Necromancy in Krynn

In a previous blog post, I wrote about how in my campaign, I replaced the River of Souls with the Cycle of Souls, and how two different, but related, concepts, needed to be defined: Souls vs. Spirits.

Here, I will focus on what Necromancy means to Souls, and to Spirits.

Necromancy and Souls

To be short, Necromancy cannot affect souls.

To be perfectly clear, nothing can affect souls. No magic, no gods, no fiends, nothing. Only spirits, when they die, and are absorbed back into souls for them do digest the spirits' experience, and evolve from it.

Necromancy and Spirits

Spirits, which are the personalities of mortals, are mostly immune to everything, too.

One can't usually destroy a spirit, or even absorb it.

But, being strongly tied to the physical universe (i.e. mostly everything, including outer planes, the astral or ethereal plane, etc.), by their perception, their physical forms, spirits can be affected through these ties. It usually goes down to experience (mostly, how the mortals experience their life), but there are ways, through these ties, to actually damage the spirit.

Miscellaneous ways to affect a spirit

Spirit Reminiscence

When the physical form of the spirit dies, the spirit starts the process to join back to its soul, and be absorbed. But in the process, the spirit still exist for a specific time (during this time, for example, the spirit can still be contacted through magic, or even resurrected).

During this time, the spirit might remain near the physical universe. It is usually the case for dead mortals who join the realms of the gods they have an affinity for, enjoying a (time-limited) afterlife where they slowly fall asleep and lose their identity, as the soul inevitably absorbs it.

Spirit Damnation

Let's say you are a goddess who is very, very furious, against one specific spirit. At personal cost (and baring interference from other similar powers), that goddess could damn this spirit (which would essentially make it an undead), stopping it from fully dying, and joining back its soul and being absorbed.

By damning the spirit, the god can then inflict countless torments upon it, as vengeance, or as a way to corrupt it so little or nothing remains for the soul to absorb. For the poor spirit, the experience can be excruciating, and can even seem to last forever, even if the actual torment will, sooner or later, finally "kill" the soul, which would enable what remains to join back the soul.

To be fair, this is a very specific necromantic way to affect a spirit...

The Bloodstone Pendant of Fistandantilus

The infamous Bloodstone Pendant of Fistandantilus enables one spirit to actually absorb another, more or less resulting in the merge of the two. The absorbed spirit is as good as lost to its original soul, while the absorbing spirit is enriched (and will enrich its soul once absorbed back by it).

Mostly, the absorbed spirit becomes passive: It has no control over the absorbing spirit, who remains "in command", but it is not unheard to have the absorbing spirit showing traits known to have been the absorbed's. And it is theoretically possible that an absorbed spirit, if it is has more willpower than the absorbing one, actually takes over, either right on, or gradually, through time.

To be fair, this is also very specific necromantic way to affect a spirit...

Spirit Ascension

Similar to the damnation, the spirit is precious enough for a god (or gods) to "remember" it. This effectively makes the spirit ascend into a higher state, which could be described as angels, demons, devas, etc., depending on the god (or gods).

These are not technically undead, but outsiders. And sooner or later, then, like the reminiscent or the damned, they will fade away as they are absorbed back by their respective souls...

It is believed spirit ascension might be the final stage of a soul: Instead of being absorbed by its soul, the ascended spirit merges with the soul, who takes its place, and awakens to some kind of divine form.

Necromantic ways to affect a Spirit

In addition to damnation and the bloodstone of Fistandantilus, there are many known ways to affect a spirit through magic, and this magic is Necromancy.

Most of them will either bind the spirit to a physical form (which might be a ghost form), rebind it back to its original body (assuming it has been repaired), or reshape the spirit.

Resurrection

Any kind of resurrection has a pre-requisite of rebuilding the original body (or a clone) of the spirit, before rebinding the spirit to it.

Undeath

This is similar to resurrection, but instead of the spirit being bound to a living body, it is bound to either a dead one (the process making that body undead), or some other physical object of great significance (or power). This might be a fallen knight becoming a death knight because of a damnation, a mage becoming a lich to continue its existence, a mortal becoming a ghoul, or a vampire.

Another type of undeath happens when a spirit, whose will to continue to exist, or even their trauma, makes it come back, again, into some physical form, usually an object important to them, their own (dead, soon-to-be undead) body, or even as a ghostly manifestation (e.g. a wraith, ghost, banshee, etc.).

