Curious Feature Of Naval Thunder

There are three basic dice mechanics in this game system:

1. A "to-hit" check, using "roll high, modify target".
2. A "penetration" check, using "roll high, modify result". Just to make things extra confusing, for this one it's necessary to beat the target and not just match it.
3. A damage control (or command) check, using "roll low, modify result".

Oh, and critical hits use a hash-table with a bell curve, placing less damaging criticals (guns, engines) in the center of the distribution, and more dramatic results (bridge, magazine) out in the tails.

Three different systems, three totally different implementations. That's pretty unusual in games today. The only mechanic missing from the list is the rarely-encountered "roll low, modify target" method, which is the one I actually like best!

I'm kind of curious why the designer used such a piecemeal approach, but I think I have my own idea. For the to-hit roll, it's often necessary to roll identical guns from the same ship against two different targets. For the penetration roll, it's necessary to roll different guns against the same target. This is something I encountered during the design of a morale system for the fast-combat system I wrote over the summer. All of a sudden, I wanted to apply a single roll against a variety of different targets, and suddenly a "modify target" system made perfect sense. And so I can respect the decision.

I think that so many games today use result modification instead of target modification that even when a target-mod system makes logical sense, designers still try to shoehorn everything into the industry standard. I chalk it all up to lingering trauma over the complicated "THAC0" experiment, which tried to mix negative bonuses to the target with positive bonuses to the result, all at once. That was probably a bridge too far, even by my standards.