[Principia Novae] That occasional burst of relevance....

[Jasper]

I'm taking another look at conflict resolution in my current project, Principia Novae (which is about rebuilding society after the fall of the Roman Empire; you can read more about in this thread).

I have a system at the moment, as well as two would-also-work alternatives, but all lack one particular behavior that I'd like to have.  It's a skill and attribute system, but not in the typical sense because either a skill or an attribute can be "primary" in any given conflict, with other skills/attributes backing it up.  Whatever's primary is handled in a different way from everything else, and gets more weight.  Right now, the player rolls (primary + secondaries)d6, counts the number higher than 3, and adds primaries again.  This method weights the primary about 50% more than the secondaries.

Usually, attributes will be secondary, but not always.  What I envisioned for play was conflicts depending mainly on a skill, with attributes occasionally having importance.  This because conflict resolution has to do a lot with the relevance of character ability.  So, for example, you roll your diplomacy with the Celtic chief not to see how well you speak per se, but whether Roman diplomacy is really going impress the guy; whether it helps in a conflict that is only partly defined.  Since each conflict is defined around the primary ability, I think secondaries should only occasionally burst into the limelight, and prove their worth to the character.

The above method basically achieves this, but secondaries will tend to have some effect all the time.  I'd like, if possible, to avoid having all combat rolls (for instance) involve three different relevant secondaries.  For one thing it makes them too important, and for another, it leads to a lot of dice being rolled.  


So, I'm considering alternatives now.  One thought of mine was to only allow secondaries in if the player spends the principle resource of the game, Spirit.  I'm not sure that's fitting with the rest of the game though, and it seems a little odd, since Spirit has to do with drive and will rather than, say, fate or luck.  

Another thought was to have the player roll a die of a different type for each secondary used, and if it rolled high or something, he'd get a bonus equal to the secondary's score.  This eliminates middling performance (as far as secondaries go), but may be too extreme.  Plus it requires players to keep track of another kind of die.

Any thoughts on this?

[Mike Holmes]

A quick clarification, when you say that Primaries add again, does that mean that their successes count double, or you roll them twice, or what?

I'm not sure I see the original problem well. That is, why can't you just say that only one secondary every can be used at once?

If that's still problematic, then I think the Spirit thing works fine. I mean, it totally makes sense to me that I can only use my strength and agility to augment my pilum throw if I use spirit to activate the second one. If I don't then I was either quick or strong, but not both. I think that's a pretty cool system, actually.

Mike

[Jasper]

Mike,

The current system is like this:

1. Roll primary#d6, count successes
2. add raw primary
3. add raw secondaries

That is, if Diplomacy is your primary and at level 4 and your secondary is Language level 3, you would roll 4d6 and count successes, and add 7 (4+3) on top of that.

A readily apparent alternative was to roll dice for both the primary and secondaries, and then add just the primary.  This gives a lot more weight to the primary (on average 3:1 instead of the 3:2 of the first method), but it involves a lot more dice, probably too many for convenience/speed (at least once bonus dice from various sources are also applied).


The method of allowing just one secondary except with the spending of Spirit certainly would work.  I was kind of looking for a way by which more secondaries could be involved, but would still exert only a minimal -- or occasional -- effect on the actual outcome.  I guess my reason for this is not a great one, being inspiration from a novel with a similar setting: only occasionally is the main character's blacksmith's strength mentioned; suggesting that only occasionally is it really significantly relevant to tasks other than blacksmithing.  But of course, RPGs are not novels, and trying to duplicate by mechanics what has carefully been designed by an author is probably both futile and unuseful.

If I do go the route described, with just one secondary, I wonder how this will impact another use of Spirit, which was to give a direct benefit to the roll, either with extra dice or by effectively raising a stat -- though this was also somewhat up in the air pending a decision on Investments (which was a matter I described in the other thread if anyone's interested.)

[Mike Holmes]

I think the Spirit thing would work out well. If the player has something applicable, he activates it as most efficient. If he does not, he adds single dice. Works for me.

Mike