Off-Balance Resolution: A mechanic looking for a home

[happyelf]

As I noted earlier, a fair bit of this does appear to be counter-intuitive, but I feel there is still some mreit to it, if a bit of depth is put down to support it. I'm definintly playing devil's advocate here to a degree, but I think tossing around ideas lie this is useful sometimes.

Note here that i'm simply discussing my own version ofthe idea- there are obviously several different variations begn discussed and i'm not attempting to monopolise the concept by any means

Personally I don't see the 'low' and 'high' trait as being any different- the higher each is, the better they are. However, it's not really a good idea to have a value of 1, or even a low value, for several reasons.

Firstly, as outlined above, if your value is too low, somebody doesn't have to roll against it. If you're rolling against a mook with a finesse of 1, you don't need to worry about finesse. So for instance, the rule may be that if your opponents score is half or less than your own, they immediatly fail against you on that side of the equasion. So, while having a very low 'low' value might seem to increase your chance of success, in my version at least, it gives you a clear handicap past a certain benchmark.

Second, the stats are involved in other task resolutions. You might have a wimpy/super agile guy with finesse 10 and power 1, and maybe they will net him easier 'balanced' rolls, but he'll be so weak he can't carry anything, or swim well, or any number of other tasks that the system might resolve with a simple 'stat of x allows y degree of success' value(ymmv of course on what detail level of tasks the rules would even touch on)

This could be based on simple linear mechanics(like a power chart that shows you how much your pc can lift), but it could also incorperate simple mechanics (that require you to roll under your stat on a d10 to achieve certain simple tasks, and uses larger dice for more difficult actions).

Either way, those are two solid reasons why overly polarised stats would be a bad idea, even if all stats, ether low or high, are on the same conventional 'high is good' continum.


The implication here is that we're talking about battle between reasonably formidable and well-matched people, and in that context, it becomes more and more important how balanced and centered they are. It's quite easy to imagine a version of such an idea where a normal person with a baseball bat simply has to roll low in order to hit another normal person. But two highly skilled martial artists battling one another are in a different sort of struggle.

I guess the chief idea here is to make a two-tiered system. On the one hand you have simple resolution where you roll under a stat's value to get stuff done. But if you want to do really cool heroic type stuff, then your character is going to have to master balance. The idea here is an opposed roll, wich results in a set of possible variations- does each contestant roll 'inside'? Does one roll 'past' their power, and the other 'past' their finesse? And so on. This gives each roll a set of critiera for what happens during it and after. I think this is an interesting and potentially rather cinematic idea.

Now, there is a logic to all of this. It's not the convntional task resolution logic we're more used to, but it is there. Primarily It's based around the idea that succeeding in a task is not simply a matter of overpowering it, that you have to apply enough force but not too much, that hitting a target can be seen as 'aiming at the right place' as much as it can be seen as 'aiming really well'.

[Harlequin]

I suspect we're facing a split, here, in priorities.

1) In the martial-arts example, we gain narrative detail from, in essence, which direction you failed in.  Squeezing more information out of the die roll with little effort doing so.  Excellent.  However, in order to get that narrative detail out, we need to set up the stats such that the low stat does, indeed, want to be low; otherwise we're continually forcing the GM/players to come up with new interpretations of why, today, the character's high Agility actually worked against them.  Tricky, unpleasant in play, forced.

2) The original idea had revolved around having all traits be, in theory, high-is-good, with the mechanic weighing in with "but disparate is better."  This has a lot of cool points going for it, but I think the assumption that "high is good" needs examining if this is to be true.  Perhaps a change in terminology is needed.  Agility, for example, doesn't have much for downsides; it's a praiseworthy term, pretty much full stop.

But if you used terms which suggested their intrinsic disadvantages, you might be on more solid ground.  How about:

Brutish instead of Strong
Twitchy instead of Quick
Methodical instead of Intelligent
... and so on.

Then rolling under Twitchy (seen as a good thing) but over Brutish (when seen as a bad thing) would make more sense.  However, we still lose the "over in the direction of Twitchy, vs. over in the direction of Brutish" distinction... because failing by rolling less than your Brutish would seem to mean that you weren't Brutish enough, even though if you had actually been less Brutish, that might have been a success.

