Regarding 3e, the dice tricks lead me to there being two plausible conclusions under Ockham's Razor: either the designer hates people who analyse his systems and wants to spite them by making it harder (in which case they should be writing rules-light RPGs, not rules-heavy RPGs), or they think that making the boring mechanistic task of rolling the dice more time-consuming is a good idea (in which case I wish them well, but do not wish to partake of the game systems they develop).
Having been pretty critical of 3e in my last few posts, let me take the other side for a minute: I don't think either of these are the reason for 3e's dice tricks, primarily. I think the dice tricks are, for the most part, an attempt to answer the question, "How do we enable a guy heavily invested in <Ability> to be incrementally superior in that Ability?"
I think the logical progression goes something like this: Solars need to be better than mortals, almost by default. Well, fine: give 'em free Excellencies, and there's a clear competence gap right out of the gate. But Solars also need to be better or worse than
each other; Swordy McStabStab ought to be a considerably better melee combatant than Sparkles Socialpants. That's the design objective.
So: how do?
Well, 2e's solution was to give Swordy a bunch of absolutely devastating "I MURDER EVERYTHING" Charms, probably coupled with some perfect effects. But, uh, we know where that road goes, and we don't want to go down it again. So, no massive overkill superdamage Charms; no (or very limited) un/un attacks, or perfect attacks, or etc. What's left?
In actual, practical terms, the Excellency is still the number one divider of "Exalt-tier threats" from "everything else" - that Tyrant Lizard has some scary damage pools, but they'll never matter if he can't actually hit you. So if we want a granular, iterative improvement in capability, why don't we let Swordy repeatedly buy
slight improvements to his Excellency? That can stack... well, if not indefinitely, then at least for quite a ways, and yet it won't lead to him instantly splattering Sparkles because boosting accuracy doesn't drastically increase damage - and doesn't increase it at all, on a Decisive.
Okay, so how do we allow iterative improvements to Excellency performance? We could add more dice... but eh, that got excessive in 2e, so let's not make that the standard response. Instead, let's make each die count a little bit more, either by rerolling it, or by adding successes, or
something like that.
Hey, now that we've got all this stuff that keys off of particular die rolls, let's run with that. We've got Charms that get benefits for your enemy's 1s; how about counter Charms that remove your own 1s? Or if we want that same probability boost without the counter aspect, that remove 6s. Or...
I don't
like the die-fiddlers. I think they slow down the least interesting aspect of gameplay (i.e., rolling dice) and obfuscate things for players who don't have statistical backgrounds; further, if you're going to have a bunch of pseudo-Excellencies that do nearly identical things, then
standardize those suckers as much as you can. This was the lesson of 1e, and it seems like an enormous regression to return to it again. But... there is at least a design goal
there, whether I like how it was attained or not.
(Edit: Sidebar - I keep seeing that "deliberately obfuscate pools" quote attributed to the Devs. Does anybody have an original source for that?)