Necromancy as Arcane Magic

A necromantic aura has a very specific set of colors:

• cyan: related to the spirit and ghostly forms
• red: related to physical bodies animation (and unlife)
  
• purple: a mix of the cyan and red and/or unrefined necromancy magic
  

This means a sword inhabited by a ghostly spirit might radiate cyan-colored light, while the contaminating blood of a vampire might register as a deep, saturated red.

Animating dead would most probably register as purple, as it is usually unrefined necromancy, unless the wizard is trying to raise a ghoul, or a vampire, which are actually "living undead" because their bodies have a physiology (e.g. they need to "eat" to be active).

Anyway, by interfering with a "natural process" without the benediction of a god, arcane necromancy is usually considered as against nature, and at the very least, frowned upon, if not outright forbidden under death penalty.

Conclusion

I hope this clarify the relations between spirits, souls and necromancy and undead.

 😊

Solo Adventures For the Win!

Last year, I have been working on five D&D5 Dragonlance solo adventures, one for each of my players.

This solo was important, as it had many aims:

• Take characters from the 4th level to 5th level
• Give character a solo experience so they could shine without being overshadowed by another player character
• Create an adventure dedicated for the target character, so they can build more background, and come back to the group with an interesting story to tell (or not)
• Give them an opportunity to meet with iconic Dragonlance characters, like Raistlin, Gilthanas, or Crysania.
• Give them an opportunity to make a decision or an action that would impact them, their group, or even Ansalon.

If this seems like the Infellows' five year separation to you, then you would be right: To be fair, I realized this much later in the process.

But the initial aim was to have the mage to pass his Test, and I didn't want his Test being solved by the group. So it had to be a solo.

But doing a solo for one player meant I had to do something similar to all players.

And there's no way I would design a full-fledged adventure for each one of my players to enjoy alone.

My Inspiration

The video game Pathfinder: Kingmaker actually gave me a solution to this.

One of the minigames was a Make Your Own Adventure-style series of choices and test rolls. They didn't even bother to make a full game quest for these "situations": Just a few lines of text, choices, rolls, and monochromatic illustrations over sepia-colored parchment, as in the following screenshot:

What if, instead of using the sandbox approach of describing a situation to my player, and then let them decide, them describe the consequences, I tried the approach of describing a situation and a handful of choices that we both know will have different but meaningful impact in the adventure?

In exchange for accepting a moderately limited set of choices, the player knows these choices will have an impact I, as their game master, carefully designed into the adventure.

This is a win-win.

(Of course, there's a caveat: I warned my player beforehand that if they found another choice, that was different from the ones I proposed, they could chose it, with the understanding I might need to pause the adventure to deduce the impacts for the whole adventure).

Let's do it!

So I went for it.

Google Drawings to the Rescue!

This kind of choice can be designed with any vector-based drawing app, but Google Drawings is more than good enough for that:

So, for each player, I designed a graph of events/choices/tests that would represent their solo adventure structure. This enabled me to see if their solo adventure was meaningful enough.

For example, here is the structure of the full solo adventure of one of my players:

(Sorry, it's in French...)

Please note that this isn't new. I'm quite sure every video game (or even paper module for a RPG) had similar tools/structures in place (most probably better designed, more complete, etc.).

I mean, the equivalent for BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy must be insane!, as you can see in the following video from Story Mode:

Anyway: this takes time, but it makes it easy to see how the adventure will go, and if the choices are meaningful.

Also, multi-rolls!

Do you remember the multi-rolls I wrote about in the last post?

Yeah, I used that, too, to make sure one single roll wouldn't ruin my player's experience during their solo.

An example...

For example, one part of this scenario (with the light red background) was how the character infiltrated Lemish to find the secret information (i.e. the macguffin of this scenario).

For reference, this scenario happens around 354 AC, which is two years after the end of the first trilogy.

The problem is: The character's contact was discovered as a spy, and executed (this solo is very grimdark, but I won't go into the details). The player character can investigate (rolls! rolls!), and then realize that the information has been moved to Sanction.

But by visiting Lemish, the player character saw how cruel the Dictator of Lemish was (think Ramsey Bolton, from Game of Thrones), so I let the player the opportunity to do something about it. Or not.

So, one of the possible decision was for the character to infiltrate the dictator's fortress (I won't go into details... again, grimdark, but the character being a mix of an unwilling spy/assassin, some hard choices had to be done), and surprise the dictator at the right time and place, when and where he was vulnerable (this was a small series of dice multi-rolls, not a full fledged infiltration/combat). The player went for it. And succeeded. Then, resumed the course of the adventure toward Sanction.

This seems like a non-choice, as the character would go to Sanction anyway. But this choice had later consequences that I made very public when sharing lore information with all the players:

The Dictator of Lemish had been assassinated by an unknown party, and now, Lemish was in disarray, which both removed a source of pain for the knights of Solamnia in their campaign against the remainders of the dragonarmies, but also, Kyre (the adopted "home" town of the players) was now free from Lemish's aggressive interference (this has been a recurrent problem in past adventures).

Long story short: A player choice during his solo had changed the course of the campaign.

What I learned from this?

Again, I'm sure this is the basics of the typical experience of a game designers, but I did make mistakes along the way. In fact, the first solo I did was so plain when compared to the last one, I called back the player so we could add a chapter.

Beware of railroading

One easy solution is to have a linear series of scenes, each one being given a choice between two outcomes that would lead to the same next scene.

This is railroading, and this is something that players may resent, as their choices are rendered meaningless that this structure.

Choices should have consequences!

Beware of too many possible outcomes!

While it seems cool at first glance, giving a choice with many possible outcomes is counter-productive.

If you try to make these choices meaningful, then you have a lot of work to do, because each choice needs to have different consequences, and may lead in the end into a combinatorial explosion, creating a tree graph of scenes... Most of them ending to never be seen by the player!

That's a lot of work for so little payoff in the end (there's a way to mitigate that, in some cases - see below).

Beware of the BioWare Ending Coloring Solution

To avoid that, one could then be tempted by making gradual changes between outcomes, but this can easily result into falling into the infamous Mass Effect 3 Colored Endings problem:

... which is an elaborate form of railroading.

For what is worth, as a player, I hated that Mass Effect 3 ending. But as a storyteller, it makes sense: In the end, the outcome of Mass Effect would always be related to victory or defeat against the reapers.

And by providing a graduated response (related to how much the galaxy is prepared to the war, which is dependend of your previous choices in the trilogy) and an orthogonal choice at the end on how to try to end the the reaper thread (destruction, control, synthesis), and by providing a video of segments that would show the same moments as they occur depending on the choices the player, you might think everyone would love it.

But no: The differences between the outcomes were either too small, or simply colored, which revealed the technique to the players, who then suspected lazyness or incompetence from BioWare, without realizing how complex the whole trilogy was in term of choices and consequences.

BioWare fixed that partially (the Catalyst remains a crappy idea, as does the Crucible, and the eternal conflict between artificial intelligence and organic life) by providing an expanded ending with vignettes describing what happened to each squad member, which was an excellent idea.

So, what's the solution?

There's no universal solution, but for me, what seemed to work was a mix of the techniques above, which boils down to the following pieces of advice, assuming your adventure is composed of segments:

• Each segment should have one important choice, with different outcomes
  
• Reduce complexity by having different segments leading to the same next segment, but make sure at some point there will be a major divergence
  
• Make each roll and each choice important, and record its outcome
• Invest your creative efforts in choices that have meaningful consequences after the ending of the solo
  
• The last choice can be as bananas as you want, in terms of outcomes, as you'll deal with only one of them in the next adventure
  

These pieces of advice are contradictory, but your job is to combine them.

Examples

The Dilemma of the Apprentice

In one case, the apprentice had the possibility to reveal he had discovered a centuries-old contract between dwarves and mages that would give a fortress back to the dwarves, should the owner mage's lineage was broken (and thus, having to mage inheritors). This led, at the conclusion of the solo, at either...:

• ... the Orders of High Sorcery blaming the apprentice for poor judgement/lack of loyalty and the dwarves being friendly with the character
• ... the Orders of High Sorcery being satisfied with the apprentice loyalty, and the character living with the knowledge he had willingly lied to his dwarf allies

The Dilemma of the Knight

Confronted with the zombie of his princess/love interest, the knight (a fighter) could either succumb to despair, and die, or defend himself, and kill the zombie, which freed the soul of the princess, at which point she actually decided to stay on Krynn as a ghost, out of duty for her people. The knight could then either...:

• ... convince the princess to let go, and rest in peace, which she would accept, and then he would mourn her final death
• ... help her stay (either out of despair, or to respect her wish), which would tie their destinies together
  

The first choice would lead to the character to go back to the kagonesti elves leaving nearby, and become a ranger (and possibly start a possible romance with heartbroken Silvara, hiding among the kagonesti).

