The Gift Introduction and a Mechanics Question

[SrGrvsaLot]

Using the ideas generated by Brainstorming - Midieval Fantasy I've started a new game, called The Gift. The introduction can be downloaded at http://www.mesastate.edu/~jfrazer/gift.pdf if anyone's interested.

This post is not about that, however. I'd like people's opinions on the mechanic I'm thinking of using.

All characters would have an attribute called "will," rated from one to ten. Will is the dice pool for every action in the game.

Players also have aptitudes, rated from one to five. Aptitudes reduce the difficulty of will rolls by their rating.

So, if the character has the "Survival" aptitude at rating 3, and a will of 4, they'd roll 4 10-sided dice against a difficulty of 7 (10 - 3) to see if they could survive in the woods.

Anyone see any immediate problems with this system that I'm missing?

[lumpley]

Any reason you're subtracting and rolling over instead of just rolling under?  Will 4 Survival 3 could mean roll 4d10 against a 3.  Less subtraction means easier, and the probabilities are the same.

-Vincent, also a Cancer

[Mike Holmes]

As I got to point out in another thread recently, and FWIW, when you do a cross product sort of thing like this, the best results will be had with balanced options. That is, it's better to have a 4/4 (dice/target) than a 5/3. This can become important in a lot of ways, so I just thought that I'd mention it.

Mike

[Jeph]

A few questions:

What is an average person's Will? 4, 5, just 1?

What is the default aptitude? 1? In Spin System, I used 2, which seemed to work well.

How does the difficulty of the task factor in? Increase the TN? Require more Will dice to beat the TN?

Just food for thought. Aside from that, it's a tried and true mechanic, used in a bunch of good games (TROS, White wolf, etc.)

[szilard]

So why is Will the die pool for everything?

In Destined (as you know), I'm doing something relatively similar - with the die pool either being Determination or Destiny. I do that for a variety of reasons, but largely to emphasize the basic distinction inherent in the game.

By making the dice equal to Will, you're doing a couple things:
* Making a statement that Will is central to completing any task or resolving any conflict.
* Making Will the overbearingly dominant statistic in the game.

These might well be intentional, but I thought it worth pointing them out.

Stuart

[SrGrvsaLot]

Thanks for the feedback. To answer some of your questions.

I'm using a roll-over mechanic rather than a roll-under mechanic for no reason other than that I don't like roll-under systems.

The average human will is 3.

The default aptitude is 0.

Base TN ranges from 7 to 15.

Will is a very important characteristic thematically, what with the characters having soul-damage and all, though my main reason for making one statistic the dice pool was so I could have an easy way to gague the players' power without having to resort to something like character levels.

[Kester Pelagius]

Greetings SrGrvsaLot,

A few questions.

The average human will is 3.

The default aptitude is 0.

How were these values determined?

How do you envision players generating their starting scores?

Base TN ranges from 7 to 15.

Why did you choose this numerical range?

Will is a very important characteristic thematically, what with the characters having soul-damage and all, though my main reason for making one statistic the dice pool was so I could have an easy way to gague the players' power without having to resort to something like character levels.

Uh.... I think I recall something about soul-fragments in the PDF you linked to, but nothing about soul-damage??

Granted you said you weren't posting about that PDF but rather a mechanic you were thinking of using (one presumes for it) but I can't say I see how this fits in with your premise of the Gifted any better than, say,  Grace.  Or maybe Spirit..  Or maybe something about Immanence. . . or not.  *thinking*  Not.

Will, IMO, *seems* *kinda* too general for the flavor of what you presented.  But, yes, I suppose it could work.  One name is as good as any other, so long as the mechanic works the way you want it to.


Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius