Dice Mechanic for Review

[Nathan P.]

Hey all - medium-time reader, first-time poster. Be gentle *G*.

I've been working on various games for a while now (the most completed one is kind of a techno-fantasy heartbreaker, just awaiting a stout playtest). Lately I've been enamored of a game centered around the ability to time travel, and the dangers and responsabilities held therein.

In terms of a dice mechanic, I want to have a feel of actions-causing-reactions. I want it to feel like, whatever you do, theres some force working against you, but I want there to be a fairly even distribution between successes and failures, in general.

Here's the core mechanic as I have it now, after thinking about it and honing it for about a week.

Terms:

Character Stats include three Broad Attributes (Physical, Mental and Social), each with 12 Arenas (like Throwing and Appearance for Physical, Memory and Awareness for Mental, etc). These are referred to as such: [Physical] Throwing, [Mental] Memory, etc.

Attributes have a score between 1 and 6. Arenas are a number between -3 and +3. All dice are d6 (though I suppose any sided dice could be used).

Mechanic:

To see if an attempted action succeeds, make a roll on the [Attribute] Arena that most appropriately governs it.

To make a roll, roll a number of dice equal to the base attribute, and sum them. Add the arena modifier to the roll. The GM rolls a number of dice in an opposing roll. The number of dice follows the following parameters: a very easy action takes one dice, an easy action takes two dice, a standard action takes three dice, a difficult action takes four dice, an extremely difficult action takes five dice, and an impossible action takes six dice.

If the opposing roll is being made by an NPC, the GM rolls dice in the same manner as the character, on an appropriate Arena.

Whoever rolls higher wins. Ties either result in a minor failure or a stalemate, depending on the circumstances. The difference between the two rolls can be read as degree of success, if applicable.
 
If you roll all 1s, a critical failure results. Something especially bad happens, regardless of what the opposing rolls total was. If you roll all 6s, a critical success results. Something especially good happens, unless the opposing rolls total is higher than your roll of all 6s. If this happens, you succeed normally.

You cannot get a critical success or a critical failure when rolling only one dice, and only the actual dice rolled count, modifiers do not (so a 6,6,5 with a +1 modifier is not a critical success, and a 1, 2 with a –1 is not a critical failure).

Example:

Player wants to climb a wall. His character has [Physical] Climbing of [3] +1. The GM thinks its a standard action, so he's also rolling 3 dice. The player rolls and gets 1 + 3 + 5 = 9 +1 (Arena mod) = 10. The GM rolls and gets 2 + 3 + 3 = 8. The player succeeds and makes it over the wall.

Questions/Issues:

1. There may be too much disparity between characters with high Attributes and those with low ones.

2. Are the Arena modifiers extraneous?

As its written, someone with a high Attribute and low Arenas will usually win contests (of whatever kind) against someone with a low Attribute and high Arenas. I can't decide whether this is good or bad. Thoughts?

3. Does anything seem wierd or counterintuitive?

4. Other thoughts I've had is do the same thing, just take the top dice and add the Arena mod to it, or have the Arena mod add dice to the Attribute roll. Do either of these options seem to fit my goals better than what I have?

5. Any other thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

Thanks for your time,

Nathan P.

[james_west]

Hello, Nathan -

the most completed one is kind of a techno-fantasy heartbreaker

I'm not sure you're supposed to -try- to make a heartbreaker ... :-)

1. There may be too much disparity between characters with high Attributes and those with low ones.

Depends on how common high and low attributes are. This is roughly the same number and distribution of dice used in the original West End Star Wars game, and it worked pretty well - there is a drastic difference between someone with a 2 and a 4 in a stat, but if you want your characters to be heroic, that's not bad.

2. Are the Arena modifiers extraneous?

They wind up making a difference of from -1 to +1 die, more or less. It means that stats are more important than arenas. If you want arenas to be more important, increase their range.

5. Any other thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

No offense, but I get the impression that you're not yet sure what kind of game you want to write; the changes you propose would drastically alter the feel of the game. I think it's probably better to start with what sort of game you want, then work backwards to mechanic, than to start with a mechanic, and work forwards to what sort of game it implies (although, especially with more bizarre mechanics, that can be fun too.)

- James

[Nathan P.]

the most completed one is kind of a techno-fantasy heartbreaker

I'm not sure you're supposed to -try- to make a heartbreaker ... :-)

Well, I've been working on it for quite a while, and just stumbled onto the Forge recently. After browsing around for a while and picking up on the terminology...well...I think it may fall into the heartbreaker category.

Anyway...

No offense, but I get the impression that you're not yet sure what kind of game you want to write; the changes you propose would drastically alter the feel of the game. I think it's probably better to start with what sort of game you want, then work backwards to mechanic, than to start with a mechanic, and work forwards to what sort of game it implies (although, especially with more bizarre mechanics, that can be fun too.)

None taken. While I do have a fairly solid idea of what I want gameplay to be like, I don't have such a good grasp on what the game as a whole will be like. I want play to be smooth and fluid, with a real sense of constant opposition, be it dynamic or static.

I guess I should work on setting stuff a bit more to get a better idea of how the mechanics will impact the game as a whole.

