First, I'd like to preface this by saying that I've been a lurker on this site for a long time and am glad that I finally took the initiative to count myself as a member of this community. I've pored through many different threads on here and it has been very enlightening, so I wanted to give a thank you to the community as a whole. Thanks everyone.

Pleasantries now having been dispensed, I recently had a burst of inspiration whilst thinking about the potential design for a game I wanted to run focused on a town during a zombie apocalypse. When I initially sat down, I began with a flurry of ideas that would be very conducive to such a setting, only to realize down the line that many of the things I wanted to include would lead to a broken game with the implementation I was thinking of.

Since that initial attempt (which I've chalked up as trying to make a bunch of mechanics and trying to patch them together), I have arrived at the conclusion that what I really ought to do is make a modular system that I can plug a setting into, rather than create an elaborate system to service a single setting.

At the current time, the goals for my system are as follows:

1) The system must be lightweight
I want a system where the mechanics are designed to resolve situations quickly and efficiently. I want there to be a minimal amount of time working out results from the mechanics, as to avoid stop-and-go gameplay.

2) Task resolution must be intuitive
This goes hand in hand with the system being lightweight, in that I want someone to be able to read through the rules and be able to understand what a mechanic does, and further, why it exists at all, without confusion. I believe that intuitive mechanics are more likely to lead to more immersive gameplay.

3) The system must be able to accommodate multiple game styles.
The system should be modular, and should thus be able to have any setting tailored to it with a minimal amount of work. It should also be able to accommodate both groups with and without a designated GM. I want my system to be able service both a theatric style of play as well as a smaller scope in task resolution.

Now that my three goals for the system have been outlined, I can get to the meat of it all. At the current juncture in time, my major hang-up is that I'm not sure how elegant my mechanics are. They are pretty simple (in my estimation) but I'm not quite sure as to how serviceable they are, with my goals in mind.

My philosophy is that the only game mechanics that are really needed (defined loosely) are those that regard task resolution. I don't believe that Task Resolution and Conflict resolution are necessarily different things. They can be, but don't have to be. With that take, My basic mechanic for all skill-based tasks is as follows:

1)The GM (or group of players as a whole) decide on the difficulty of a certain action and assign it a numerical rating (referred to as DR).

2)The player attempting the action rolls against his Skill Rank a number of d10's equal to the relevant Stat Rank (In the next part section, I will explain the relation ship between Skill Ranks and stat Ranks). Each die that is above the skill rank number is counted as a success, with a roll of 10 counting as 2 successes, unless the skill rank is also 10 (more on this later). Rolls of 1 are never considered successes.

3) If the number of successes is equal or greater than the DR, then the player fully succeeds at his actions. If the number of successes is greater than half the DR, then the action is at least partially successful. If the number of successes is less than the DR, the result is a failure. If the player doesn't roll any successes, there is a chance for a fumble.

The mechanic for simple aptitude based actions (such as lifting a heavy object) is similar, but does not involve skills,a nd only a single die is rolled.

1) The GM or player group assigns a DR to the given action.

2) The player attempting the action rolls 1d10 and adds it to the relevant stat.

3) If the total meets or exceeds the DR, the action is successful. If the total is equal or greater than half the DR, it is partially successful. If less thant he DR, the action is unsuccessful. If the d10 roll is a 1, then there is a chance for a fumble.

A Quick Primer on Stats vs Skills

The hard and fast difference between Stats and Skills is that Stats are general aptitudes for certain types of actions, and Skills are basically the ease in which you can apply your aptitudes to specialized actions.

An example of a Stat could be Might, which would cover acts of muscular prowess.
An example of a Skill could be Bludgeoning, which would cover the use of heavy objects
as tools for, well, bludgeoning.

Stats run on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being pretty lousy and 10 being very good.
Skills run on a scale of 10 to 1 with 10 being virtually inept and 1 being the best you can be.

That is basically all there is without delving into the Character Creation and Experience aspects(as well as specific rules regarding fumbles, and bonuses for multiple people working in concert).Having concluded with the task resolution protion, I have a few questions.

Does the task resolution system I have proposed seem to be in line with my stated goals?

Do you see any glaring deficiencies regarding the mechanics that could cause inexplicable results?

