ROLL UP SYSTEM

One of my players really couldn't get her head around the way the pendragon dice rolling system worked. Roll under this number, and 20 is bad, unless your skill is above 20 in which case, subtract 20 and add that to your roll and 20 is good, etc.

I noticed that you could replace the system with a much simpler one, and keep the probabilities identical as follows:

Roll d20 + rating + modifiers.
Total 40+, or Natural 20: Critical Success.
Total 21-39: Ordinary Success.
Total 1-20: Failure.
Natural 1: A fumble, unless the roll is good enough to be a success or better.

This system gives EXACTLY the same probabilities as the standard system, but I've foud it is much easier to explain it to new players, and is much easier to use in play when modifiers start getting applied.

There are two special cases:
Flail: In the standard rules, a roll of 1 = hit self. Since a roll of 1 is the lowest possible success, In these rules, a rolled total of 21 causes that.

Glory for skills: Sometimes you get glory based on your success. So, a roll of 5 would give 5 glory, a roll of 15 (if a success) would give 15, and a critical would give 20. In this system there are two methods:
Purist: Glory = total -20. Functionally identical.
Generous: Glory = half total, if success. This means that succeeding gives 10 glory, and a critical 20. Less variation (since I always through getting, say, 1-3 points is a bit paltry.)

ROLLUP, PERFECT TWEAK
So, the above system is nice, but I realised I could do more with it. So, we started using the following system which does a great job of handling the Tink-Tink-Boom problem referred to in another thread (http://www.gspendragon.com/roundtable/index.php?topic=1176.0):

DICE ROLLS
Roll d20 + rating + modifiers.
Maximum effective skill: 40 (you can have higher than this and divide it between multiple opponents, but the maximum for any single roll is 40).
Natural 1: calculate total and subtract 20.*
Natural 20: calculate total and add 40.
Roll 60+: Perfect Success
Roll 40-59: Critical Success.
Roll 21-39: Ordinary Success.
Roll 1-20: Failure.
Roll 0 or below: a Fumble.

*The Natural 1 rule means that people with skill 20+ can still fail, but someone with skill 40 (perfect skill) still succeeds.

Critical Hit: As the standard rules, exception below.
Perfect Hit: As Critical, but has full Critical effects, even against Critical Hits.

Critical vs Critical: The higher roll wins with a Partial success. Damage is halved, after armour.
Perfect vs Critical: The Perfect roller wins with a Critical success. Damage is halved, after armour.
Perfect vs Perfect: Both achieve Partial successes, halving damage after armour.

OBSERVATIONS
This system is quite heroic. It allows the random lucky outcome of bandit slaying knight with a critical, but makes that less likely for characters with skill 21+. Fights between knights with 20+ skill, especially say 30+, aren't anywhere near as brutal and feel more 'heroic', to me.

ROLL-UP, MARGIN OF 20
This is a further tweak of the system, which I haven't used yet.
Roll d20 + rating + modifiers.
Maximum effective skill: 40
Natural 1: calculate total and subtract 20
Natural 20: calculate total and add 20, no maximum.
Roll below 0: Fumble
Roll 1-20: Failure
Roll 21+ Success
Roll 40+ AND beat your opponent by at least 20: Critical.

This has some significant and perhaps not obvious effects:
* It reduces the number of criticals, especially for the higher skilled character:
A bandit with skill 8 who rolls a natural 20 gets a mdofied total of 48. If a knight's roll is 28 or higher, it stops that roll from being a critical. So, a knight with 17 skill who rolled 11 would avoid that brutal effect. However if that 17 skill knight rolled 20 and got 57, the bandit would only avoid it if he also rolled a 20. (And he'd still get hit.)
* In fights between equally skilled characters, criticals are as uncommon at high skill, as they are at low skill:
Two knights with, say, 35 skill would under the normal rules, have a 92% chance of one knight criticalling the other in the first round (equal chance of either). Under these rules, the chance is pretty much the same as if they both had 15 skill.