The second choice would lead to the soul of the princess to anchor itself into the sword of the knight, the sword then becoming magical and intelligence, and the two joining to fight for her people and hunt the undead who had zombified her back to unlife. The knight would then become a paladin whose divine powers were tied to the ghost of the princess.

As you can see, the outcomes are very different, leading to a change in class of the character.

The Fame of the Faithful

In one case, the faithful, being one of the first clerics on Krynn since the Cataclysm, had their actions and choices impact the status of his own faith, as well as the perception by the population of the clerics of good.

This means that most minor choices and rolls actually added up into a "status" score among knights, among clerics of good, among some characters, and among the population, the final score defining the relation of the faithful character with them (which is how he almost ended up with Crysania despising the faithful for his failed attempt at social interaction being mistaken for a crude attempt at romance)

At the end of the solo, these statuses were acknowledged, and will affect the character from now on.

The All-over-the-board Ending of the Spy

In the end, the spy/assassin could, depending on past choices, a current choice, and a multi-roll, end up in very different outcomes: Interrogated by Kitiara after being discovered hiding Sanction, the spy could end up...:

• dying by suicide
  
• dying under torture
• being freed by the shadowpeople, and leave Sanction
  
• joining back the order of shadow assassins the spy had left and work for the baddies
• offering a deal to Kitiara, exchanging her life (and health) for information she had on one of Kitiara's lieutenant's betrayal, and leave Sanction
• dying under torture by lord Soth, and being brought back as a the fourth of his banshees, now condemned to serve forever the undead knight's unholy appetites.

Of course, some of these endings were definitive and would result into the player either changing character, or playing a traitor.

And some of them would have consequences later. For example, I'm sure the players would have been shocked to meet an overly bitter and aggressively hostile banshee who would be revealed, mid-scene, to having been once their ally.

One Last Advice: Tell the player some of the choices and all the possible outcomes

It might be interesting, after the solo, to discuss back the choices (and rolls) done by the player, revealing what could have been the outcomes.

This has two beneficial effects:

• It reveals to the player how much the solo was tailored for them, and how impactful their choices had been
• In specific cases, if you are okay with that, give the player the opportunity to rewrite history, i.e., retcon some roll or choice, and fast-replay the solo adventure
  

The second effect is more beneficial than you might imagine: This solo is for the player and their character. It's their moment to shine, and this character development is something all the players will share after, and that will have consequences after.

So, yeah, I let the player of the spy character know what could have been the different endings for the spy, and another player was able to retcon part of his solo adventure so we could continue forward with his character following a specific narrative arc that satisfied both of us.

What about the Apprentice?

As already described in a previous post, Philosophies of the Wizards of High Sorcery, one of the point of the test was to determine which of the three philosophies, Vigilance, Curiosity, or Ambition, the apprentice was more attuned to.

And much to his surprise, his decisions showed that he was more of the "curious" archetype, than anything else!

Fun fact, my player had chosen for his character the following art from Woong Seok Kim:

Royal Researcher, by Woong Seok Kim

... which is awesome, by the way. Of course, Krynn being Krynn, there's no way I would have allowed him to just go around with some kind of brown/black/white clothing (even if the black/white constrast was, in itself, interesting).

So I had a bit of fun playing with GIMP, and showed him the following...:

 ... then told him, if he wanted to, he could "rewrite history", make different philosophy choices, and thus, join another order. Of course, the mages, after announcing they advised him to join the Red Robes, let the final choice to the character.

The player appreciated the choice, but decided to stick with the story as already happened: After reflection, he realized that his character, with an "arcane archeologist" penchant, was indeed more curious than ambitious or vigilant.

He thus joined the Red Robes.

Conclusion

I'm quite sure I am not the first one to have this kind of experience, or find these solutions.

Here, all I wanted is to share them, just in case...

😋

Multi-rolls: More engaging Ability/Skill/Save Rolls

Last year, I have been working on five D&D5 Dragonlance solo adventures, one for each of my players.

I will add more information on the structure of these solos in a subsequent post, but the important part is that I needed to have some crucial choices to be done, and their successes measured. And instead of playing multiple rounds of combat, I wanted to test abilities and skills.