So I think we can have one thing, the "vector trick" where the roll is good if it stays middlin', bad if it goes too high or too low, or we can have the other thing, the "disparity edge" where an optimized character is one with very disparate stats.  But not both at the same time.

Me, I prefer the first one - I like to squeeze more info out of the die roll, and am not that picky about trying to make characters' strengths into their weaknesses... so I have this thought, applicable to the first alternative above.

Center the die roll on zero, using (say) d10 minus d10.  Yes, this is analogous to 2d10 minus 11, but centering it on zero makes more sense in context.  Then remove the labels "positive side" and "negative side" from the axis, and relabel.  This would get us this funky system:

You have a Finesse score and a Strength score, both positive, both high-is-good.  When you strike, roll two distinguishable d10s, a Finesse die and a Strength die.  Subtract the lower die from the higher one, but remember which one was high - the result is a number and a type.  So a roll of (Finesse die 7) and (Strength die 3) is a net roll of "Four Finesse."  If this result is under your Finesse, you've succeeded; otherwise, you "fail by Finesse," most likely meaning that the move you tried was too difficult and you were not agile enough to pull it off.  This packs a lot of information into the die roll, because we also get information about whether you succeeded-by-Finesse, succeeded-by-Strength, or in a balanced manner, as well as which direction you failed by.

[This is mathematically equivalent to rolling 2d10 straight, aiming to lie between a new Finesse score which is (11-Finesse), and a new Strength score which is (11+Strength), but obviously is more interesting and communicates more clearly.]

That's really quite neat, but IMO there's still some counterintuitiveness about it, and some issues which could be good or bad.  For example, interpreting the failures takes some finagling of the language; rolling Strength-heavy but over your Strength means that "the move you were trying, based on the situation, required Strength to power it through, and you were not strong enough."  It doesn't mean you were too much of a brute with insufficient Finesse.  Neither does failing on the other end, though, except inasmuch as on a point-buy system you might have had too low a Finesse for the move because you'd bought your Strength up.  It also means that the odds for a Finesse3/Strength7 combatant to fail (due to Finesse) are much higher than a more balanced Finesse5/Strength5 fighter, due to the bell curve being centered on zero; not necessarily bad, but would tend to make every character look the same in the long run.

However, we can also invert things, and get even cooler results.  Turn that one around and remove the flat d10s, and we get this variant:

Your Strength score, and your Finesse score, are a die type (Strength d12, Finesse d6, for Joe the Fist).  The maneuver you're attempting is a range of results, which can be centered on "zero" but need not be.  Twisting Fist, a demanding move, might require a result of (Finesse 2-5), say.  Roll Finesse and Strength together as above, subtracting one from the other but preserving the "type" of the higher die with the result.  If the result comes up outside the range, you fail to execute it properly.  Too low on the desired scale (in this case Finesse) means that you weren't Finesse-ey enough.  Too high on that scale means that you neglected the other elements of the attack; Twisting Fist does need some strength behind it to do damage.  Rolls on another scale entirely mean that you over-whatevered it, such as winding up much too far (too much Strength) for the punch.

To reduce whiff factor, better to have it be "and so it costs you X to succeed" rather than "you fail because of Z."  Martial-arts contests would definitely benefit from that.  Two resources, say: Ki, which can be spent to increase the value of the Strength die, and Zen, which can be spent to increase the value of the Finesse die.

Taking that as the base engine, you could build a whole library of move-countermove options, with schools teaching a subset of the list plus specialty moves of their own.  The anatomy of a move would include the range of results needed to pull it off (Finesse 2-5, or Finesse 2 - Strength 2, etc), and the effect of succeeding (does X to opponent - better with a descriptive system instead of a hitpoint one! - or blocks/avoids any move of category Q, etc).  Categorizing them (high punch; low block) would make it easier to establish which block you needed while still leaving specialties open (Twisting Fist is a high punch, so can be prevented with anything that says it defends against high punches, but because it's hard to do (narrow range not centered on zero), it also does damage even if blocked, or whatever).

If you wanted to get really involved, take a leaf from Jolly Roger Games' excellent Swashbuckler! and have each move list which moves could follow it.  (Or, interestingly, put you into a stance which alters your Finesse/Strength dice - Crane Stance: Finesse d10, Strength d6, and so on, thus implicitly changing what you'll follow it with.)

Hmmm....

- Eric