Dark Days: Conflict Mechanics

[northerain]

Dark Days is my game of horror and supernatural angst. The characters have risen from the dead with ''kewl'' powers to fight crime and monsters.
Here's my introduction blurb:

You died. For a few seconds, your heart stopped, your lungs stopped drawing breath. Your body shut down. You thought dying would be grander, more impressive somehow. But dying isn't like in the movies. Death is bloody, dirty, without dignity or pride.
Getting shot, stabbed, hit by a car, thrown from a window, cutting your wrists, taking a bottle of pills, plastic bag around your head are all viable means of death. It happens to everyone, anywhere and for no reason at all other than chance and a bit of bad luck.
So you died. But you came back. You came back unlike all the others that get a casket and a shovelful of earth and maybe a few flowers, if they were loved or rich enough.
Your close brush with death probably affected you deeply. You felt like a zombie, a dead man walking. Maybe it has something to do with the nightmares you see every night, the horrible dreams that visit you, that won't let you rest. The times when you shut your eyes and saw a different world, bleak, fleeting. Maybe it's you have this nagging feeling that something isn't right, like a shadow you can only see with the corner of your eye. Turn around and it's gone. The dreams are getting worse and you think there's something else too.
Maybe they're not dreams. Maybe they're a memory. Where did you go when you died?



So in Dark Days characters have 3 stats(or dice pools, or types of dice): Flesh, Darkness and Despair.
Flesh is just a catch all for your skills. It's not a stat on it's own, it contains all the skills. Like a placeholder.
Darkness is the effect your death had on you. You can draw power from the darkness to make you stronger, faster or better at anything you like. You can use it at will, but there's a limit to how much you can use and using too much will fuck you up. A major roll failure when using Darkness dice will result in you gaining a permanent dice. Gain too many and you're gone.
Despair is another word for sanity or anger. When you see bad or weird things, you gain Despair. You can use your Despair dice to fuel your actions with well...despair or anger. Once you used a die, it's gone and your Despair goes down. Again, gain too many and you go insane or somesuch.


So a normal action would be your Flesh(Skill) pool.
If you want to use your Darkness powers, it's Flesh + Darkness(up to your current limit) and if you botch it you gain a permanent Darkness die.
If you want to use some of the Despair you have, you roll Flesh + Despair(up to the amount of Despair you have). The dice you use are now ''spent''.

That's more or less it. What I'm trying to achieve is this:
Using your Darkness can be very helpful, but it will slowly eat away at you until your personality is gone.
The more shit your characters experiences, the more pissed off/uncaring/violent he becomes and that fuels his actions. Works well with the ''devil may care'' attitude I'm trying to promote.

What do you guys think?
I'm worried it might be a bit too complicated or that Despair and Darkness could be boiled down to a single stat instead.
No idea what happens when you botch a Despair roll.
Botching a roll isn't that easy, I'm worried Darkness dice are too powerful. I'm not really into the idea of using a level cap of some sort(characters starts with a maximum of 3 Darkness, they can raise it with experience points).
Darkness is also the dice pool for your aforementioned kewl power. I'm thinking using Darkness should also ''spend'' those dice, in order to make characters use their power fleetingly. I'm going for a gritty kind of game.

Ideas or any kind of feedback welcome!

[Vulpinoid]

Keeping despair and darkness is good.

Despair is a bit like a passive sanity rating, explain how well your system has reacted to the outside world.

Darkness is more symbolic of your character's active actions against the world. How much you've fought back.

The scale between these two options (passive responses, and active responses), can give a wider range of concepts for the character.

V

[tadk]

I like the distinction put between for Despair and Darkness. I would like more explanation on the Flesh and skills. There going to be a list or the make your own sort of verbiage

[Myrkridia]

That's more or less it. What I'm trying to achieve is this:
Using your Darkness can be very helpful, but it will slowly eat away at you until your personality is gone.
The more shit your characters experiences, the more pissed off/uncaring/violent he becomes and that fuels his actions. Works well with the ''devil may care'' attitude I'm trying to promote.

What do you guys think?
I'm worried it might be a bit too complicated or that Despair and Darkness could be boiled down to a single stat instead.
No idea what happens when you botch a Despair roll.
Botching a roll isn't that easy, I'm worried Darkness dice are too powerful.

I might have missunderstood some parts of your flavour, but the worst that can happen is that you ignore my post, so I`ll have a shot

Maybe this is a flavourful solution to both the "No idea what happens when you botch a Despair roll" issue and the "Im worried Darkness dice are too powerful" issue? When you botch a Despair roll you get some adverse effect relating to the experience you had during the time you were dead. This effect increases in proportion to how many Darkness dice you have.

Lets say you saw your dead mother when you were dead, and she told you that she had hanged herself. You didnt know this, and you felt angry because she had deliberately left you alone in the world, and horrified because a hanged person can be a pretty grotesque sight. When you botch your despair roll, maybe you relive this event in your head, and the more darkness dice you have, the effect on your mind and soul becomes stronger and more concrete. Maybe with few dice, you get feelings of horror and nausea from seeing her. With more dice, perhaps she instead commands you to use your darkness to do something horrible, like hanging other people. Most likely, its not the mother talking to the character, but only the memory of her, twisted by the brush with death and brought up from the subconcious by the botched despair roll. I have no idea what mechanical effect you might get for botching the Despair roll though, that would grow with the size of the Darkness pool.

[otspiii]

I have a couple of questions about Despair, actually.

So, channeling your Despair has no real down-sides other than having less Despair?

Gaining Despair seems like it could in theory be dangerous, what with the going mad if you get too much of it, but it sounds like it might on a practical level have no down-side.  I have the feeling the players will build up a very "Oh, my Despair is getting a little high.  I guess I should blow some points off it on some arbitrary rolls just to be safe" mentality towards it, especially since doing so seems to have no down-side.  It seems a little strange to have characters build up insanity, go nuts once with it, and walk away as if nothing had happened.  I think a botched Despair roll should do something nasty.

I liked the idea of crossing over effects between Darkness and Despair.  It almost seems to me like botching a Despair roll should give you a permanent Darkness, where the experience of losing yourself to madness/rage/whatever warps your soul slightly, while botching a Darkness roll should maybe do something else.  That also eases up on the fact that the higher your Darkness is the harder it is to botch with it, which may or may not be an intentional part of the system.  I personally like slippery slopes, but that's just me.

[northerain]

Hi guys

The main problem I'm having is the 2 pools not having a downside mechanically. For Darkness, it's completely absent and for Despair, like otspiii said, it's way too easy to get rid of it.

Let me first answer your posts:

Myrkridia: I like your idea, in general. I might use it for a specific character type that has flashbacks.

TadK: Yes, there will be a small skill list.

otspiii: Thank you for your post, it actually exposed the troubles I'm having with the conflict mechanics.


So for Despair, I was thinking of maybe using a UA style mechanic, with 3 different types of Despair where you can get hardened or failed marks. This would make it harder for your character to gain Despair, the more hardened he becomes (as per UA rules). Of course, I have no idea how this ties in with the Despair pool.

For Darkness, it's obvious there has to be a downside to gaining too much or using it too much. In DRYH, the rules about certain dice pools ''dominating'' take care of that (when Madness dominates, the outcome isn't nice for the character).

[Certified]

So in Dark Days characters have 3 stats(or dice pools, or types of dice): Flesh, Darkness and Despair.
Flesh is just a catch all for your skills. It's not a stat on it's own, it contains all the skills. Like a placeholder.
Darkness is the effect your death had on you. You can draw power from the darkness to make you stronger, faster or better at anything you like. You can use it at will, but there's a limit to how much you can use and using too much will fuck you up. A major roll failure when using Darkness dice will result in you gaining a permanent dice. Gain too many and you're gone.
Despair is another word for sanity or anger. When you see bad or weird things, you gain Despair. You can use your Despair dice to fuel your actions with well...despair or anger. Once you used a die, it's gone and your Despair goes down. Again, gain too many and you go insane or somesuch.

First, let me begin by saying that I really enjoy this concept. The idea of having the player describe their life, death and how they were saved at the onset of a game seems like a great way to set the mood. Although other details for the setting are not present in the description I think this core idea has a ton of potential.

Maybe this is just me reading into this but it seems like there are subcategories of each of the three pools. Flesh contains you skills and accumulation of knowledge. Although not expressed in the dice mechanic it may be that the player selects his skills and here flesh can be used. Darkness is the link one has to their death and possibly some supernatural element in that it can make you better by it's nature and the character's possession of this pool.Despair seems to be more like Madness as it is less about sanity and more along the the growing of insanity from seeing things that should not be increase this pool, and drawing strength from it.

One way to  to associate a negative with both of these pools would be to have them quantify their sub-groupings. Much like skills. Darkness may have a list of triggers based on the characters death that when encountered force a Darkness roll. The greater the success of this roll the worse things are for the player. Loss of control, paralysis there are lots of fun things to play around with here. This same line of logic can be applied to the Despair pool listing a set of neurosis the character has developed. When encountering these triggers or a situation that may enable their Madness the character makes a despair roll, success determining how long they must feed their madness. This adds both opportunity for roleplaying and a deterrents for gaining too much power through Darkness and Despair.