I've been working on my 3rd edition of The Artifact and one of the things I've been wanting to do is to reduce the presence of roll modifiers. I'm not getting rid of them entirely but I want to reduce the math required to play as much as I possibly can.
I have several solutions that sort of work and one that is simple and works, it's just. . . weird.
The Artifact system is roll under 1d100, that's not being changed. Normally to model that one roll is more difficult than another I'd write -20 (to the skill or attribute, not the roll). I want to change that to writing something like difficulty 5. The player rolls 1d100 by rolling 2d10, one is in the tens place the other is in the ones place and you get a number 1-100. (yes you probably know that already.)
What I think I want to do is say "This task is difficulty 5 (or 6,7,8,9)." and when you roll the 2d10, replace the lowest number with the difficulty number. So say I roll a 2 in the tens die and a 3 in the ones die. The 2 is low so it gets replaced by the 5 for a 53 (instead of 23).
I've been playing with this and it seems a bit maddening because some rolls are actually reduced by this mechanism (97 becomes 95 etc). Overall, statistically, each difficulty number bump up (5 to 6, 6 to 7) represents a 5% increase in difficulty. You wouldn't know that from the rolls though, they're all over the place. With a difficulty 9 a roll of 21 becomes a 29 but a 19 becomes a 99. It could seem random to a player even though statistically the average results of a diff 9 is 30% different from no difficulty. Individually the rolls can be significantly different ranging 80% in the worst scenarios.
Would this bother you?