One of the earliest decisions I made for Project Theseus, all the way back in 2016, when it was still a 5e hack, was that I wanted to use 2d10 instead of a d20 for the core skill check/attack roll mechanic.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that I thought a more "central" outcome curve for skill checks just feels better; I had been Stars Without Number-pilled for a while. The second: advantage can stack.
This sounds like a really elegant way to combine advantage and group checks!
just to make sure I understand, I'm rolling Xd10 and when I have advantage i take the highest two as my result, and with disadvantage it's the lowest two as my result?
Super insightful! You've made me want to mess around more with 2d10 rolls in games :)
Love to see the ideas bouncing and inspirations occurring! I like the 2d10 thing, and I see you're keeping crits as 20 only? Any thought towards having matching dice numbers on the 2d10 matter?
Matching dice get weird. If you wanted them to matter, my first thoughts would be either:
Treat it as an intensifier no matter the outcome. (so it also increases the intensity of failure).
Have matching numbers explode, so you roll an extra die and add it to the result. If it matches again, roll another die, etc. (On rolls with net disadvantage, subtract from the result instead of adding).
Both of these add a lot of randomness to the game and behave super unintuitively. As you add more (dis)advantages, the odds that your selected 2 dice match actually do increase, but not in a super clean way. I don't love them for my design, since part of my goal with 2d10 was to reduce D&D's swingy-ness, but if you wanted to reintroduce it while preserving a functioning group check mechnic it's not a bad choice. Just like with nat 1s/20s, dice will match 10% of the time, so you're effectively adding D&D levels of crit fail/success back into the mix.
It might be a thought for stuff like proccing random weapon effects and such, but not a primary concern haha
Fun one-off effects on items/something like 5e's wild magic would be a great use for it. You could even tie it to the general number of dice in the whole pool that match if you wanted (e.g. wild magic tends to go off more when things are going very well or very wrong)
In a situation with advantage and disadvantage, do you just subtract one from the other to get a net (dis)advantage? I wonder how it would work out if you applied both — e.g. if you have one advantage and one disadvantage, you roll 4d10 and take the middle two — basically each advantage adds one low die that you ignore, and each disadvantage adds one high die that you ignore. This would mean that situations with lots of modifiers in both directions lead to more consistently middling results
Subtract the disadvantages from the advantages and roll the net (dis)advantages.
