[Open_Gaming] industry standard

[Githianki]

Hi Bill,       I think that since this is the Open Gaming forum you are perfectly right not to feel bad about posting your idea here :). I think that using this as a springboard is great.  A lot of license theory,etc. get hashed out here but actually talking about games or products is much more fun.       What are your thoughts on the basic problems facing problem resolution in an RPG? What allows a player to turn an unknown into a known without quantifying the unknown too much?  What can be used to turn a swing into a hit, a search into a find, and an attempt into a success, without making all further explorations down that road predictable?         For instance, most player's feel the need to have some basis for knowing how well they can cope with a given situation (attributes, skills, etc.).  They also need to be able to apply these in a manner that involves uncertainty in the outcome or the game becomes all certainties.         If you use dice with a fixed range of posibilities and measured rolls against attributes/skills then you have limited the scope of uncertainty to a quantifiable amount and the game doesn't scale well. Meaning that if you offer advancements in a player's stats (increasing certainty) then you also reduce the maximum limit of what is unknown (i.e. the outcome has no secrets).  The problem is that player's need to feel advancement somehow.  If you balance the challenges so that the uncertainty remains the same, then players eventually feel they aren't advancing or the uncertainty itself becomes a certainty.       Clearly the art of storytelling and GM behavior can influence the levels of certainty and uncertainty, but the choice of problem resolution method frames the overall world in a way that determines many of its attributes.  A 1-10 scale exhibits much less flexibility and range for expression than a 1-20 scale.  Similarly, where a player starts on the scale greatly affects where they can go from there, for, as mentioned, that actually reduces the unknown.         Do anyone have ideas for a system which avoids these dilemas? Perhaps a non-dice based one or something "more random"? -Alex Silva