Are there similar task resolution systems in other games. If there are, what were some pros and cons of such systems, and how might I address them in my system?

Could you see yourself being able to use this mechanic in a game, and does my description have enough clarity for someone to easily pick up on it?

I don't like your split between aptitude based and skill based tasks.  As a weightlifter would say, there is a technique to how they do it, skills applies even to such a "simple" task.  It also presents problems in that its a very diufferent form of resolution, which could lead to conflicts and confusion about which to use or odd results.

I think your "skill based tasks" system all seems serviceable, I have one suggestion though.  Basically at the moment, stats give dice and skill gives better odds at turning those dice into successes.  This means there will be tasks that a person with insufficient stat is unable to achieve because they simply can't get enough dice (with a grey area where they might be lucky rolling tens).  Thus, the proverbial 98lb weakling can never lift the boulder.  Thats reasonable enough, but seeing as stats and skills are both rated positively,  you can switch this around for some skills or some situations, and have the skill rating determine dice and the stat determine successes.  That's neatly symmetrical and doesn't call upon a different methodology, even if it is a special or particular case.

I've been a lurker on this site for a long time...The system must be able to accommodate multiple game styles.

First off, I can see your point about skills influencing even simple tasks, but the reason for having a separate mechanic for simple tasks based solely on Stats and a roll is so that it is simple and doesn't require a skill for every menial task to be performed or a modifier for every skill that might have something to do with it. If a skill truly does have enough overlap for a certain task, then one could always have the difficulty rating of the task changed to reflect that. There needn't be a built in mechanic for modifying tasks with skills when the tasks aren't strictly related to them. I think it's a matter of the GM or the player group's discretion, and to include more in a mechanic than needs to be lends to make the system unnecessarily bulky.

However, I can see how it's possible to have confusion between which mechanic to use. But unless I want to have a different skills for every general type of action (in which case having Stats at all are only to serve the mechanic for using a skill), then it necessitates having a separate mechanic based simply on a Stat. The trade-off is essentially a smaller potential for confusion for a larger list of skills, as opposed to a larger potential for confusion but without having to worry about whether or not a skill has been included to encompass a certain task.

And part of me wants to keep a separate mechanic for stats, if only for the fact that if some tasks are governed by skills, and some by stats, then it offers a bit of protection as far as having more dice for skill rolls by encouraging a player to focus at least an extra point or two in a stat, rather than a skill, during character generation, which leads to a character that can succeed at more things, which in turn offers a small amount of protection from having a character that fails at everyone, which isn't particularly fun to play.

For these reasons, it seems more reasonable to me to say that tasks that aren't explicitly governed by a skill are rolled simply taking the governing stat in mind.

In regard to the Stat's Vs Skills governing the amount of dice, I'm not sure why it makes a difference. The difference in dice between any given example don't matter at all until put into context with the difficulty rating. If it's something that should be attainable for someone completely useless and/or unskilled, it should have a very low difficulty rating anyway. However, I hadn't mentioned that there was another way to add dice to a roll, mostly because the explanation hinged off my experience system, which I had yet to explain. My experience system, in a nutshell is that throughout gameplay, players accrue Character Points (CP), which can be used to buy skills. Once a player has a CP, they can either opt to buy a new rank in a skill, a higher stat, or convert the 1 CP into 10 Action Points (AP). Each AP can be used to add a single die to any Skill roll, or allow a reroll for Stat roll, to be declared before rolling occurs (in the event that a reroll is unneeded for a Stat Roll, the AP is not used).... Alternately, I was thinking that instead a player would accrue AP, and upconvert them to CP so they could use AP more quickly, but that's a conversation for another thread.

As far as my wanting to accommodate multiple game styles, I think it's just a matter of pragmatism. I would much rather make a single set of mechanics that can fit in multiple situations rather than have to work on a new set every time I want to play a different kind of game.

Thanks for your input,and I hope I didn't come off as being defensive about your criticisms. I was just trying to explain the thought processes behind my decisions. If you have any suggestions as to how I could incorporate 

David P. wrote: The system should be modular, and should thus be able to have any setting tailored to it with a minimal amount of work.

Garbados wrote:

In that case, why not come up with a game independent of this zombie scenario, and then build zombies as a module?

