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Honestly, I'd be up for playing both of the games. My approach to the good luck game would be pretty much the same for a normal game; do not use spells or abilities that allow for saving throws, and focus on tactics that allow for longer range battle engagement to prevent damage to myself.
In the bad luck game; use spells with saving throws more often and focus on acquiring immunities or resistances to most of the poisons, diseases and longer term crippling effects that just got extremely deadly due to the effectively higher DCs (disadvantage usually ends up giving you a net -4 to -5 on your effective rolls).
Bad luck game might make for a truly realistic gritty horror game.
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Good luck, I'd be okay with but as DeathlessOne said, don't use stuff that allows the enemy to save.
Bad luck would be awful because fighting would take FOREVER! And save or suck effects would shut down characters too quickly. Trying it as a one-shot? Sure, maybe. Longer than that? No thanks.
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So whenever anything is rolled, and I mean anything, it gets rolled twice, and the higher of the two results is chosen, if playing with simulated good luck, or the lower of the two results is chosen, if playing with simulated bad luck. The chosen type of simulated luck is applied universally, so if the players have simulated bad luck, so does their opposition.
How would you feel about playing in such a game? Assume the type of luck stays the same for the whole adventure, and point buy is used for Ability Scores.
As for me, I'd be down for a universal good luck game. Too often some player has a majority of actual bad luck (sometimes including myself), preventing them from doing anything, so now they can feel like they are making a difference. But I would loathe a universal bad luck game, for the same reasons.
I don't know if I'd want to run an entire campaign with universal advantage or disadvantage, especially on ALL rolls (you're literally doubling the dice-rolling load of every single action). While some might point out that *on average,* advantage on a d20 = +3.325 (based on charting out every possibility and averaging the 400 permutations' outcomes,) we can illustrate the problem a different way.
With a simple d20 roll, each of the 20 outcomes is equiprobable (1/20 = 20/400 = 5%) assuming that the die or RNG is fair. With advantage, each outcome "n" has a (2n-1)/400 chance of occurring.
Let's look at some new probabilities that arise out of this.
- Nat 20: 9.75%.
- 19-20: 19%
- 18-20: 27.75%
- 17-20: 36%
- 16-20: 43.75%
- 15-20: 51%
Every combatant now has Improved Critical, in effect, except that it stacks with Improved Critical. And because the luck isn't limited to d20 rolls, all of those extra crits are now dealing significantly more damage on average, seriously upping the ante on combat.
Mages don't have it very good here. Rerolling 10d6 doesn't produce a dramatic shift (on average) in your fireball damage, which is just gonna get halved because people are rolling much better on their Ref saves. Meanwhile, your save-or-screwball spells are simply failing more often.
That all said, though, having some wild / chaotic location shift periodically between:
- "Good luck" (roll twice keep high)
- "Bad luck" (roll twice keep low)
- "Sleepy luck" (roll THRICE keep middle or majority)
That could be interesting if set up or done right.
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Sleepy Luck is a good alternative to Take 10, for people who want to be kinda careful but maybe try a simple shortcut.
This is otherwise known as a Median Cut Filter.
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Is a die being rolled? Yes? Good and bad luck is already being simulated.
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I think Warped Servant picked up on something important.
Rolling twice would make everything take longer.
Taking the Highest result would make everything quicker as you get more hits, more crits, more damage. Therefore averaging out to (hopefully) around the same time as usual.
Taking the Lowest result would make everything slower as you get less hits, less crits, less damage. This would compound with the slowness of rolling twice and slowing the game to a snail's pace. The exception is save-or-die/suck spells, and I think ending combats that way would get old really fast.
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That's an interesting ideology for the bad luck game, but you have to know the GM would likely use similar tactics on the players, right. Obviously not all the time, but still. Wouldn't you find it frustrating to die to a save or die spell, when you rolled high on the first roll?
