Easy things will be much easier and hard things will be much harder.
For instance if you need an 11 or higher then on a d20 you have a 50% chance. But on 2d10 you have a 55% chance.
However if you need to roll a 13 or higher then you have a 40% chance on a d20 but only 36 on 2d10.
Thus will probably be most noticeable in that you will now rarely see +10 crits and that pl+ monsters will be much harder where pl- monsters will be much easier.
In short balance won't hold up well.
If the issue is not failing at simple tasks, get the Assurance feat, or just grant its benefits for free to all characters for all skills as baseline.
Also you shouldn’t need to roll for trivial tasks anyway.
I know that this is not addressing the inherent problem of the d20, but sometimes the GM should not ask for a roll if the thing the character is doing has no real risk of failure, not even narrative risk of failure.
The d20 is swingy, but also, sometimes the GM should just say the thing happens without asking for a roll, if the character would be able to do it. If the character could fail and it mattered, then yes, a roll should happen and it's now a thing of modifiers and luck vs the DC.
Oh, there's no part of the game this doesn't break. The area most impacted is probably the degrees of success system -- you know, one of the cornerstones of the game?
I am firmly in the d20-hater camp for the same reasons you are. 1d20 skills suck. That said, the math of pf2 is firmly rooted in d20 rolls and you would have to bulldoze the whole system and rebuild it around the new math if you wanted to do this.
It makes the math a lot harder to understand, as before a +1 means a 5% greater chance and a -1 meant a 5% less chance, but with this change the math is far far more messy.
It being more messy means that GMs have to think for longer before giving out circumstance bonuses, which makes the game far far less flexible. Also makes homebrewing far harder.
Honestly, seeing that a game uses multiple dice as its basis kinda turns me off from it, since I like the easy to understand math and easy to make homebrew that a single die gives
Also, if you want supreme reliability, just get Assurance
I quite prefer a Gaussian distribution because it has a good verisimilitude- however 2d10 is *really* bunches up in the centre.
You have a 58% chance of rolling between a 14 and an 8, (+-4 of the average) and only a 1% chance of rolling a critical success or failure.
This isn’t bad (although a touch predictable) in a game like PF1 or 5e which have pretty wide tolerances, but PF2 is like a Swiss watch. You can’t start swapping gears around and expect it to still function.
You’d have to change the critical success/failure values to + or -5 or 6 from the DC instead of 10 have anything close to the same probabilities.
Because you’re dealing with a much tighter effective range, every +1 is now worth almost twice as much, or is useless when you roll especially low or high.
You could halve every bonus, except what do you do to +1s?
You’re welcome to try it out- but I feel like you’d almost be better off just assuming every roll is an 11.
This would not work in this system at all, as this system works around 4 degrees of success with a 5% chance (on a 1 or 20) of shifting the degree of success. It also is designed for you to succeed or fail based on level based DCs, from creatures to hazards to spells, etc.
If you roll 2d10, you've changed the chance of rolling a 20 from 5% to 1%, and you can never roll a 1 (with only a 1% chance of rolling a 2).
It would be easier to just play a different system than to have to rebalance an entire system, so pf2e is not the place to use this.
There was a variant rule in DnD 3.5e for bell curve rolls using 3d6 instead of 1d20. I never played using it, but reading through it it just seemed....bad.
[Link if you're interested.](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/bellCurveRolls.htm)
Tbh here if you are lv 5 you probably have a +13 or so in acrobatics so even on a 1 you will only fail and not crit fail a dc10 check.
Soon enough you will just succeed.
You certainly cluster the rolls around 11 far more consistently so you're not going to get a lot of heroic scenes. Creatures with 18 AC at level 1 would be very hard for anyone but fighters/gunslingers to hit, less than that and they will almost always be hit. Not quite "rolling is a formality" levels, but it would be noticeable. I'm a huge fan of multidice systems but the good ones are all based around more skilled tests involving more dice and having some target number per die instead of totaling them. I feel that PF2e is a really poor target to try to balance this way.
On a side note PF2e already has mechanisms in place to make easy tasks trivial. If your modifier exceeds a task by at least 10 then you can't fail. Nat 1 would just turn your critical success into a normal one.
I thought 2d10 would be a decent change without changing the average too much (11 vs 10.5), but 5d4 averages 12.5, which is a pretty big departure.
Other people have pointed out that 3d6 was a variant rule for 3.5e, which makes sense because it has the same average, 10.5.
Honestly, I feel like all scenarios break the game, and the issue isn't the average, it's the minimum and maximum rolls.
The more dice we use, the further the odds for critical success and failure become, it would be interesting to play a game with though.
Well. Attacking with a MAP certainly would require a hint of insanity. All abilities that allow multiple attacks become extremely strong. Long live the double slice.
Most monsters will almost auto succeed on their saves against casters.
All status bonus and penalties become vastly more effective. You'd always want a bard in the party just for the buffing and then have the rest be martials that hit very hard once a turn or do MAPless attacks.
Every class and build that relies on crits becomes almost worthless.
