[Six Bullets] Making a better bullet

[andrew_kenrick]

I've been tinkering with the rules for conflict resolution in Six Bullets for Vengeance, mostly as a result of the last playtest we did (which is here ).

Over the past three playtests one thing keeps popping up as a persistent problem - that of who rolls the dice, and what a dice roll determines. I've solved this to a certain extent with the implementation of a stakes setting mechanism, which gives a nice framework to a conflict.

The problem still keeps coming back to character conflicts (conflicts that happen between the characters) vs narrative conflicts (conflicts that happen between the players), and the fact that I have a different mechanic for each. The character conflict mechanic seems to work fine (it's based off of opposed attribute rolls), although doesn't encourage players to make particularly innovative uses out of their attributes ("I put all my attirbutes in shooting! Then I shoot you!"), but the narrative conflict mechanic turns out to be something of a crapshoot (it's based off of opposed dice rolls based on who has what at stake, but the difference is negligible so it's almost 50:50). There's also the small matter of limiting narrative intervention - currently there's nothing stopping one player persistently raising a conflict (or variations on that conflict) until he gets it to go his way.

Now I'm thinking of consolidating all these problems and solving them with a rethink as to how the conflict mechanic works. Stake setting will remain the same, with players stating their intent and will happen if they win the conflict. But I'm going to combine narrative and character conflicts into the same mechanism. Players will each get a pool of dice - their 6 bullets. When a player sets his stakes, he pushes a number of dice forwards to gamble on the outcome. Winner gets his own way and loses his dice, loser loses 1 dice (as payment for entering the conflict) and keeps the rest.

Players can get dice back (reloading) by fitting pieces of previously unconnected narration together (fitting the pieces of the puzzle together), revealing some new and interesting revelation (the revelation dice Michael proposed in the other thread), exacting vengeance in a fitting and appropriate manner (perhaps replacing the vengeance dice of my previous draft) or other, as yet unspecified ways.

But, I can't decide how I want to handle attributes now. I like how it works already, that players define a character's attributes as they are revealed in play. It fits the game nicely, but I can't work out how to fit it into the new mechanics. I'm thinking that players can spend their dice to give themselves an attribute, which then in turn contributes a bonus die to any conflict in which its relevant. Or, rather than spending dice, players can attempt to narrate an attribute as part of a conflict, and if successful that attribute sticks automatically.

Do you think my new mechanics will work any better than my old ones? Will they solve the problems I've outlined? And how to get attributes to work so that characters are defined by more than just how many dice they currently have?

[andrew_kenrick]

Walt asked this question in another thread, but I thought I'd answer it here instead.

Would the "players" create the scenes as the game progresses (allowing the non-good guy bad guys in the scene to take on suplimental roles) or would they be predefined (written like an adventure)

The scenes are created by the players as the game progresses, each of the villains setting up their scene and "casting" all the other players as the various minions/npcs.