Why do many people prefer roll-high to roll-under?

[Reynard]

Did your GM not use situational modifiers? That's how you reflect the difficulty of a situation in GURPS, just as you set DCs in d20 systems.

That is still relative and not objective, because the GURPS system uses a curve so a -1 is not the same between two characters.

I agree that objective difficulties are better, with bonuses and penalties coming from the talent or skill of the person involved, as well as situational modifiers. And, to be clear, those objective difficulties should be based on how hard it is for an "average" person to perform the task. Difficulty should not scale with level or skill, except insofar as more skilled individuals are willing to attempt more difficult feats.

 

[innerdude]

I've read somewhere else that you can easily convert GURPS to a roll-over system by setting a default target DC of 21 for everything, roll 3d6, and add your skill to get the end result.

I'm not saying I'd love GURPS if someone actually did this. But it would go a ways in making me not absolutely hate it.

 

[Aldarc]

The benefit of roll under is that when you roll, you know. IME, that is psychologically powerful as a player.

 

[MNblockhead]

An oddity of my own: rolling under feels good to me with percentiles but bad or at least not so good with 1d20. Even though it is very much viciously the same math and I have so much experience multiplying a score by 5 or dividing it by 5. What the heck is up with that?

Same with me. Rolling under is very intuitive with its percentile (d100) system. But when playing D&D, I prefer roll over on the d20. Overall, I don't care too much either way. I've played a number of different systems and as long as the mechanics are clear I'm not going to get out of shape over either approach.

 

[Swanosaurus]

That. It's fundamental psychology drilled into us from when we're school children. You don't aim for lower numerical grades, after all. If there was a system that generated alphabetical results rather than numerical people would favor A over F - and I've actually heard people playing Rolemaster complain that A crits are less severe than F crits and that's backward.

Actually, in Germany, school grades go from 1 to 6, with one being best and six being worst.

Personally, my first (and for quite some time only) RPG was d20 roll under, followed by d100 roll under systems, and to me, until this day it feels weird that a 1 on a d20 should be a bad thing and a 20 a good thing; it also still feels weird that in Mexiko, were I live now, the best school grade is a 10 and the worst a 1. So I'd say it's not fundamental, but learned, and even more, it is learned highly context-dependent (because while I "feel" that a roll of 1 on a d20 is "good", I also "feel" that a Dexterity score of 13 is better than Dextery score of 7, and I certainly feel that having 5000 dollars in my bank account is better than having 500). There's certainly no "high is good" notion hardwired in the human brain.

 

[Swanosaurus]

But the bigger deal to me is still that roll-under naturally obscures the idea of objective difficulty. Roll under always orients the player to view the difficulty as represented on their character sheet, not as an unknown factor in the game world itself.

Which is actually what I tend to prefer. "Usually, I have a success chance of 70% at these kinds of tasks", with "usually" usually meaning under pressure, immediately tells me a lot more about my character than "I think I'm kind of good at this, but really, it depends on the situation." Of course it's a wash as well, because that 70% might be modified, and you end up with a similar mechanism to target numbers, but it's still a psychological difference if your baseline is "if I'm trying to do something none-trivial with my Athletics skill, I have a 70% chance of success." It's straightforward and keeps the focus on the abilities of the character.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

So I'd say it's not fundamental, but learned, and even more, it is learned highly context-dependent (because while I "feel" that a roll of 1 on a d20 is "good", I also "feel" that a Dexterity score of 13 is better than Dextery score of 7, and I certainly feel that having 5000 dollars in my bank account is better than having 500).

Call it learned early in life, then. The first few years of school are "fundamental" to me (unless you were raised by wolves or otherwise just didn't experience early schooling) and I wasn't trying to use it in a clinical sense. Your case does support the contention that what you start with (both in gaming and in school) seems to influence preferences going forward regardless.

There's certainly no "high is good" notion hardwired in the human brain.

Good, no. But even animals have been shown to be aware of quantity as a concept, and respond more strongly to larger quantities in either positive or negative ways depending on context. Most every animal prefers larger amounts of their preferred food, and dislikes larger amounts of potential predators, for ex. "High is more meaningful" is hardwired to at least some degree, even in humans - but we're better at redefining positives and negatives or we'd have more agreement on (say) ascending versus descending armor class.

We also tend to respond to extremes in numerical spreads, with a bias toward recalling those ones and twenties on a d20 roll while largely forgetting how many (say) threes or twelves we rolled. I remember one of my old roomies doing postgrad studies on the psychology of choosing lottery numbers that showed that skew tendency really clearly.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I've read somewhere else that you can easily convert GURPS to a roll-over system by setting a default target DC of 21 for everything, roll 3d6, and add your skill to get the end result.

I'm not saying I'd love GURPS if someone actually did this. But it would go a ways in making me not absolutely hate it.

Solid, adding it as #3 on my list of things to change with GURPS once I buy it (which I will never do!); after removing pre-defined advantages/disadvantages and simplifying the core combat cycle of "roll to hit; roll to defend; roll damage"

And in reference to this thread, I'll just chime in that bigger is better. No one wants to be "less poor" people want to be "more rich". People are talking A-F, A is lower. Actually, an A is 90-100% - and here again you want a higher score.

A-F is sort of like THAC0 come to think of it

 

[Swanosaurus]

Call it learned early in life, then. The first few years of school are "fundamental" to me (unless you were raised by wolves or otherwise just didn't experience early schooling) and I wasn't trying to use it in a clinical sense. Your case does support the contention that what you start with (both in gaming and in school) seems to influence preferences going forward regardless.

Yes, that's what I'm getting at ... I don't feel like I have learned on some "fundamental" level that "high is good" or "low is good"; it's a 100% context dependent. A high body temperature (fevre) is bad, a high star rating on drivethru RPG is good, a high number on a d20 is bad, a high number on your character sheet is good, a high number on a d6 is good, a low number on your school certificate is good. I have learned all of these and can re-learn them with some effort. And while it's fine to say that RPG rules might take advantage of something already learned by a lot of people (like a school grading system or a five-star-grading system), I wouldn't want to generalize that people are normally wired that way and that's why RPGs should do it like that. People around the worlds have learned many different ways to think about and handle numbers, and there's no "one size fits all (except for the weird edge cases)".

EDIT: Also, high numbers do not necessarily mean more; there's a lot of ways we relate abstract numbers to the material world; If I have 20 cakes all for myself, that's a lot; if 20 people have one cake among them, it's little. Dependent on the context, both situations are related to the abstraction of the number 20.

 

[overgeeked]

Do players just associate bigger numbers with being "better" in some way?

That’s basically it. The math is almost always the same either way. You can flip them back and forth with a little math. Bigger numbers have more of a dopamine hit. It’s more intuitive, to me, to have a higher number you roll under, like BRP %s. You have a 75% chance of success. Roll 75 or less on these dice. Simple.