Rolls

Rolling Dice. How quaint, said the people who don't understand dnd. But rolling is great. In normal DnD, we have the very binary Success-Failure, with occasional Criticals happening.

Uh, yeah, it works, but it gets a bit janky and annoying sometimes, right? I mean, if I roll 20 above that asshole's AC, it's still just a hit, but a Nat 20 that hits by just 1 is a crit? How dumb is that? So, I've done a bit of a weird. Shouldn't be too hard to get, just a mite strange at first.

Stages of Success
There are six stages of success for a roll, from a Super Failure upto a Super Success. If you want to think about it in a simple way, rolls are either a Failure or a Success, which are then modified by features and the roll's specificities. The Stages are summarized in general on the following table. Each effect would have it's own interpreted stages, some of the simple such things listed on the further tables.

Stage Modifiers
Those tables are no good if you don't know how you get the results, right? Well here's the breakdown.

Very simple, if you meet or exceed the difficulty, armor class, whatever your roll is made against, it's a success. If you don't, it's a failure. It then has the following tricks involved;

If you fail or beat a roll by a margin of 10(Rolling a 5 or 25, or more extremely, on a DC 15 roll), your "Stage of Success" is downgraded or upgraded by one stage, respectively. Thus, rolling a 25 on a DC 15 check would give you a Critical Success, as would hitting an AC 8 Zombie with an attack roll of 18. It's a crit!

If you roll a 1 or a 20 on the d20, rather than change the stage (IE, Critical Fail or Critical Succeed), you roll an additional d20. If the roll was a 1, this is applied as a penalty; A 1 followed by a 5 becomes a "-5" roll. A 20, however, prompts an additional d20 roll; The dice are then added together. The 20 rule persists regardless of previous rolls; If a 20 is followed by a 20 is followed by a 9, the roll is 49 plus bonuses. A 1 only matters on the initial roll; A 1 followed by a 1 is simply a "-1," while a 20 followed by a 1 is simply a 21. However, a 1 followed by a 20 prompts another die roll; a penalty of -20 or more is possible with the worst of luck.

Other features will modify or change these. For example, the Disintegrate Spell could be thought of as skipping the Success stage, a success is always a Critical or Super success. The Evasion feature could be thought of as increasing the Success Stage of a dexterity saving throw by 1, turning simple failures into successes and successes into critical successes, or better.