Asteria Rising: Update 8

I've spent a lot of time working on a new roll system for Asteria Rising. "Why a new one?" Well audience member I made up to answer a question. . . Initially I did start off with just making a D&D homebrew campaign, then I began changing rules here and there. My last update talked about a major overhaul of some features but didn't elaborate on them. I'm spoiling for you all the dice roll system as it currently stands in Alpha version 0.13.

I decided I wanted to incorporate aspects from another table-top-role-playing game, King Arthur Pendragon by Greg Stafford. All the reviews of his game and my own watching of YouTube channels playing his game indicate a very robust system for combat and maintaining character. One problem for D&D has always been people staying in character. Hey, it is not easy especially when you need to talk to people outside and inside of character throughout a session.

Going off those aforementioned YouTube channels, I reversed engineered my favorite components of the fighting system and character personality system. The issue is that those don't work when spliced with D&D. To fix it, I decided to mark down players going through rounds of combat in the videos to determine loosely what occurred on a mechanical scale. I know I'm not on par with what Greg Stafford uses, nor do I want to be. Asteria Rising can burrow and be inspired from other sources, but it shouldn't be a copy in all but aesthetics. Now with the context in place, feel free to view the below excerpt [with formatting for the blog] from my Asteria Rising Game.

Dice Rolls

Ateria Rising uses dice in order to determine the outcome of player actions. Dice rolls affect character creation, combat, social interactions, and so forth. The roll system focuses on players increasing their skill levels in order to reduce their chance of failure when performing actions.

An example is that a character may have Modern Firearm of 15; as the image below shows, the skill level indicates that the character can have a successful roll between 2 and 15. Rolling any more or less than that results in a failure.

This method also means that low skills, such as 2. Will results in the only success being a critical success at 2. If that skill became a 3, then 2 would be a success at 3 a critical success. Ways to increase skill levels are covered more thoroughly in the Skill section.

While normally rolling above your skill level will result in failure there are two exceptions to the rule. First, if your character has 1 or 0 in a skill then you must roll a 20 in order to have the effect count as a success. Rolling a 1 with a skill of 1 is still a critical failure. The rule is so characters maintain a chance of success with every skill, even those that they have little aptitude with.

Second, if your skill level is above 20, usually caused by a modifier or condition of some kind, then the success chance is still 2–20. However, the critical success chance changes, as the above image suggests. Count the excess over twenty back and everything over that number is a critical success.

E.G. your character has gained an advantage in a situation and has a skill level of 24. Their critical success rate now ranges from 16 [20 subtracted from 4] to 20. This exception exists so players aren’t punished for getting a bonus to their skills in a situation [fight, social interaction, et cetera] at higher skill levels

End of Excerpt for Alpha0.13

Now I try to keep everything concise and clear in the rule book, as you can tell from above, but I wanted to give more reasoning for why I'm using this system. One is that I decided to incorporate a system for skill increasement, which means characters can progress through their own agency rather than just a table. That idea worked better with the new roll system rather than the D&D system.

The roll system also removes the need to calculate modifiers. At the end of the day Asteria Rising is meant to be played with my friends, and most of them don't like having to calculate modifiers in character creation. It also reduces number crunching in combat to an extent. Rather than continually adding pluses and minuses, a character rolls their weapon skill to see if they hit. Success, they hit, AC absorbs damage. To be fair that system for hits and damage isn't an upgrade from D&D's, merely a sidegrade [on par].

The new system also opens up further avenues for me to expand on how armor and weapons relate to each other, creating a tactical necessity for certain items. If the item section is ever finished confidently I will post that section as well. I did need to modify quite a bit of previous existing mechanics, and the monsters I created still need a stat overhaul. So, the change did not come without a price. I still feel confident in this change because the system simply makes more sense to what I want to do; therefore, even if I'm wrong that confidence will allow me to get the job done quicker.

Remember, the system is new and in alpha still. I will most likely need to modify it, but the above are the core rules to the rolls. In news, I will also be launching another page, and it will contain links to the various Asteria Rising updates. Some of my preexsisting pages will also go under review to be scrapped or combined with another to conserve space. Also, if I ever get off my bum [it means butt/ass/rear/rectal pillow], I will make a new background for the site. So far, the issue is that the image itself needs to be 1800x1600 pixels yet still only 300 kilobytes. I'll figure something out, eventually.

Have an amazing day.