or "every player gets roughly the same xp and then increases in different areas by roughly the same amount" like D&D. If you want people to roll dice to increase in skill, then more power to you. :)
Edit: Also, this system will really benefit power gamers as their shtick will keep getting better and better, while people who want to increase in new areas and learn new skills will never really be at a high level in anything, won't have any bonuses and will do really poor at any skill checks.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:06, Mon 28 Apr 2014.