[The New World] Diceless

[JohnG]

So I'm publishing an rpg via blog just for the fun of it on my www.headtripgames.com site.  The idea is what if these fantasy races discovered a new continent like the europeans discovered america and humans and orcs are the natives that they're running into.  Right now I'm putting up setting stuff on the blog, but I'd like some opinions on the diceless system I'm toying with for it because I've never done anything with diceless before so here it is.  Honestly I don't know what to ask so tell me what's wrong with it and what's not wrong with it heh.

Attributes 1-10

Toughness
Agility
Intelligence
Perception
Charm
Manipulation

Skills 1-5

Attribute gives you pool for actions, skill gives you maximum bid.  Failure means losing 1 pool success means keeping whatever you bid, bidding less than max and succeeding refills pool by an amount equal to max bid minus actual bid.  Players can bid above their skill rank by burning pool, burnt pool is removed from the attribute pool regardless of whether the character succeeds or fails, though failure does still burn an additional pool, and usually can not be restored until the character rests.

Bids are compared to a secret difficulty or to an opponent's secret bid.  Bidding equal to or greater than difficulty means success, contested bidding determines winner by highest bid.  In case of a tie compare max bid, whoever has the most unused max bid is winner, if this is a tie the participant with the highest skill rating wins, if this is still a tie the character with the highest attribute wins.  If this is still a tie characters bid again but do not have access to any pool that has been bid in the previous tied contest.

Wildcard points, not sure what I'll call these but they basically will allow a character to increase their bid even after finding out they've failed though they still won't get to know what the difficulty or opposing bid is, and may be useful for using special abilities/spells/etc.  These will recover at the beginning of every session like action points in spycraft but they can only be recovered during a session for something really impressive and creative.  Only really powerful or important NPCs will have these, cannon fodder will not.

[whiteknife]

I don't see anything blatantly wrong with it, although there may be some kind of hidden flaw I don't see.

One thing though is how often do the pools refresh because it seems like you might run out of energy pretty fast.

[JohnG]

Well other than using underbidding to restore lost pool it would probably restore with rest to kind of reflect how tired a character becomes the longer they are doing stuff.  I was also thinking that using wildcard points could be used to refill a pool, or the GM can award pool for good roleplay and such.  Probably be a few ways.

[Ken]

You may want to consider having stats act a base that bid points are added to. This sets a baseline for characters and would allow instant success for simple activities without always needing to spend points. It would also allow for some over/under -confidence issues for characters with good or bad stats.