On Mon, 12 May 2003, Stephen Starfox wrote:

> Not true. As long as the "threat number" (as opposed to threat range)
> is not 10 or below, all such benefits work normally. The chance of
> rolling a 11 is 10 times that of rolling a 20 on 2d10, just as the
> chance or rolling a score in the range 11-20 is ten times that of
> rolling a score of 20 on 1d20. That is the beauty of this idea.

Yes, it`s rather nice. "Doubling" the threat range on 2d10 would change
20 to 19, 19 to 17, 18 to 15, etc., just as on a d20 it would change 20 to
19-20, 19-20 to 17-20, and 18-20 to 15-20. Having 11 be the "best
possible" critical threat number is not much of a restriction, since even
a Keen rapier in the hands of someone with Improved Crit (rapier) will be
12, and it`s hard to get better than that, ever. Actually, you could go
"past" 11 if you could accept a stranger-looking mechanic: the equivalent
under this mechanic of a threat range of 9-20 would actually be "11 or
19", or "15 or 18-20", or any other set with a probability 12/100.

The big difference is the overall percentage: crits done this way will
happen only one-fifth as often, which could be good or bad.

Here`s another way to do it, using 2d10 and still keeping all crit range
percentiles unchanged: make the two dice two different colors, and look at
each one somewhat separately. You`d still add them to determine hit or
miss, but crits would read them differently. A threat range of X-20 could
then look like "the red die rolls anything from X-10 to 10, and the blue
one rolls odd". If X is less than 11, this would have to be modified a
bit; even numbers of d20 faces are easy to handle -- a threat range of
7-20 would be "the black die is 4 or more, regardless of what the green
die says" -- but odd numbers of faces could get a bit funky (8-20 becomes
"you threaten a crit if the purple die is 5 or more, or if the purple die
is 4 and the yellow die is at least 6").

Actually, that last might not be so bad, and could in fact subsume all
these mechanics: just note that if the two d10s are differently colored,
every roll of 2d10 happens also to be readable as a roll of d100, and that
a crit range of "roll above X on d20" is exactly the same thing as "roll
above 5X on d100". I like it. It adds a bit of extra randomness, in that
a crit range of 19-20 would threaten a crit on some rolls of 10 (9+1) but
not on some rolls of 19 (0+9), but I think that could be a lot of fun.

Wargamers may notice I`ve stolen this mechanic from AH/MMP`s Advanced
Squad Leader. ASL resolves almost everything with 2d6, and most of the
rest are an independent d6, but a few things look at just one of the dice
of a pair rolled for some other reason. The "crit range = lowest value"
thing suggested by Mark Aurel is in fact exactly how ASL`s sniper mechanic
works, even though most of their rolls are "less than or equal to."
Their convention, to make the rules easier to read, is that one die is
considered to be white and the other colored; owners of d10s marked
"00,10,20,..." could say instead things like "if the tens die is odd and
the units die is at least 8."


Ryan Caveney

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