And I needed these rolls to be simple and enjoyable, for both me and the player.

The problem with the current ability/skill/save rolls

You roll a d20.

If the result is higher than some difficulty, then you succeeded. Else, you fail.

The End.

That is the most boring, frustrating thing ever. Because it's binary. If you get a high result, then you can imagine the action was a tremendous success. Or not. Because again, the roll is a simple, binary success/fail test, as shown by the graph below:

Of course, you can add some nuance to the process. For example: If you get a result 5 points higher than the difficulty, then this is a tremendous success. Or if you get a result 5 points lower... You get the point.

But again, it's one dice roll, and it's instantaneous.

My Solution

In this scene, Nolan, the mage apprentice player character, as well as Jenna and Dalamar, have been arrested in Solanthus because of a magic battle and a fireball thrown in the middle of a market. The three apprentices needed to convince the knights of Solamnia that they were the good guys, and that the other purple-robed wizards were the one sowing destruction around them. I asked my player to attempt a Persuasion (Charisma) Roll, with a DC of 10... but I asked him to roll two dices, and tell me how many successes he had, then looked at my scene description:

• 0 successes: The group failed to convince the knights, and remain under arrest
• 1 success: The group succeeded in convincing the knight they are innocents, and are freed
• 2 successes: Not only the group succeeded in proving their innocence, but they also convinced the knights the purple-robed renegades were a danger to the population: The knights gave the group an escort of 3 knights to help them in their quest.
  

Did you see what I did, here? 

By rolling multiple dices, I did many things indeed.

Failure/Success becomes a scale, instead of a coin toss

Instead of having a binary failure/success, I have multiple steps in-between.

Of course, I can have it by by looking at the difference between the result, and the DC, but it's math-y and I find it less intuitive.

With my method, I decide how many separate steps I want to define, and then ask the player to roll as much dices as this number of steps, minus one. In the example above, I had three steps (critical success, success, failure), so I told the player to roll 2 dices.

The bonus is that the more dices you use, the more steps you have, and also the more the average steps are likely to occur:

• With 2d20 and a DC 10, you essentially have 20% chances of a failure, 50% of success, and 30% of critical success.

• With 3d20 and a DC 10, you essentially have 9% of critical failure, 33% failure, 41% of success, and 17% of critical success.

• With 4d20 and a DC 10, you essentially have 4% of critical failure, 20% failure, 37% of barely success, 30% of success, and 9% of critical success.
  
• etc.
  

(Of course, changing the DC will tweak/bend/warp the probabilities toward success or failure.)

Bad Luck is less impacting

I introduced an overall bell-curve randomization. Which means that the "average" is much more likely than the extreme. This is important because the more dices rolled in one session, the more opportunities for all kind of successes and failures. This reduces the impact of streaks of bad rolls in the overall session. Less player/gamemaster frustration.

This is an objective effect that can't be denied.

But there's another effect, that is more psychological: By rolling multiple dices, the player does accept the result more easily: Indeed, if all the dices failed, then the player naturally accepts this is some kind of critical failure. In the other end of the spectrum, you have a critical success you, as a gamemaster, can easily jump unto to describe the extraordinary success by the character.

This is a subjective effect, but I've seen it in action (sometimes, the player rolls the dices one after the other, to enjoy the gradual unveiling of the result of the roll!), so...

This is actually the main reason I adopted this alternative dice roll.

You can even tweak the roll further

One thing I introduced in the solos was the usage of Inspiration: Each time a player rolled a natural 20, I gave them Inspiration, which essentially gave them the possibility of re-rolling one dice.

The fact Inspiration does not stack influenced the player to use that Inspiration as soon as possible (but not too soon).

And you can even use that natural 20 to give the player the satisfaction of a critical success, similar to Matt Mercer's "How do you want to do this?", which I mainly used to describe players critical successes in a way they didn't imagine possible, and yet, made their characters appear amazingly cool.

Of course, if there are natural 20 + awesome critical success description, you can also add a natural 1 critical failure. In this, I'm usually lenient, rarely giving something more than a malus to the next roll, unless I find a particularly satisfying narrative to describe this critical failure.

It's like combat, but for non-combat situation

Indeed, combat is a succession of d20 rolls. In a 4-rounds combat, you can expect a player to do 4 attack rolls, and usually, they will do an average number of successes.

And players love to roll dices!

So I actually imported a combat-style mechanics into ability/save/skill rolls.

