I don’t find “lol 5% of the time something WACKY happens!” very fun very long, no. That is too high a frequency for freak events. Actually, it’s 10% because people do wackiness on natural 1s and natural 20s. That’s too much! That’s so much it’s distracting.

I outlined the dice system I liked from nWoD in another comment. You can get some wild outcomes there, but it’s not the absurd flat “10% of every roll is insanely good or bad”. You get the occasional “I can’t believe I rolled three tens convinced the vampire I was a wizard!”, still.

I am a huge fan of dice pools and absolutely done with “roll one die vs target”. The flat probability you get from one die doesn’t give results that feel good.

I was a big fan of the nWoD’s S10 system. Add up your stat, skill, and relevant bonuses, roll this many d10s. Every one that comes up as {8, 9, 10} adds to degree of success. Roll another die for every one that came up {10}, possibly repeating if you keep rolling 10s.

You get pretty consistent results. Someone who’s a professional will throw ~6 dice on average, so they’re very likely to succeed on basic tasks. Much less of that “lol the wizard rolled a 1 and forgot how to read” or “barbarian rolled a 20, I guess he can speak infernal?” weirdness. You still get freak outliers every once in a while, where someone rolls like six 10s in a row and everyone’s cheering. But not 5% of the time, and not so binary.

Plus there’s other “dice tricks” you can apply for different circumstances. “Reroll all failed dice once”, “reroll 9s like 10s”, etc.

1d20+stuff is just so basic and threadbare. It’s not even easier. nWod’s dice pool you don’t even have to add. You just count. We all know players that can’t add 16+7, but they can probably count to 4.

Reminds me of when we had a free and paid snack area when I was at Lowe’s. No camera in the break/locker room, a nice private place to put your stuff in your locker and eat in peace.

Then they ‘upgraded’ so instead of tap pay you had to go up to a facial recognition camera, sign into an app, buy shop cash, and buy your snack through their app via the ‘aided smart teller’ where you scan your items and do a self checkout situation that took 4x longer than before and kept your change since you have to buy their cash.

Snacks started rotting in place, the once busy room was almost always dead save the few seats outside the camera field of view.

Most folks went in the door harder to be seen from but there were only two slim corners and three seats where you weren’t watched the whole time.

this article came out just after I started GMing shadowrun. I let our decker do damn near anything he wanted after reading it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/07/27/criminals-hacked-a-fish-tank-to-steal-data-from-a-casino/

Art imitates life, and sometimes, life looks at art and says “hold my beer”

Can confirm, two the Walmarts in my city sell shotguns and bolt action hunting rifles

Huh. I thought they stopped selling 'em.

I did not hit him i did not. Oh hi Viking.