Rethinking my resolution mechanic

[Justin Nichol - BFG]

ok so I had a new idea for the game system I'm trying to create. I've created about 5 systems now, each better than the last but each still not good enough. I wanted to get a little feedback on the new idea. For the most part it's a prety simple dice pool- success mechanic because I hate single dice or low numbers of dice (too random) and I hate percentiles (the numbers you roll don't actually come up the percentages they should if do the math) so I opted for this.

The basic idea is that each character has a Focus pool which basically amounts to how many dice they are able to draw from in order to attempt a certain task, the more focus a person has the more they can split their attention and the more effectively they can multitask or do many things quickly. Focus ranges from 1 to 10 with an average human being somewhere around 3 or 4 roughly. Each character has talents and abilities, talents are rough groups, abilities are the actual bread and butter of what the character can do, a high physique talent does not mean you are strong, your power abilitiy does, but a high physique means you have a natural inclination and potential. For any roll a character automatically gets a number of dice for their action pool equal to their ability and may opt to draw a number from their focus pool equal to the appropriate talent, you cannot draw more than this without incurring straing. The basic idea is that at any given time you have a Focus pool, and if you are undertaking a number of different actions at roughly the same time, the focus pool depletes until you have to decide what exactly you are going to pay attention to. In combat for instance, you would have to spend at least one focus to make an attack and you could opt to go up to your talent and really try to hit well or make many attacks in a round, swinging wildly, but if you hadnt saved any Focus for defense you would have to opt for your default, and if you had a lot of focus or budgeted it well, you might be able to save for defense, make a few attacks, but if the defense wasnt used they could be shifted to the perception roll you had to make at the end of the round or used to bid and wrest the initiative from an opponent.

When a roll was made, the difficulty would be the number of successes required and successes would be measured

Basically the idea is that when you are only trying to accomplish one task you are limited by your talent and you arent pouring the entirety of your faculty into the task, you're capable of perceiving things around you, carrying onconversations, etc. I also like it because I think it would lend itself to diceless variant more easily than some systems.

What do you think? worth pursuing? problems?

[Justin Nichol - BFG]

Sorry, I posted that prematurely

"When a roll was made, the difficulty would be the number of successes required and successes would be measured"


was supposed to say

When a roll is made, the difficulty would be the number of successes required and successes would be measured by the number of dice that came up 4 5 or 6, with 1 subtracting a success, this makes it easy to track probabilities. Also there would be rules for succeeding automatically without any rolls for non-contested checks, and also the ability to use your elements, style points, and ability descriptors to gain style dice whose numbers can be moved up or down by 1.

[J. Scott Timmerman]

Ok, big question here, what are the ranges of values for character abilities?  It would seem that talents would have to be pretty low; 1-2 for humans in general if they're going to be any limitation on the spending of Focus, but you give no indication of what ranges Abilities would fall under.  Assuming they're somewhere 0-4 (not including style), then I get a curve-surface somewhat like this, where the vertical values represent number of successes, horizontal represents number of dice.  I went with "equal to" rather than "at least", so you may have to do some summing on the table.

   1   2   3   4   5   6
-6                  0.0000
-5               0.0001   0.0003
-4            0.0008   0.0013   0.0017
-3         1/216   0.0062   0.0071   0.0073
-2      1/36   1/36   0.0278   0.0257   0.0235
-1   1/6   1/9   7/72   0.0802   0.0682   0.0581
0   1/3   5/18   11/54   0.1651   0.1353   0.1133
1   1/2   1/3   7/24   0.2407   0.2045   0.1744
2      1/4   1/4   0.2500   0.2315   0.2112
3         1/8   0.1667   0.1910   0.1968
4            0.0625   0.1042   0.1354
5               0.0313   0.0625
6                  0.0156

As you can see, another big question I've been having is whether "negative successes" count as zero, can a Difficulty be below one, or is it possible to "botch"?  If it counts as zero, then go ahead and roll all those negatives into the zero row.

So, the Focus refreshes every "round", so attention you've used on actions that have ended are now available again?  It seems like a pretty cool concept.  The balancing decision to divide Focus doesn't seem to take too much resolution time when I think about it.  The question is, how common are multiple actions going to be?  An action game which exploits the mechanic would be cool.  There is a bidding aspect to it, but there's also going to be a usual "better decision" on how many, for instance, attacks to make based on difficulty.

Another issue is, in a contested check at least, a 6-die character has a fairly significant chance of failure.  This prevents characters from being particularly godly.  I mean, it takes 11-12 dice just for a character to have less than a 10% chance of getting 0 or fewer successes.  Seems to work pretty well for gritty games like WoD, though. 

-Jason T.

[J. Scott Timmerman]

Sorry the table came out ugly.  Tabs didn't translate correctly.  Should've used HTML formatting.

-Jason T.

[Justin Nichol - BFG]

The range for both would be 0 to 5.

The basic idea would be that average people would have talents around a 2, so they would only be able to throw about half or a bit more than half of their focus. Heroes would have more like 5 or 6 to start. The limit of ten would stay but there would be numerous stunts and stuff to alter the cost of focus and whatnot so 10 seems like a reasonable limit even for higher level characters.

[J. Scott Timmerman]

Ok.  How about the negative successes thing?  So far decent as a basic mechanic for a combat system.  In non-resisted situations there's got to be some definite way of determining whether auto-success happens or not.

So if Abilities also turn out to be 2 for these average people, then extras (fodder combatants) might have around 3-4 dice each pool?  (3 if spent only one focus on the roll, 4 if 2 focus on the roll).

Now, 3 dice has:
~97% chance of succeeding Diff -1
~87% chance of succeeding Diff 0
~67% chance of succeeding Diff 1
~38% chance at succeeding Diff 2
~13% chance at succeeding Diff 3

4 dice has:
~97% chance of succeeding Diff -1
~89% chance of succeeding Diff 0
~72% chance of succeeding Diff 1
~48% chance at succeeding Diff 2
~23% chance at succeeding Diff 3
~6% chance at succeeding Diff 4

Not a bad curve...  Looks like, much like White Wolf, "Standard Difficulty" could be set at 1 and negative difficulties could just be ignored.  With 6-12 (6 = 5 plus min 1 focus, 12 = 6 + max 6 focus, since heroes would have 5-6 in these values), they mignt hit difficulties of 2 to 4 with some regularity.

Since I haven't seen how the rest of your system might work, do you have a chart for arbitrating difficulty?  Other aspects of combat?  How does time flow in the systems you've come up with so far?

-Jason T.