It already exists in D&D5, anyway...

You probably already encountered a version of such rolls. One of my players met a medusa, and the medusa has the following petrification attack, which I summarized as:

The medusa can force a creature to make a DC 14 Constitution saving throw. If the saving throw fails by 5 or more, the creature is instantly petrified. Otherwise, a creature that fails the save begins to turn to stone and is restrained. The restrained creature must repeat the saving throw at the end of its next turn, becoming petrified on a failure or ending the effect on a success.

Yeah, it's two dices rolled for one effect.

(Note: Rolling one dice after the other, instead of two at the same time, might have different result if the second roll depends on the first roll result, as in the Medusa petrification, above)

... and this is how it went:

This roll was awesome because the character failed his first saving throw, and I described how his priest of mishakal, Verath, was now feeling restrained, the color of his skin being drained, to be replaced with a stony grey... and I asked him to roll again, and he rolled a... natural 20!

When he did that, I went overboard with the scene, describing how not only he refused to die as a statue as many did before him, he actually challenged the medusa to do better, staring her right in the eyes. The medusa was so furious she doubled down... and failed to petrify him (he succeeded the save, after all). Furthermore, as she was distracted by this mortal challenging her power (natural 20 effect), she let her guard down, and the guards used that time to position themselves, and fire arrows at her, wounding her, and forcing her to flee.

Verath, the priest of Mishakal, thus impressed both the knights of solamnia escort, and even Crysania (pre-Legends) who was, until then, quite unpressed by the young priest she believed was trying to flirt with her (natural ones in social rolls tend to give the wrong impression...).

The more you ask for dices to be rolled, the more natural 20s will appear, and the more you'll be able to give the player the satisfaction of a critical success, sometimes of epic proportions.

Of course, if natural 20s have a critical effect, natural 1s can, too. Don't ask me what (almost) happened when the same priest of Mishakal rolled a natural 1 in a Medicine roll to help a pregnant woman give birth to her baby...

;-)

Another example:

One character was infiltrating post-War-of-the-Lance Sanction. She knew her way around, having been a double agent for years. And she knew that, to go further, and get anywhere near the Temple of Luerkisis, she needed papers. So she spend some time in a inn, waiting for a suitable victim.

So I asked the player to roll Investigation (Intelligence), DC 12:

• 0 success: The character found no one, and actually stayed too much in one position, and got detected by guards looking for intruders...
• 1 success: The character found a suitable officer, and started stalking him waiting for the right occasion...
• 2 success: The character found a suitable officer, and started stalking her, waiting for the right occasion, but the officer was apparently on a mission of her own...

The player rolled 2 successes, followed the suspicious officer, and discovered she was a spy for the red dragon highlord. This information came handy, a few hours later, then the player character got caught and was able to bargain her life with Kitiara herself, by revealing the information.

Not everything needs to be over-the-top

Despite the two examples above, not all dices were either critical successes or critical failures. Most multi-dice rolls were in the expected "average" range. So a difficult roll was usually barely succeeded, if not simply failed, and an easy roll was usually successful.

And this is good, because you can expect your adventure to follow the most probable, average course, and then profit from the surprising results to branch out and give player an exceptional scene to play (be it a critical failure, or a critical success).

Conclusion

By rolling multiple dices instead of one, you can:

• reduce players frustration when unlucky
• have a multi-step outcome, instead of a binary failure/success one
  
• make dice rolls more awesome, and thus make the action outcome more awesome
• plug in additional options (like inspiration, and critical-roll related descriptions)
  

I did five solos, using these multi-dice rolls, and I've yet to hear of any negative comment about them.

Of course, not all tests need multi-dice rolls. But multi-dice rolls actually help make some important rolls really feel important, and you can use the separate steps to have very different consequences.

But keep in mind they need significant work for the game master, as you need to come up with different steps, potentially leading to vastly different outcomes.

P.S.:

I first learned of this multiple success rolls when playing Vampire: The Masquerade, and I loved it. Porting it to D&D5 was natural for me, and my players.

I don't know if the designers of the Storyteller System came up with this by themselves, or got inspired by another similar game mechanics from another system, but kudos to the ones who brought this to role-playing games. 

P.P.S.:

Yes, I did write an HTML/JS/CSS app to display me the curves, as shown in the screenshots above. The thing is not perfect, but it will help me design my next multi-rolls for my players.

😁