Charm

[Epoch]

I've been meaning and meaning to put up a web page for this game concept, but essentially, I just won't get around to it with my current web-load.

So here it is, in really sketchy form.  I'd love some feedback:

Basic resolution is that you roll a number of d10's which is equal to 1 + your skill number, at a difficulty of 10 - your stat number, count successes up, and be cool.

Example: You have Medicine skill 3 (like a med-school intern after a few months of practice) and an Intelligence of 4 (above-average), you'd roll 4d10 at difficulty 7 to diagnose a disease.

You roll a 2, a 6, an 8, and a 9 -- two successes, and you've got a pretty good diagnosis.

Now, the interesting aspect of this system comes with the magic dice and the curse number.

Magic dice are d20's.  Curse number is generally 1 to 5.

You (or, potentially, the GM) roll some number of Magic Dice (usually 0 to 2) along with your resolution roll.  If you roll a number between 11 and 20, and the units digit of the magic die matches one of the numbers, then that's a "charm," or a minor positive magical effect that's associated with your skill.  If, however, you roll the Curse number or under on any Magic die, your skill is tainted with foul magic.  It's not unsuccesful (if you rolled a success).  It's just that there's a curse associated with it.

Example (continued from above):  Your GM is rolling 2 Magic dice, with a Curse number of 2.  He rolls a 16 and a 1.  That means you get a Charm (the 16 matches the 6 on your regular dice) and also a Curse (the 1).  Your GM rules that with your Charm, you notice the signs that your friend's illness may be the result of malevolent spirits, and with the Curse, that you've opened yourself up to the same malevolent spirits.

It may be that all skills provoke the use of Magic dice, or just some of them.

The amount of Magic dice that you have is affected by environmental situations, not skill based ones.  You'll probably have a base number of Magic dice, determined by your heredity, that's like 0 - 2, with a base curse number of 1.

Then, suppose that you're out in the woods (a wild area).  That might provoke a +1 magic die, but also a +1 curse number.

Nighttime might also provoke +1 magic, +1 curse.

The Solstices or Equinoxes might be +2 magic.

Being in your home village might be -1 curse.

Being in your home temple might be +1 magic.

Being in an enemy temply might be +2 curse.

Being baptized Christian might be -2 magic Monday through Saturday, -1 magic Sunday.

A few words on the setting I'm thinking of:

I'm seeing this as mythical Britain at the time when the Christians were just coming to it.  Think the very beginning of the TV miniseries "Merlin" for the general idea (though probably nothing like that in specific).  The Christians are making inroads, but there are still whole communities who believe in the "old ways."

The catch, of course, is that the Christians really are affected a lot less by the "old ways" (they have a hefty Magic die loss, which also corresponds to some manner of resistance to extant magic).  Note that if you roll no Magic dice, you don't provoke curses on yourself -- if the effect of Charms is kept pretty minimal unless you rack up a whole bunch of them, it could be a big advantage to be Magic-dice low.

Anyhow, that's the bare skeleton of what I'm looking at.  My concerns:

• It seems to be on the ragged edge of the amount of complexity in a core mechanic that I'm willing to endure.  How tiresome would you find matching numbers from d20's to d10's?
  
  
• Is it evocative?  I want magic to be mysterious, unreliable, and something which the believers of the old ways consider just part of life -- something always to be aware of, and be potentially concerned about, but not something practiced by wizards in crumbly old towers.  (I'd probably roll the Magic dice secretly, and give them the results of their rolls in IC terms -- not differentiating magical effects from mundane ones.  I like the concept that a very well-forged weapon might be considered just as puissiant as one that's got several charms on it, but isn't all that well made).
  
  
• Is this kind of mixed magic and everday life thing something that you'd find interesting?
  

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Mike,

The numbers work, as best as I can tell without a playtest, and it all makes sense. I am a Fortune junkie and like the idea of magic being a "parallel die system," for lack of a better word.

My only problem is what you suggest - too much handling time. I like to see the result, bam, be done with the Fortune step (which as you know may not be the end of resolution).

I'm pretty sure that if you lose the skill/stat paradigm and go with a more "ability" approach (e.g. Hero Wars), that it wouldn't lose any granularity that matters. In that case, the system would attract me greatly.

Seems to me that the two dice (d10 and d20 in your case) could be pretty much any two dice, just by adjusting the scale of target numbers for the first and the effective range for the second.

Best,
Ron

[Epoch]

Brief errata:

As Greyorm pointed out to me in a private message, I messed up the numbers in one of the examples:  At stat 4, the difficulty should be 6.  (I was messing around with 11 - stat and 10 - stat for difficulty, and got confused as to which one I had decided to go with).

Ron,

You're correct that you could use many sets of dice for the deal.  I do think it matters what you choose, though, and that relates to handling time in a way I'm concerned about.

First off, I don't want Curses to become ridiculously common.  Suppose that you're using a d10 instead of a d20 for the magic die.  Now, suppose that you're using 2 or 3 magic dice.  We'll assume that there's a single curse number on each die, and still, your odds of rolling a curse are 19% with two dice and 28% with three.  That strikes me as too high a chance -- I want curses to be at least somewhat avoidable (though in a game in which you didn't tie the magic thing to all or most skills, a smaller-sided magic die might become appropriate).

Secondly, one thing that I've taken to heart from all the recent D&D furor is that people feel very strongly that "high is good, low is bad."  I don't personally understand that -- I never had a problem with old style D&D in which sometimes you wanted to roll high, sometimes you wanted to roll low.  But practically everyone else seems to agree that it's a woeful fault for a die mechanic to aim for low numbers, and a ridiculously bad problem if some of the dice are aiming high, and some are aiming low.

Thus, I want it to be desireable to roll high on the magic dice.  However, at the same time, I want it to be easy to correspond numbers between the magic dice and the regular dice.  With d20/d10, it's pretty intuitive.  The tens digit tells you whether you're rolling well, the units digit matches up.  I don't think that there's another die combo that "snaps together" like that.

Now, with respect to the "abilities" vs. "stats & skills," I think you're right that you could get little loss of granularity by switching over to that system.  Personally, I like stats & skills systems, and I'm not really worried about the handling time of determining number of dice and target number.  Most of that is figure-and-forget, and I'm good at that kind of thing.  It's the actual physical dice-reading that I'm concerned about -- I've noticed that counting successes for fairly large die pools (say, 6 dice or more) is fundamentally difficult, and it seems like matching the numbers on various dice would be even harder.

I guess that fundamentally, the question is whether y'all would find it annoying to roll some d20's and some d10's, and then see if the numbers on the d10's were the same as the units digits of numbers on the d20's.

[Mithras]

Just want to let you know Epoch that I've got a dice mechanic I'm polishing which asks players to roll 1d10 for the stat, and an additional 1d10 for each skill point relevant. But they roll low, not high.

Just so you don't think I've nicked your idea.

Also ... dare I say it, its a Vietnam war-game! Again, I've been working on it (as you may remember) for years. It will all be a long time coming together, however.

Anyway, good luck.

[Epoch]

No worries, Mithras.