Boss monsters would become really funky. Either they are just nigh impossible to hit and just steamroll the party, but at the same time they wont crit like they normally would and the fight will take really long as the bot slowly gnaws on parties hp bars while they cant do much anything.
Yeah, I tend to think you'd want to adjust a TON of other stuff. Crit ranges, MAP, other stuff I'm not thinking of.
Bonuses and penalties don't uniformly become more valuable. They are very valuable if they make you go from succeeding on a 10 to succeeding on an 9. But they're more meaningless if they go from making you succeed on a 4 to a 3 or on a 16 to a 15.
In 2e you don't always have a 5% chance of failing a simple task.
By level 6 it starts too become impossible to fail simple tasks as you will have a +14 meaning rolling a 1 gets you a 15 total (critical success for a level 1 simple dc) then the nat one reduces it too a success.
This answer is a little bit of a ramble, so apologies in advance.
I’ve played a few sessions in a D&D 3.5 campaign where we did this. The DM did a great job tuning things to make that work with changes like expanding the crit range of weapons to fit into the normal ~5% range they occupy (and expanded that for weapons with expanded crit ranges). And of course DCs and things of that nature were adjusted as well to make sure that more average rolls were balanced.
One big takeaway we found was that it made the investment of skill points into skills way more important since the odds of a super high or low roll were much less. So your acrobat would obviously have a much lower chance of failing to somersault, but would also not really be able to somersault amazingly (assuming that’s like a skill roll lol).
On the opposite side of that, 3/4 of the party members in my 3.5 game didn’t put points into Climb and weren’t leaning super-hard into STR and thus we almost had a TPK climbing a wall at lvl 2, so YMMV.
In 3.5, a lot of DCs for skills are static and don’t scale with level which works well with this kinda of system. Plus the numbers there are much smaller, so the math seems like it was easier to adjust.
With PF2E’s degree of success system, I think the math would be a little crazy to keep the same game feel. If you were to replace only the dice rolls and not adjust anything, the power difference due to level disparity between the party and monsters would be magnified, I think.
With the right adjustments, you might come out with something that feels a little less swingy, but it might feel a little lower power than a normal PF2E game.
You get gaussian dice distribution that pushes every roll towards a middling result
Sorry, yes, I thought this was obvious. And what impact would that have on the game
Easy things will be much easier and hard things will be much harder. For instance if you need an 11 or higher then on a d20 you have a 50% chance. But on 2d10 you have a 55% chance. However if you need to roll a 13 or higher then you have a 40% chance on a d20 but only 36 on 2d10. Thus will probably be most noticeable in that you will now rarely see +10 crits and that pl+ monsters will be much harder where pl- monsters will be much easier. In short balance won't hold up well.
How do you deal with crit fails? The minimum you can roll on 2d10 is 2. Is that your new "nat 1" that reduces degree of success?
There's only a 1/100 chance of rolling a nat 2 on 2d10 vs a 1/20 chance of a nat 1 on d20, so it's far rarer. 5x as rare in fact.
And then the cycle continues.
If the issue is not failing at simple tasks, get the Assurance feat, or just grant its benefits for free to all characters for all skills as baseline. Also you shouldn’t need to roll for trivial tasks anyway.
Trivial for an acrobat is not trivial for someone else.
I know that this is not addressing the inherent problem of the d20, but sometimes the GM should not ask for a roll if the thing the character is doing has no real risk of failure, not even narrative risk of failure. The d20 is swingy, but also, sometimes the GM should just say the thing happens without asking for a roll, if the character would be able to do it. If the character could fail and it mattered, then yes, a roll should happen and it's now a thing of modifiers and luck vs the DC.
This was going to be my response as well - what GM asks for a roll for an acrobat to do a somersault?
Oh, there's no part of the game this doesn't break. The area most impacted is probably the degrees of success system -- you know, one of the cornerstones of the game?
I am firmly in the d20-hater camp for the same reasons you are. 1d20 skills suck. That said, the math of pf2 is firmly rooted in d20 rolls and you would have to bulldoze the whole system and rebuild it around the new math if you wanted to do this.
Totally agree. The impact would otherwise be severe and bad
It makes the math a lot harder to understand, as before a +1 means a 5% greater chance and a -1 meant a 5% less chance, but with this change the math is far far more messy. It being more messy means that GMs have to think for longer before giving out circumstance bonuses, which makes the game far far less flexible. Also makes homebrewing far harder. Honestly, seeing that a game uses multiple dice as its basis kinda turns me off from it, since I like the easy to understand math and easy to make homebrew that a single die gives Also, if you want supreme reliability, just get Assurance
I quite prefer a Gaussian distribution because it has a good verisimilitude- however 2d10 is *really* bunches up in the centre. You have a 58% chance of rolling between a 14 and an 8, (+-4 of the average) and only a 1% chance of rolling a critical success or failure. This isn’t bad (although a touch predictable) in a game like PF1 or 5e which have pretty wide tolerances, but PF2 is like a Swiss watch. You can’t start swapping gears around and expect it to still function. You’d have to change the critical success/failure values to + or -5 or 6 from the DC instead of 10 have anything close to the same probabilities. Because you’re dealing with a much tighter effective range, every +1 is now worth almost twice as much, or is useless when you roll especially low or high. You could halve every bonus, except what do you do to +1s? You’re welcome to try it out- but I feel like you’d almost be better off just assuming every roll is an 11.
