The core mechanic of the Shattered Vistas is essentially a die pool with resource bidding:  you start with an initial pool of d6s, add extra dice by spending points from your 'reserves,'  and then rolling the final amount.  Rolling more dice is good.

Playtest revealed a problem I had not even considered in design:  when people decide how many dice they are adding is a big deal.  One thing I know I don't want is a back and forth bid system, since it'll bog down play too much.  I also don't want a blind bidding system (it's interesting, but not really what I'm looking for in this game). 

What I'm mulling over right now is that one party (always the GM if the GM is involved) states an opening bid.  The other party then gives their bid.  The first party can then raise their bid to some number a based on the opponent's (say, one less).  Then the dice are rolled.

Does this sound functional?  Are there hidden problems I'm not realizing?  Is there a potentially more elegant solution out there?

Hi Willow,

I'm having a hard time understanding 2 things that might make it easier to understand what you are trying to achieve with the declared bidding? Is it maybe to have one player (or GM) basically reveal, or not reveal how important a particular confrontation is to them? So part of the game is figuring out if they are low-balling a bid they care about, or trying to draw out a big bid? Also are the reserves a limited resource or a potentially limitless resource? I would guess limited. If both of my guesses are right, the system sounds like it could create some tense bids.

A middle road between blind bidding and a bidding war might work something like this: Everyone rolls a dice and possibly adds a responce time type score or their level or something like that. The person who gets the lowest has to bid first and blindly. Then the next lowest person goes only getting to see what the guy before him bid. And so on until you reach the highest scoring person who gets to bid see what everyone else bid before bidding himself.

A little more information about your game and what your trying to achieve would be useful.

Out of curiosity, what exactly do these d6's represent? From the process you describe it seems like you are encouraging players (and the GM) to engage in metagaming thinking. This makes perfect sense if people are bidding to add their own story elements into a game (sort of like a competitive narrative game), but if the bidding represents how much effort a character puts into an action (basic finite resource system) then the players are able to adjust the character's effort due to information that the character couldn't possibly know (specifically, how much effort the opponent is putting into a counter action). Either is fine, really, if that is what you want, though metagaming in general is something to be aware and careful of.

As for bidding mechanics, what if each player has to make a blind bid, but then they have a limited pool of points from which they can draw in order to change their bet. That is, say player A blindly bids 5 tokens, but player B blindly bids 30. Both players have a pool of points that allow them to change their bid a total of X times. This is important to player A, so he uses one of those points to change his bid to 31. Now player B could use one of his points to change his bid as well, but decides that he still has a good chance and it isn't as important to him as keeping those points for later.

By limiting the number of times a player can change their bid, you will gain some advantage from a blind bidding system (since players will be somewhat reluctant to change their opening bid now if it means they can not later), but still allow for a more complex series of bets, raises, and so forth.

Hope that helps.

~Joel

The core system is a die-pool-count-successes type system, which is what the rolled d6's are used for.

The reserve points are somewhat paralel to say Willpower/Blood/Whatever in WoD or Pool Dice in TSoY- but there's just so darn many of them flying around that it's tactically advantageous to see what your opponent is doing before you bid.  GM vs. player conflicts aren't what I'm concerned about: PvP conflicts are where this has problems.

The reserves are a limited resource, but they play a very big roll in the system.  You can expect to be spending at least a few points on most rolls, and lots on really important rolls.

The possible solutions presented so far aren't really what I'm looking for.  Lewis, yours doesn't really do anything about the 'last person to bid wins' problem, and formalizes it with a bidding initiative roll.  J, yours is a bit more interesting, but could still result in back and forth bidding, which I think slows the game down.