Multi-axis Die mechanics

[Bailywolf]

OK, I was playing with d6's yesterday, and I decided to see how many different kinds of information I could pull out of a pool of plain white sixers in an effort to leverage the hell out of a single roll.  A system which used all these possible axis would be pretty silly complicated, but two or three might make for a nice departure from more conventional die rolling.

OK, here they are:

High-Low:  Subtract the lowest die you roll from the highest die you roll.  This gives you a nice 0-5 curve with a chance for total failure (a 0) and a chance for total success (a 5) at both the top and bottom of the die pool size scale.

Total:  simple- roll and add.

Successes:  Pull a certain number of the dice out of the pool based on certain criteria.
  Beat High- dice which roll over or equal to a fixed number
  Roll under- dice which roll under or equal to a fixed number
  Roll under plus High-Low- to get wierd, count succeses as rolls below the High-Low number generated as per the first item above.

Pairs: look for matching numbers and count the number.  And to avoid totally ripping off the ORE mechanics of Godlike, there are a couple of different ways to read them.
   Count number of pairs- the number of complete pairs is the value
   Read value of pairs- the number shown on the die is the value

Even/Odd: Read dice as even or odd.  This can be combined with any of the above options to generate either boolean vlaues (yes or no) or to generate a numebr (the number of either odd or even dice).  

Sequences:  Dice can be read as sequences: 1;2;3;4;5;6.  The more dice in a sequence, the larger the value this generates.  





I can't think of anymore that don't involve anything really anoying.. and sequences is already half-way there.  


So how might these be used?


In one mechanic I'm playing with, it uses the High-Low method to generate a value which is oposed to a like value generated by another person, a dynamic situation, or other dramatic conflict.  This determines the degree of success.  The totals of the two rolled values are then compared to determine the quality or persistence of the success.  In combat for example, both parties roll and compare the 0-5 value.  The difference is subtracted from the looser's dice pool.  The total values are then compared.  If the looser rolled a higher total, the penalties last for only the next die roll.  If the winner's total is greater, the penalities las for the remainder of the conflict (and perhaps longer if the circumstances warrent it).  A third wrinkle is that pairs can be used to gain a momentary circumstantial advantage.  A pair allows you to take a +1 die bonus to your next roll.  

In combat, for example:

Roderick and Camilla are settling their old score in a back alley in Las Vegas.  Both are armed with potentialy lethal weapons (Rod has a kama with chain, and Camilla is using black magic).  

Both declare their intentions for the first clash: to slash or maigc their foe into a pile of dead and twitching meat.  Then both roll their relevent dice pools first clash:

Rod rolls 4 dice and gets 1, 2, 3, 6
Effect (High-Low)- 5
Quality (total)- 12
Pairs- none

Camilla rolls 5 dice and gets 1, 1, 3, 4, 4
Effect (High-Low)- 3
Quality (total)- 13
Pairs- 2

Rod's player has the best Effect value, so he gets to describe the outcome of the clash with a Result of 2 (his 5 minus her 3):  I spin my kama out onto its chain in a feint, and let the hooked conuter-wieght swing around and slash her face.

But because Camilla's got a better Quality value, she gets to make counter-statements about the round, and the 2 dice of penalty will only last through the next die rolls.  The GM makes the statement: Your kama's counterweight only grazes her forehead, briefly stunning her and scratcing her skin, but doing no permenant damage.

Next, we look to Pairs to see if there are any circumstantial advantages either character can sieze.  Rod has no pairs, so he can't take advantage of the circumstances.  Camilla however has 2 pairs, and so sees a fairly significant advantage for herself in the next round.  She gets to add this statement to her declaration of intent in the following clash.

In Clash 2, both parties declare action.  Rod is still trying to kill her with his kama.  The GM, for Camilla, indicates her intent to fry Rod alive with a boiling blood curse, and adds The witch sidesteps neatly under a fire escape, putting the ladder between herself and you- you'll have a harder time hitting her with your Kama until you can close and get around the obsticale.      For this round, Camilla gets 2 bonus dice for the 2 pair she rolled previously, which neatly cancel her 2 die of penalty from Rod's first attack.  

From here, the conflict procedes.


High die pools increase the odds of a high effect number, total, and the likelyhood of pairs.  But with fairly equal oponents, it makes for uncertain results.

Comments?

-Benjamin

[szilard]

In Destined I use another axis.