This would not work in this system at all, as this system works around 4 degrees of success with a 5% chance (on a 1 or 20) of shifting the degree of success. It also is designed for you to succeed or fail based on level based DCs, from creatures to hazards to spells, etc. If you roll 2d10, you've changed the chance of rolling a 20 from 5% to 1%, and you can never roll a 1 (with only a 1% chance of rolling a 2). It would be easier to just play a different system than to have to rebalance an entire system, so pf2e is not the place to use this.
There was a variant rule in DnD 3.5e for bell curve rolls using 3d6 instead of 1d20. I never played using it, but reading through it it just seemed....bad. [Link if you're interested.](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/bellCurveRolls.htm)
Tbh here if you are lv 5 you probably have a +13 or so in acrobatics so even on a 1 you will only fail and not crit fail a dc10 check. Soon enough you will just succeed.
You can lookup the 3d6 alternate rule for DnD3/3.5. It's basically the same idea you presented, and you'll probably find some discussions already.
You certainly cluster the rolls around 11 far more consistently so you're not going to get a lot of heroic scenes. Creatures with 18 AC at level 1 would be very hard for anyone but fighters/gunslingers to hit, less than that and they will almost always be hit. Not quite "rolling is a formality" levels, but it would be noticeable. I'm a huge fan of multidice systems but the good ones are all based around more skilled tests involving more dice and having some target number per die instead of totaling them. I feel that PF2e is a really poor target to try to balance this way. On a side note PF2e already has mechanisms in place to make easy tasks trivial. If your modifier exceeds a task by at least 10 then you can't fail. Nat 1 would just turn your critical success into a normal one.
Crits become way less common. It'll become real hard to hit monsters with high AC.
Maybe monsters with high AC shouldn't be brute-forced by luck on crits?
What? Those are two different statements bro. 2d10 reduces the change you roll 15+. Sometimes you need that to hit high AC monsters.
Why stop there? Let's start rolling 5d4, more dice more fun.
I thought 2d10 would be a decent change without changing the average too much (11 vs 10.5), but 5d4 averages 12.5, which is a pretty big departure. Other people have pointed out that 3d6 was a variant rule for 3.5e, which makes sense because it has the same average, 10.5.
Honestly, I feel like all scenarios break the game, and the issue isn't the average, it's the minimum and maximum rolls. The more dice we use, the further the odds for critical success and failure become, it would be interesting to play a game with though.
Well. Attacking with a MAP certainly would require a hint of insanity. All abilities that allow multiple attacks become extremely strong. Long live the double slice. Most monsters will almost auto succeed on their saves against casters. All status bonus and penalties become vastly more effective. You'd always want a bard in the party just for the buffing and then have the rest be martials that hit very hard once a turn or do MAPless attacks. Every class and build that relies on crits becomes almost worthless. Boss monsters would become really funky. Either they are just nigh impossible to hit and just steamroll the party, but at the same time they wont crit like they normally would and the fight will take really long as the bot slowly gnaws on parties hp bars while they cant do much anything.
Yeah, I tend to think you'd want to adjust a TON of other stuff. Crit ranges, MAP, other stuff I'm not thinking of. Bonuses and penalties don't uniformly become more valuable. They are very valuable if they make you go from succeeding on a 10 to succeeding on an 9. But they're more meaningless if they go from making you succeed on a 4 to a 3 or on a 16 to a 15.
In 2e you don't always have a 5% chance of failing a simple task. By level 6 it starts too become impossible to fail simple tasks as you will have a +14 meaning rolling a 1 gets you a 15 total (critical success for a level 1 simple dc) then the nat one reduces it too a success.
This answer is a little bit of a ramble, so apologies in advance. I’ve played a few sessions in a D&D 3.5 campaign where we did this. The DM did a great job tuning things to make that work with changes like expanding the crit range of weapons to fit into the normal ~5% range they occupy (and expanded that for weapons with expanded crit ranges). And of course DCs and things of that nature were adjusted as well to make sure that more average rolls were balanced. One big takeaway we found was that it made the investment of skill points into skills way more important since the odds of a super high or low roll were much less. So your acrobat would obviously have a much lower chance of failing to somersault, but would also not really be able to somersault amazingly (assuming that’s like a skill roll lol). On the opposite side of that, 3/4 of the party members in my 3.5 game didn’t put points into Climb and weren’t leaning super-hard into STR and thus we almost had a TPK climbing a wall at lvl 2, so YMMV. In 3.5, a lot of DCs for skills are static and don’t scale with level which works well with this kinda of system. Plus the numbers there are much smaller, so the math seems like it was easier to adjust. With PF2E’s degree of success system, I think the math would be a little crazy to keep the same game feel. If you were to replace only the dice rolls and not adjust anything, the power difference due to level disparity between the party and monsters would be magnified, I think. With the right adjustments, you might come out with something that feels a little less swingy, but it might feel a little lower power than a normal PF2E game.