[Chronoplex] The Coin Mechanic Thing

[sockmonkey]

This post is based on feedback I received in a previous post:

...Assuing that rolling "1c8" means flipping all four coins (you have given no other situation in which you would flip the lower-valued coins), all your coin-flipping gives the same result as rolling 1d16...

The bold section above kept eating at me. When I came up with the coin mechanic, part of what I liked about it was that you could change the number of coins used to come up with differing amounts, I just never got around to using that much in the rules. And really, it seems like I'm missing an opportunity by not using it more, so I've re-examined my conflict resolution.

Previously conflicts were all resolved by adding the skill base to a 1c8 pitch result. That works, but it's a bit dry. In rethinking it, it occurred to me that the number of coins used could represent the amount of effort a character puts into an action. I'm thinking players could wager how many coins they wish to use to successfully complete an action. For simultaneous actions this means you would need to split your attention, so you could wager up to a combined total of 1c8 (i.e., wager 1c4 on one and 1c4 on the other).

I can see some interesting possibilities in going this direction. Of course in my excitement of trying something new I could be blinded to major flaws, so I thought I'd run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes. Any thoughts?

[JoyWriter]

You have got to be a programmer, who else would think of binary dice! However, if you do split the pool, like games like shadowrun used to do, it will not work the same: Will you be putting the 1 and 8 on one side and the 2 and 4 on the other? What will happen for those pairs if they turn face down? Consider if you split your effort 4 ways and put the 8 by itself; I get either 8 or 16! Or would you say that only the full 4 together can get the full 16, smaller divisions just get 0.

But that really complicates your mechanic. Another way to do it would be to call those coins b16, a binary way to get a 16 sided dice. Then you could just use "dice size" to show some relevant feature other than skill, as in some other games, going b2, b4, b8, b16. And for anyone who didn't like the coins, they could just bring their own dice, except for b16, which they could replicate with "d20, reroll 17-20" in extremis.