And I think I am going to expand the Arena mods (to +/- 6), thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks for your time,
Nathan P.

[Nathan P.]

Gah. Random double post. Editing this one out.

[Dav]

All right, you have a very basic mechanic...

a quick attribute dice pool with skill modifier against a result (you have a pseudo-dynamic result, as the GM has a pool).  Instead, you could average the resistance roll for simple actions (actions not resisted by another character).  Just make every die the GM rolls a 3.5 (3 or 4, depending upon how success/failure oriented you want your game), it speeds things along.

May big question is this:

AND?

You said time travel.  You have my attention.

I am all about non-linear stories and new ways to "rewind" or "fast-forward".  Where is that in your game?  In effect, you have this little system... okaaaaay.  But where is the SYSTEM?  If you hook me with time travel, you sure as shit had better be talking to me about the time travel system.  I want to see wonderful flashes of light and stars and hear people speaking in reverse, then forward, then reverse.  

What I'm saying is that if you spend one-fourth the amount of time on the setting or simple action systems or (please, no) character races as you do on the time travel aspect, then you are INSANE.  Your game is about time travel, make it shine.  Make it GO.

I had a game that was time-based (as in, you die at hour 24, not a time travel game) and utilized Ticks as the only relevant statistic... at 100 Ticks, you die.  Okay, how will you have things work in your game?  Is the game broken into six scenes?  These six scenes encompass an entire night of gaming.  What happens is that each player decides on a place for each setting (with the GM making up the spare ones to total 6).  The players then choose the order of the scenes (use high die to pick first, or whatever, not important).  Now, characters begin in Scene 2.  They can time jump, however, and move forward or backward 1 Scene.  But, as everything happens in one span of six scenes (each scene can be 10 minutes, or an hour, or whatever you want), you have to recall that NPCs, and other events don't have knowledge of time travel.  Hell, the climactic Scene might not even be the last Scene!  

The characters can jump through time, but their targeting isn't perfect, the GM decides when in each Scene they arrive, making it possible to see and hear things that make no sense, that they haven't experienced yet, and so on.  Twice per Session, a player can announce a Pinpoint jump, that puts them right where they want to be in a Scene.  And once per Session, the GM may announce a mishap, and jump a character to a Scene other than the one they want to go to.

Now, make certain your normal simple-action system feeds into that, and that things can rewind, happen again, and so on, and you have an interesting, dynamic system that GOES.

Or not.

So, my question stands: AND?  

(and I say that with much hope and fervor, as I have always wanted to see a REALLY good time travel game)

Dav

[Nathan P.]

Good point, Dav. Aight, heres some more detail on time traveling itself. This is half what I have from my notes and half a brain dump thats been brewing for a bit.

I'm thinking on two, mutually exclusive scales here.  On the larger one, characters have the ability (for whatever reason - I'll get to this in a moment) to travel between different time periods, subject to a handful of Laws. These are natural laws, (like gravity is a natural law), that work to minimize paradox's. Things like you can't kill your parents before you were born, you can't meet yourself and tell yourself not to build that time machine (or whatever), etc.

Some of these laws work to minimize disruptions to how things "really happened" - this is the concept of a force always working against you that I want to always be present. This isn't to say that you can't change history (or the future) just that (a) it's very difficult and (b) you encounter diminishing returns every time you attempt to change the same thing.

On this scale, the relationship between you and time itself is that time in an inexorable flow, and you are jumping in it and getting out of it at certain points.  

On the smaller scale, you can control "local" time, as opposed to moving through time itself. This would be things like fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing and looping a scene or scenes. Scene framing may be in order for this scale. It would be almost the inverse of the broad scale, as in you can move back and forth as much as you want, but you can't change anything once youve started mucking about with time.

Brings up the free will/predestination bit, I suppose. Something to think about harder.

Having these abilities could be from any source. So far I have the following broad categories - Technological (i.e. a Time Machine), Magical (i.e. Chronomancy), Psychic (Mind over Time, baby) and Thrall (Someone else controls your  abilites. Better be nice...). This kind of roughly fit into broad historical epochs, with past = magic, present = technological, future = psychic, and thrall being from any, though this is of course not hard and fast.

Now to go write up some more concrete systems.

Thanks for your time,
Nathan P.

[Dav]

NOW WE'RE COOKIN' WITH BABIES!

All right.  I like the concept.  I REALLY like the "local" versus "broad" time scopes, and the degree of mutability within each.  

Some few things I would suggest taking a long look at when designing concepts and systems:

FitM (Fortune-in-the-Middle) systems (I will find you a good thread on this, I promise... or ask Ron Edwards, who has a near elephantine catalogue of the board's good discussions, and can likely quote them, in toto, to you... scarily, he likely has already sensed that you will, one day, be interested in this, and has devised a host of resources that he sent one week ago, anticipating your need, and it will likely reach the local post office... who will be calling... you... NOW (did it work, if the phone rang, I am pleased... if not, well, don't crush my dreams).  All of this parenthetical is a long way of saying: ask Ron Edwards or Mike Holmes or Clinton Nixon or... use the Search feature)

Director/Author Stances.  If you allow such control over "local" time, then this is likely going to be a part of your game.

and for the love of everything Dav, please read "The Nuked Apple Cart" and (MUCH more importantly) "System Does Matter".  Both are articles found at this website.  System Does Matter should become a mantra to someone with a kick-ass time travel game.

