Developing a Dice mechanic

[F. Scott Banks]

Okay...so far an encounter is...

Problem

Choice

Roll

Reward/Punishment

Payoff

[Josh Roby]

Does the choice affect the reward/punishment, the payoff, or both?

[Justin Marx]

Okay...so far an encounter is...

Problem

Choice

Roll

Reward/Punishment

Payoff

Not sure if I get the mechancis of the encounter exactly - to rephrase:

Situation
Stakes
Roll
Punishment/Payoff

Is this more or less correct, (this is straight CR), or am I way off? Is the Choice equal to the Stakes? Is the payoff getting the information from the GM?

Justin

[Callan S.]

I was wondering if a sort of tension gamble might be good. Like the GM declares a clue is in the basement. You then go through steps, asking each time if the player wants to go on a bit further. At the start of each step you roll a low percentage of being hit by something nasty. The thing is, the more steps you go through, the bigger the clue is...but at the same time the bigger the nasty.

But for it to work, you'd have to accept players chickening out. But I think a story that ends "We were too scared to finnish the story" is a story well finished.

[F. Scott Banks]

I'd rather the players finish the story.  Whether they all survive to the end is incidental.  Perhaps at the end, all they're left with is clues and they have to guess at what "really happened in that house", but that's the kind of "around the campfire" feel I'm shooting for.

I'm working through a rough draft for Outatowners.  I guess the only way to test the rules is to playtest the game itself.  Seasoned GMs will quickly find out where the water rushes in.

Is that the sort of thing that goes into a playtest forum, or do just the results of the playtest and subsequent discussions go there?

[Josh Roby]

Playtests usually go in Actual Play, for reference.

I'd actually be interested to see what happens when an unseasoned GM runs the game.

[F. Scott Banks]

Cool, I'm sure I'll get a few unseasoned ones.  It's the element of story writing that will seperate the d4's from the d20's.  All good RPG's require the GM to do a little beforehand planning, but to write a full story with the morking mechanics of a traditional mystery might be daunting for a beginner.  I can only hope that my interweaving the game mechanic with the tried and true mechanic of a whodunit will make the game easier to play.

I'm thinking the sample ruleset should have a small town with three locations described in detail and several others with "shadowy pasts" that the GM can embelish upon.

[Josh Roby]

All good RPG's require the GM to do a little beforehand planning, but to write a full story with the morking mechanics of a traditional mystery might be daunting for a beginner.

There's lots of good games that require zero GM prep -- or don't have a GM at all.  I think you're working off a bad assumption, there.

As I see it, though, your game doesn't have the GM prepare the entire mystery; she prepares a ghost, a stack of clues, and the monsters/scares that bear them.  The story will be created when the characters encounter the monsters and scares, collect the clues, and exorcise the ghost.