Hi, I’m new to these forums, but I tend to browse a lot of different game design discords and forums without posting. I’m wondering if anyone can help talk me through some design aspects I’m working on, or help with some dice math that I’m not very good at. I tend to just keep design thoughts to myself, but this has been a bit of a hurdle for me, so I think I need outside opinions.
I’ve been toying with the idea for a system that combines Forged in the Dark and Technoir . The main things I’ll bullet point:
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Action ratings go from 1-6 instead of 0-4. While I like the high stakes feel FitD dice give, in play it feels more punishing than I want for different design goal reasons. Still the “count the highest roll.”
- Attributes, but no resistance rolls . I’m hoping they will not be necessary with less punishing consequences, and also it always felt a little clunky and hard to remember at the table.
- Success tiers are now 1-3 /consequence, 4-6 /mixed success, and multiple 6’s (I call them 6+ )/full successes. I’m hoping the increased dice pool and success tiers basically makes it so mixed successes are overly abundant, while failures are a result of accumulating consequences, which brings me to
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Hurt dice from Technoir. Whatever the hurt dice roll, those numbers are removed from being counted in your regular roll. You get hurt dice from fictional consequences like harm and such.
- Still debating on what to do when all dice are removed. It can go either way with being positive or negative. Calling it 0+ in my notes.
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Position and Effect are still used . Greater effect is now a list that players can choose from to add to their normal success.
My biggest hurdle is not knowing how to do that math for the dice, both counting multiple 6’s and how hurt dice factor in. If anyone has any advice or questions please let me know! Thank you!
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AnyDice is a good place for looking at dice probabilities, but it does take some learning to get the details down.
For the basic probabilities for 1-6d, this chart looks right. https://takeonrules.com/2017/06/06/blades-in-the-dark-probabilities/
As you can see, going from 4 to 6 does very little to change the chance of failure, and instead sharply drops the chance of a 4-5 roll, and boosts the chance of a critical (multiple 6s.)
Hurt dice seem like a strange concept. On a 6 they negate any chance of a full success, no matter how many dice you roll, while a 1-3 is almost always going to be irrelevant. The “take the highest” system seems to work against this being a useful mechanic.
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In Technoir, all rolls are contests with an opponents roll, so what number you have to beat changes. It still is a take the highest kind of roll. The only difference with this is the numbers you need to succeed are static rather than variable per roll. I’m don’t think that would make Hurt dice pointless, especially if something happens when all dice are negated.
It doesn’t seem all the different than taking a -1 to a roll. Sometimes it screws a roll over but lowering u below the target, but sometimes you roll high enough that the -1 doesn’t even matter. I like the idea of having the consequence also be something physical that the players have to collect and roll rather than just write on a sheet or try to remember, even if sometimes it does nothing.
currently trying to learn the right code for AnyDice. I’m starting to feel skeptical of my multiple 6’s as the only way to succeed, but I want to see if I can get it to calculate hurt dice as well. 
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Well, without any harm dice, the “critical” column on that chart I linked is the chance of multiple 6s. Which seems very low to me!
As far as Harm vs -1d. If I understand it right, the main difference is that each Harm in your system is a flat 1/6 chance of “you can’t get a full success” no matter how many dice you are rolling with your skill. While -1d in Blades has far more effect on the odds of someone with 0d or 1d compared to someone with 4d or 5d.
Edit: Let me know if you need help with the Roll20 stuff. I’ve done a lot with it for my own TTRPG engines and board games.
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After messing around with AnyDice, I think I’m coming around to not making success only happen on double 6s. I was hoping more dice would fix it, but not as much as I’d hope.
I’m still debating on how harm works. Either a track that gives a Hurt die after a certain harm threshold, or have harm work the way blades does it, but replace “less effect/-1d/need help” with just “take a hurt die” when you fill in a row.
Here’s what I got so far with AnyDice trying to calculate negation. Problem is, whenever any kind of negation occurs, instead of finding the next highest roll, the result becomes completely negated. Complete negation should still be possible, but the percentages are just too high for me to believe them.
I didn’t make an attempt to fix the negation problem with this one: https://anydice.com/program/17603
In this one I tried to fix the problem, but it still gives me the same result. It would be so much easier if I could use a while loop statement 
https://anydice.com/program/175d2
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I went ahead and ran 1-2d and 1-2 Harm in Google Sheets. So you can use that as a baseline for comparing your AnyDice code. (Assuming I didn’t make any errors, of course.)
Harm as Negation odds
The results are in cells 47-51. I ignored criticals as a separate probability, since the chance of a crit on 2d is already known, and this wouldn’t change it (since any roll that can succeed can also crit.)
Oh wow thank you so much! This is really helpful. I think theres an error for 1d 2 Harm (because it adds up to 116%) but hopefully I can fix that up.
https://anydice.com/program/17620
I almost figured it out with AnyDice but got caught in its limitations. A friend showed me that it was impossible to use dice sequences for functions, so attempting to have normal dice sequences and harm dice sequences interact wouldn’t work. I may try to find another program to run the probabilities because I don’t want to hand input all possible values, but we’ll see how far I go.
At this point I may stop trying to force this system and just use FitD. It is not easy to calculate, and my initial probabilities were way off the mark. I may give it one more go but thats as far as I may take it. Thank you so much for the help and advice though!
I’d love to see an adaptation of Transmissions for FitD! I have wanted to do it, but I haven’t had a chance to play Technoir.
Oh yes, good catch! I had it looking one column too wide. Should all be accurate now.
The only other thing I could think of to do would be Monte Carlo simulation. Which may be more trouble than it is worth. No harm in playtesting it this way first though, and then adapting to feedback. Just playtest early and often, as always!