All right, back to the other stuff.  I'm pickin' up what you're puttin' down.  I like your verve... or what-have-you.  Some questions:

1) what is the price of this power?  I understand there are Laws (capital "L"), and that all Laws exist to be followed... but as with all things, it is the purview of man to break every rule, guideline, and law he can conceivably stumble across, and when he runs dry, he makes new laws to break.  So... when the inevitable happens, what, exactly, happens?  
 
To my mind, every good game needs a few things:
a hook (which you have, and damn fine, don't ever change), a power (which should be either very closely related to your hook, or just plain BE your hook... which yours is: time travel and time travel), a scope (well, this you haven't yet, but this is mainly because things are early yet, you'll have one eventually.  Likely, yours will be centered in stabilizing or handily doing something with a "Local" zone), and (trumpets) a cost.

Now, here is where it all comes into focus for me.

Cost: The opposite of the Power.  That which makes the character accountable.  The lynchpin upon which rests the moral dilemma raised by the nature of your Power.  Now, for you, a good thing would be Paradox... but dammit, WoD, dammit (AND they took Arete... and didn't even use the fucking word appropriately!)... so we restrain ourselves to think of it as "Bad Juju".  You have so much Power, balanced by so much Bad Juju.  Now, is there a finite pool? (a mechanic I am a fan of, as some might attest.  It is where you have X amount of containment space (say 10 "points"), and it can be filled with Power and Cost, but it must always total X.  The idea is to remain "centered" (hovering near 5 and 5), but the need to utilize the Power diminishes one side of the equation, meaning the other side gets filled, and whoops-a-poopie.  This is fun when either extreme grants some measure of phenomenal cosmic power, but the imbalance also means the proverbial Sword of Damocles seems to be hovering a bit more menacingly that morning.  
  But Cost can be accomplished many ways.  Some games don't have Cost be a static, or even optional idea.  In some games, the Cost is already there (such as, by virtue of choosing this path, you WILL die a horrible death that sends your soul screaming toward oblivion at a speed that seems infinitely fast but similarly takes infinitely long to get there... this is built-in Cost, such as with the time game I mentioned above: you die at Tick 100.  Nothing you can do, you WILL die.  Cost is built-in.)  Anyway, to me, the meat of a game is in the COST, not the Power.

I go now, as I tend to get the idea that I ramble when I type.

Dav

"Brings up the free will/predestination bit..."

YES!  The best thing you said all day.  THERE, my friend, is your moral dilemma and argument, and time travel is the lens through which we will examine this handy question! (That might have sounded... um... nobly bookish or so, sorry)

Keep in mind, then, that your system:
a) must make time travel cool and dynamic
b) must allow time travel to be the "front seat"
and c) must have a Power-Cost issue that feeds and, to some degree (whether stated or no), confronts the free-will vs. predestination question.

Keep in mind that it shouldn't ANSWER such a question, just address it.

(sorry, forgot that I wanted to discuss that issue when I posted)

[Nathan P.]

Some few things I would suggest taking a long look at when designing concepts and systems:

FitM (Fortune-in-the-Middle) systems

I searched for a bit, and I found a lot of references to it without finding out what it is. Anyone have a good thread I could look at?

Director/Author Stances.  If you allow such control over "local" time, then this is likely going to be a part of your game.

Agreed. I'd ideally like to integrate a system for determining Director/Author Stance into the system for local time manipulation. That would own.

And I read those essays a while back, no worries there.

1) what is the price of this power?  I understand there are Laws (capital "L"), and that all Laws exist to be followed... but as with all things, it is the purview of man to break every rule, guideline, and law he can conceivably stumble across, and when he runs dry, he makes new laws to break.  So... when the inevitable happens, what, exactly, happens?

Well, there will be some kind of resource you have to spend to Travel (generic Energy, perhaps). As for breaking the laws, each has its own punishment built in...like diminishing returns for trying to change the same thing over and over again.

Also, existing outside of your local timeframe (or excessive local manipulation, to keep the systems unified) causes strain. Eventually, this strain would build up enough to where you snap back to when you are supposed to be like an overstretched rubber band, with the associate bad effects. This is a function of history being self-correcting (again, I like keeping things as internally consistent as possible).

I feel like this is a solid cost to balance out the power - too much mucking about in time comes back at you. Maybe it erases any changes you made, or were about to make - touching on FW/P-D territory again, if you go back to make an important change (free will), but you stay too long and get snapped back, is it you being incompetant or is that change not meant to be made? What about when you try again, and the diminishing returns sets in? If you had done it right the first time, would it have worked? Could you somehow make it so that you never went back in the first place, just so you can try to go back again and try a different tactic?

Nice. Thanks a lot for your responses, Dav, they've been really helpful. And if anyone else has anything to say, that would be great too!

Nathan P.