It's a good game mechanic for RPGs. In high school when all the cool kids were writing their own role-playing systems, I wrote one based on m5d10.
I feel like the computational (and, worse, legalistic) overhead for RPGs can detract from the fun of playing. So I wrote a simpler system that was based on that. Finding the middle of 5 d10s is something you can do (once you're used to it) in 0.25 seconds, so it's "immediately obvious" what the dice say. Adding 5 d10s takes about 1-2 seconds for most people, which is enough of a pause to break flow.
However, the real flow-breaker of RPGs isn't computation, but looking up rules in a rulebook to figure out how many dice of damage you take from a third-story fall before deciding whether to leap. This is one of the problems with formal role-playing systems... but, as always, the quality of the session has a lot more to do with the GM and players than the system itself.
But if I were to do a role-playing system now, it'd be based on Tarot cards (the 22 trumps). RPGs are more about interactive storytelling than about combat and number-crunching.
The article seems more concerned with goals and incentives, than with nuts and bolts.
By the way, how would your Tarot card system work? They could make for an interesting qualitative instead of quantitative system. Say, you try to do an action, draw a card and interpret "The Fool" as fumbling.
The cards have a ranking that is on the card (Judgment is 21, World is 20, Fool can be 0 or 22) if you need a quantitative result, but it would be a mostly qualitative system. How it would work would be based largely on the GM, since you can't write rule books for qualitative systems.
I feel like the computational (and, worse, legalistic) overhead for RPGs can detract from the fun of playing. So I wrote a simpler system that was based on that. Finding the middle of 5 d10s is something you can do (once you're used to it) in 0.25 seconds, so it's "immediately obvious" what the dice say. Adding 5 d10s takes about 1-2 seconds for most people, which is enough of a pause to break flow.
However, the real flow-breaker of RPGs isn't computation, but looking up rules in a rulebook to figure out how many dice of damage you take from a third-story fall before deciding whether to leap. This is one of the problems with formal role-playing systems... but, as always, the quality of the session has a lot more to do with the GM and players than the system itself.
But if I were to do a role-playing system now, it'd be based on Tarot cards (the 22 trumps). RPGs are more about interactive storytelling than about combat and number-crunching.