Pools of d6s (averaging 5 dice, but variable). Player and GM each roll. The highest dice of each (plus modifiers) is compared and the difference between them is the degree of success or failure. (This is fairly similar to Sorcerer) Generally, larger die pools have a greater chance of greater success.

In certain cases (i.e., not all rolls) I also use the lowest die rolled by the player in the same roll to give a number of plot points gained in the roll. In this case, the larger the die pool, the worse off you are (for the purposes of garnering plot points). The goal here is to balance out sheer ability with the capability to manipulate the plot.

Stuart

[Bailywolf]

Stuart,

Ah!  I missed the obvious- roll and keep the best.  And I really like that method for generating metagame currency.  I like it a hell of a lot in fact.  Your 10 die kung-fu badass shouldn't generate extra mojo from doing what he is good at.  There isn't enough draamtic risk there to justify it.  But if the same bloke tries to use his pathetic 2 dice of Singing to woe his lady love... he's out there on a freaking limb, and perhaps deserves some payback for the risks.  An enormously cool little mechanic.

I wonder if I can figure some way to use the above system to so likewise?  Hmmmmm...  

Good things to think about.

-Ben

[Bailywolf]

Ah!  Cool.  Thanks for moving this over.  I stuck it in the wrong place.

-Ben

[Jay Turner]

I'm contemplating a doubles-based mechanic (using d6s) for a cartoony-violence game I'm kicking around. I began using it before I ever read Godlike, but I got the suggestion from someone who had read it.

You use a dice pool equal to Stat + Skill and separate doubles. Double 1s mean you botched, double 2s mean you failed, but double 3s and better are successes. Triples let you double the value on the roll for figuring out success (most important for damage), and quads give you the option of doubling the value on the roll or treating it simply as two separate sets of doubles.

Each set of doubles you get represents a single action, and you spend those doubles to perform the actions. You can spend single dice to cancel out an opponent's dice in contested actions.

Damage is figured by multiplying the result on a successful pair of dice by a fixed Damage Rating, different for each attack/weapon. I want these numbers to be pretty big. :)

Anyway, that's how I'm thinking of doing it. That method uses the Doubles, and Roll-Over axes.

As note, shouldn't this be in Theory?

edit: cross-posted with the actual move to Theory.

[Matt Wilson]

I've got this mechanic where you roll dice, and each die potentially represents a thing you can do. In the game I compare it to a line of script. If the roll is high, you narrate it as a positive thing, like "I pull the lever," or "I find the needed clue." If it's low enough, it's a complication, like "whoops, I just made a reference that's insulting to her culture," or "I slip on a banana peel." In-between dice can be used to provide non-essential details, like "there's a fire extinguisher on the wall."

Then players take turns spending their dice and narrating the conflict. There's more to it than that, but the above is the basic concept.

[talysman]

I figured I'd add one more possible use of doubles/matches, then bring up another die twist.

for the series of short rpgs I'm calling my "fantasy inversions", I'm using a TFT-like mechanic: roll 3d6 to get a number equal to or below your relevant stat. harder tasks require you to roll more dice, easier tasks require fewer dice. unlike TFT, special success and failure (what TFT calls critical success) is not handled by fixed numbers, but by matches. if more than half the dice rolled match (double 6s on three dice, for example, or triple 2s on four dice,) then the result is special; more numbers in the match mean more "specialness". the success or failure is still determined in the traditional way: so if I roll double 6s and a 3 on three dice and needed to beat a 16, I have a special success; if I needed to beat a 12, I have a special failure.

another option for dice mechanics is to use two colors of dice. it's not that hard to get black and white d6s, so all the types of rolls Benjamin mentioned can be twisted a little by mixing black and white dice and interpretting them differently. an example: for high-low, roll a black die and a white die, subtract black from white. this gives you a -5 to +5 range, with 0 being the most likely result. or for even-odd: subtract the number of black evens from the number of white evens.

here's a trick I'm using in the gnostic nag hammadi/pseudopigraphia game I'm designing (no, Jonathan, I didn't forget!): roll d10 and two d6s, one black and one white. the result on the d10 is used to determine if your action succeeded (simple comparison to an effectiveness stat.) however, if the d10 is equal to or less than the white d6, there's something slightly miraculous about the results, and if the d10 is equal to or less than the black d6, something horrible has happened (without necessarily harming or interfering with the player's roll.

also, there is a way for the numbers of black d6s and white d6s to change in the game; the highest black d6 and the highest white d6 in the roll are the ones that are counted. I chose this as a way to represent the shifting forces of light and darkness -- and the effects of character decisions on this balance.

