Degrees of success
A binary pass/fail hides information the margin already contains. Reading the gap is cheap to add and changes what a near miss is allowed to mean.
01The number under the result
Every roll against a difficulty number produces two pieces of information: whether you passed, and by how much. Most systems keep the first and discard the second. Degrees of success keep both.
How the mechanism works
- 01Degrees of success — reading the margin between a roll and its target, not just pass/fail
- 02Degree threshold — the point gap required to move from one tier to the next (common choices: every 5 points, or fixed band ranges)
- 03Partial success / near miss — a failure read as a degree: something happened, but not what the player wanted
- 04Exceptional success — a pass by a large enough margin to warrant a qualitatively better outcome
The mechanic is almost embarrassingly simple. You set the difficulty at, say, 15. A player rolls 22 and hits by 7; another rolls 16 and hits by 1. Both succeed, but the gap between those outcomes is real — the first character picked the lock silently in ten seconds, the second scraped and fumbled and still got it open. Ignoring that gap flattens the fiction without saving any arithmetic, because the margin was sitting there anyway.
The cost of adding degrees is low. You need one extra design decision: what threshold constitutes a significant margin? Some systems divide by a fixed number — every 5 points of margin is one degree. Others count discrete bands: pass by 1–4 is a partial, pass by 5–9 is a full, pass by 10 or more is exceptional. Either way, the referee reads a second number off the same roll, which takes about one second once the habit is formed.
A near miss read as a degree gives the referee something to work with: you almost had it, you made progress, the door is open a crack.
The real payoff is at the edges. A near miss in a binary system is nothing — the thing failed, move on. A near miss read as a degree gives the referee something to work with: you almost had it, you made progress, the door is open a crack. Similarly, a massive success stops being identical to a bare pass. The fighter who rolls 18 points above the target hits differently from the one who scrapes through. What a difficulty number says is still a claim about frequency — degrees don't change how often success occurs, only what kind of success it is.
Design decisions in brief
- 01Threshold style: fixed interval (every N points = 1 degree) vs. named bands (1–4, 5–9, 10+) — both work; intervals scale automatically, bands let designers tune each tier's flavour
- 02Number of tiers: two or three covers nearly all fiction; five or more introduces lookup cost that rarely pays off at the table
- 03Action-facing descriptions beat numerical labels — "you open it quietly" beats "Degree 3 success"
- 04Degrees change the meaning of margin, not the frequency of success — the pass rate at any difficulty stays the same
The failure mode is granularity drift: too many bands and every roll becomes a lookup table. Two or three degrees — near miss, success, exceptional — cover almost all practical fiction without adding the cognitive overhead of a five-tier chart. Keep the tiers sparse and the descriptions action-facing rather than numerical, and the margin does its work without slowing the table down.