I'd likely be disappointed by such an occurrence, but frustrated? No. That places too much emphases on the kind of emotional attachment I'd have to the character. In a bad luck game, you do NOT get attached to your characters.
As for the GM using the same kind of tactics, I'd expect it. Any kind of person able to survive in such a hostile environment would have had to adopt such methods to survive. Tactics would win the day more often than brute power.
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In a Bad Luck game, a x3/20 weapon will crit on 1 hit in 400. Assuming an encounter requires you to hit the opponent 3 times* and you have 13 encounters per level, you'll have two, count 'em, two crits in your career. You'll have 8 with a 19/20 crit weapon.
* that's 3 hits with weak damage rolls, not 3 swings, accepting that sometimes you won't hit at all and/or the wizard will take the enemy down with his super-effective SoD spells.
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In a Bad Luck game, a x3/20 weapon will crit on 1 hit in 400. Assuming an encounter requires you to hit the opponent 3 times* and you have 13 encounters per level, you'll have two, count 'em, two crits in your career. You'll have 8 with a 19/20 crit weapon.
* that's 3 hits with weak damage rolls, not 3 swings, accepting that sometimes you won't hit at all and/or the wizard will take the enemy down with his super-effective SoD spells.
That's cool and all, but that's a pretty ludicrous assumption.
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Bear in mind that at higher levels with your multiple attacks per round (archery, anyone?) you could be hitting 3 times in one round. Obviously your first level barbarian doing 2d6+9 doesn't need to hit the goblin 3 times, but a) there might be more than one goblin and b) you might be the cleric with a longspear doing 1d8+1 at 4th level. With Bad Luck he averages 4.2. You'll be a while killing the CR4 Minotaur with 45hp.
And anyway, that rather reinforces my point. As you're likely to get fewer than 3 hits on a given encounter, a x3/20 wielder might actually never see a single crit in a Bad Luck campaign up to 20th level.
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Changing the dice rolling system can change the feel of a game, sure. Constant bad luck in PF1 would make you feel like the worst mook ever, even if that's also true of your enemies. There are abilities which are dependent only on enemy rolls and characters with those would be stronger but would still feel weak when ordinary skills etc. were involved. I can't say I'd be for that game.
Constant good luck? You'd be getting crits all the time as would your enemies, and save-based effects would be weak. It could work to make for a heroic-feeling game where most people will shrug off spells, poisons and the like. It could work. I might play a swashbuckler in it - both for panache replenishing and to fit the probably style of the game.
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In a bad luck game it's save or lose caster time, since your spells are much more likely to work whereas attacks are all much less effective.
In a good luck game it's the opposite, avoid anything that uses saves like the plague.
But your enemies are also more accurate, so you don't really want to end up in melee, so archer or summoner would probably be best.
The more chances of critical threats and automatic failures, the more it hurts the PC's, since they have more attack rolls aimed at them and have to make more saving throws. So your "good luck" method would actually make for a more dangerous game, and "bad luck" would make a less dangerous one.
I'm not oppopposed to either, specifically. But I am opposed to mechanics that interrupt the flow of narrative more than necessary, which this would definitely do.
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That sounds like an awful lot of dice rolling. Combat takes long enough as it is.
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Assuming this applies to both the characters and the party it would completely change the nature of the game. In both cases it would make the game more dangerous and the players less likely to succeed. Since the player characters make more roll than their opponents any changes to the odds affect them more.
A good luck game would benefit martial characters more because rolls to hit, critical and saves are all made by the character. So you have a better chance of hitting, getting a critical and making your save. A bad luck game would heavily favor spell casters because it increases the chance a target would fail it saving throw.
I'd enjoy a good luck game in general, I think.
In a bad luck game I'd be up for a narrative arc, but probably short. Also, take 10 would be king for skills in that game, maybe even that trait that lets me take 12. Skill mastery, man. Just. Skill mastery. Anything to minimize the dice rolls I have to make.