[dragongrace]

If you are using plain whites, you may also think about yatchzee type scroing with 5 white dice.  Value increasing upon difficulty.  The value in most cases is right there ont he score card and you can add in others which reflect the poker basis of Yatchzee.  
Pair, 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind, Yatchzee, small straight, large Straight, full house, two pair, and high die (chance).  Whatever you roll on 5 die you compare against target.  If tie then try for a better hand.  You can also buy Poker Dice to better refect this idea.

JOE--

[Bailywolf]

<much groovy stuff snipped>

here's a trick I'm using in the gnostic nag hammadi/pseudopigraphia game I'm designing (no, Jonathan, I didn't forget!): roll d10 and two d6s, one black and one white. the result on the d10 is used to determine if your action succeeded (simple comparison to an effectiveness stat.) however, if the d10 is equal to or less than the white d6, there's something slightly miraculous about the results, and if the d10 is equal to or less than the black d6, something horrible has happened (without necessarily harming or interfering with the player's roll.

also, there is a way for the numbers of black d6s and white d6s to change in the game; the highest black d6 and the highest white d6 in the roll are the ones that are counted. I chose this as a way to represent the shifting forces of light and darkness -- and the effects of character decisions on this balance.

That is a very neat conception.  Do you have any mechanicis by which players can influence their own mystic/horror dice?  Or tweak those of someone else?  This would be a great way of laying a curse on a character- something like 'add 3 to you Black Die's rolled value'- or representing the influence of benevolent supernatural agencies- that bloody spike you carry which was promised to be one of the spikes holding Jesus to the cross- carries with it the power to infuse your life with the miraculous.  Very nice mechanical twists are possible here.


In the above scheme- the high&low + total + pairs (HaLTP)  I have something like three axis by which a situation or ability can wonk the results out.  Adding and suntracting dice, adding and subtracting from the total, and magnifing the result of pairs (doubling the extra dice from a rolled pair makes for a good Heroic Surge style mechanic).

I like systems that give me several avenues to wonk the odds out of wack to reflect different kinds of situations.


Good thoughts all around folks.
-Benjamin

[M. J. Young]

When I read this, I thought of Yahtze, and Risk, and systems in which the dice were different colors for different things.

And today as I came back to it, that last idea came up a different way.

There are games in which different colored dice have different effects on what you're doing. You could, presumably, have one die represent the speed of an attack, another the force, another the defensive value of the character, and probably several other factors.

What occurs to me now is that if you had all the dice the same color, the player could choose which die would be speed, which force, which defense, after they were rolled, thus deciding where he wanted to put the best roll. Similarly (but significantly different in terms of game strategy), the player could announce before the roll that the highest would be defense, then speed, then force (this would prevent the decision from being based either on the values the player rolled or on the values the opponent rolled).

Just a thought.

--M. J. Young

[Bailywolf]

I had one system idea I ditched due to the colored die overhead in which you roll a big ass pile of dice- each relevent ability contributing dice of a certain color- and then assembled them into Stacks.  A Stack had one Speed die, one Power die, one Accuracy die, and could include 1 FX die.  You compare Speed to see which action goes off first.  You Then compared Accuracy to the Accuracy of any oposing stack.  If the agressive action succedes, you add the net accuracy to the power die to get your effect/damage.  FX dice allow you to use special manuevers- disarm a foe instead of inflicting damage- with the difficulty of the manuever requiring higher and higher values on the FX die.  

I also thought you could use larger dice for supernatural abilities- d8's or even d20's.  But this magnifies the issue surrounding buying colored d6's to very expensive proportions.

Alternatly, you roll a handful of your basic bones and assmeble them into stacks however you like.  You would roll one big combat dice pool in this case.

-B

[Bailywolf]

OK, I've been playing with the above three axis system, and found the 0-5 results you get from the High-Low axis are way too grainy for my purposes.  I've also decided the use of pairs is just redundant, so I've dropped that axis completely.

So, I'm using the rolled die total to cover Effect and the number of Even dice rolled to determine Quaility.  As it applies to Greater Works of magic, this will be very useful.

I'll start another thread with the details on my little pocket game in a day or so.

-B

[Mike Holmes]

Huh, that reminds me. Universalis has a dual read system. 1-5 for counting successes, and then the actual number rolled for reward.

Also, IIRC the Isolation system had a very weird dual read system.

Mike