Forums of the Megaverse®

How does stepping dice up/down work in most Palladium Games?

For example, say you have a weapon that does 6D6 damage, but you have a +4D6 bonus for one reason or another. At what point does it go from xD6 to 1D6x10? Or in other words, is there a standardized (or even just basic guideline) for this sort of thing?

I'm particularly confused because I rarely see 7D6, 8D6, or 9D6 damage codes; it always seems to go 6D6 straight to 1D6x10.

Anyway, I vaguely recall seeing something about it before, but after thumbing through most of my books, I just couldn't find anything and I was hoping someone either had an answer or knew where I could find some tangible information on the subject.

I don't think I have run across an official statement of when you might step up to multiplying dice by 10 instead of rolling all of them. In the fantasy setting, I have mostly seen the XdY*10 sort of formula applied to siege weaponry. Using word searches in some of the pdfs I own hasn't turned up anything, though I might not have hit on the correct book yet. I definitely don't have access to everything though.

For me, it is mostly about how many dice you have and convenience. When sitting around a physical table, it is much faster to roll a single die and multiply by 10 than it is to roll 10 dice and add them up individually. You lose the bell curve for the results in exchange for reduced time. If you are rolling dice digitally, then there is no time trade off, so you are free to decide whether you want to retain the bell curve of rolling all the dice (with middling results being much more likely), or all damage outcomes have the same probability when rolling a single die multiplied by 10.

That's fair. I could just as easily be remembering some old forum post from decades ago elsewhere, too. My memory isn't quite what it used to be.

But yeah, I'm likely to just "roll both values" when the subject comes up rather than try to add them together into a unified system. So 1D6 + 1D6x10 would simply be that, rather than trying to figure out how they step things up (since it seems to go 1D6x10 to either 1D6x10+10 or 2D6x10 seemingly at random, especially since one would think 1D6x11 would be the next logical step in the formula). Palladium Games, amirite?

Thank you for the feedback regardless.

Crimson Dynamo wrote:How does stepping dice up/down work in most Palladium Games?

For example, say you have a weapon that does 6D6 damage, but you have a +4D6 bonus for one reason or another. At what point does it go from xD6 to 1D6x10? Or in other words, is there a standardized (or even just basic guideline) for this sort of thing?

I'm particularly confused because I rarely see 7D6, 8D6, or 9D6 damage codes; it always seems to go 6D6 straight to 1D6x10.

Anyway, I vaguely recall seeing something about it before, but after thumbing through most of my books, I just couldn't find anything and I was hoping someone either had an answer or knew where I could find some tangible information on the subject.

There's nothing official about it, afaik.

You'd just roll 10d6, by the rules.
Which actually has a different statistical spread than 1d6x10, so technically there's a difference between the two damages.

But in practice, GMs often make arbitrary calls about that kind of thing when they don't have enough dice, or simply don't want to roll that many dice.

::nods::

It just always struck me as odd how they tend to do it. Most of the time they just seem to jump straight from 5D6 to 1D6x10 when staging things up, particularly with weapons. If you're lucky, there'll be a 6D6 and/or 1D4x10 in between to kinda/sorta level things out a bit better, but that's a relatively rare find.

Crimson Dynamo wrote:::nods::

It just always struck me as odd how they tend to do it. Most of the time they just seem to jump straight from 5D6 to 1D6x10 when staging things up, particularly with weapons. If you're lucky, there'll be a 6D6 and/or 1D4x10 in between to kinda/sorta level things out a bit better, but that's a relatively rare find.

It makes a kind of sense, really. While of course you **could** design firearms with arbitrary spreads of statistics, in reality there are brackets of efficiency where certain compositions are just more cost efficient for what they do. And this explains various caliber gaps. Why do guns go from .40 to .44 and .45 then to .50? Where's a .42, or .43? or .48? The truth is if you really wanna look, they're out there, but they're extremely uncommon because they're in the gaps. the move from .48 to .50 is much more significant than the jump from .45 to .47.

So the leaps in damage reflect the actual tendency of firearms to have leaps in efficiency at certain zones.

One assumes similar principles would apply to directed energy weapons. It's not that you couldn't make guns with 7d6 or 8d6 or 9d6 damage codes, it's that due to physics, going from 6d6 to 1d6*10 doesn't cost much more than going to 7d6, so why not just take the full leap?

Really it goes 6d6, 1d4x10, 1d6x10,
Not just from 6d6 to 1d6x10.

Is there anything that does 1d4x10 +10?
That’d fill the gap.

I think the writers just don’t like hands full of dice.
Which is a shame.
They also don’t like d10s, d8s, or d12s.