Your proposed dice system is clean and elegant, and though some wording may seem off to the sensibilities of some, its basic attributes/skill paradigm is tried and true. So, yeah, I'd say it's spot on for your stated goals.

For my own curiosity, what kind of play experience do you want your game to have? What do you want your players to be thinking about while they play? I'm not sure if that's an easy question to answer, or if it really makes sense, but I'll ask it and we can go from there.

David wrote:
First, I'd like to preface this by saying that I've been a lurker on this site for a long time and am glad that I finally took the initiative to count myself as a member of this community. I've pored through many different threads on here and it has been very enlightening, so I wanted to give a thank you to the community as a whole. Thanks everyone.
(snip...)

David wrote:
(...snip)I don't believe that Task Resolution and Conflict resolution are necessarily different things. They can be, but don't have to be.(snip...)

The only critique I might offer goes back to the stat v. skill dichotomy. You should work out the probabilities. I wouldn't be surprised at all if either stats or skills have too much weight. The system is very similar to the original World of Darkness die pool mechanic, and I know they eventually nixed the variable target numbers (on a die by die bases) for achieving successes because it over powered other factors in determining the probabilities of the outcome.

And you could have a very small list of skills with no need for attributes and still have a fully serviceable game. Hell, Might could be a skill, it is in some games I've played, it is. Two stats seem like a good idea, and I think your basic reasoning for having them is sound enough, but if your concerned about balance, there are plenty of examples of games where the stat/skill split has caused them to do major system revision through editions (D&D, White Wolf, the L5R/7th Sea system, etc...)

Also, how do you determine degrees of success beyond "partial" and "full" is there a way to succeed really well?

Okay, so I've spent some time thinking about the points brought up in the last two posts, and I didn't want to answer until I felt I had  an answer worth posting.

First off, regarding the stat vs skill dichotomy... I haven't really had much time int he last week to do all the rolls manually, and I haven't been a fan of any of the dice-rolling programs I've found circulating on the web, so I've decided that I would simply write my own, which I will be starting today using Visual Basic. I'll get back to you after I see what the results look like.

In regard to IIEE... Intention occurs when a player says "I want to do X". Execution comes after the dice are rolled. In a GM run game, ideally, the GM would interpret the results. In a group solely comprised of players, the acting character (the one who rolled the dice) would explain what the effect was, and the rest of the group determines whether it sounds reasonable. The basic idea is that a player announces their intention, rolls the dice, and then the results are determines (to me, the step of initiation really only has weight in the event of failure, as a way to pinpoint why something didn't work out as the player intended). I hadn't noted anything about IIEE in my original post mostly because I was mostly concerned about whether there was an intrinsic deficiency in the mechanic and the set-up of the stats and skills.

Which brings us to the problem of Skill Rank 1 vs a 1 on a die roll... At this point, I've got a few different ideas floating around in my head about what the benefit of having a Skill Rank of 1 would be. My first thought was that a 1 would make any succeeding roll count as 2 successes. However, that could easily upset the mechanic by making nearly every task a breeze for anyone who has a skill rank 1 and points in the applicable Stat. My second thought was to overhaul the system completely, and say that for any given roll, the amount of successes is determined based on the difference between the dice rolls and the skills rank.  The problem with that is that if it were on a 1:1 basis, then it's just artificial inflation of the numbers needed, and if it were a 2: or 3:1 or whathaveyou, then the mechanic takes a bit longer to employ. My third idea (which is the one I'm leaning to, is simply that for any given task, a character with a Skill Rank of 1 automatically gets 1 success in addition the the amount of the die roll. The problem, however, with that, is that doesn't seem very organic with the rest of the system, and seemed a little bit tacked on.

On the note of Conlict vs. Task Resolution, please note that I didn't say that they were the same, I said they weren't neccesarily different. The fact is that conflict resolution is at base, just a specialized form of task resolution. You're trying to achieve a certain effect... the only difference is that another party is acting as an obstacle or a hindrance. And the fact is that the mechanic for task resolution could fit with conflict resolution without having to chance the interpretation of anything, because the interpretation of the dice is the providence of GM or Player-Group discretion, and not a mechanic.