The game session is getting boring, the GM is running into a wall, and so he resorts to the old standby:

GM: "An army of like thirty ninjas jump out of nowhere!"

PCs (feigning surprise): "Oh boy, NINJAS!"

GM: "I'll say this is a medium length conflict."

They grab what looks like a multicolored ruler and set it on the table. The first square is labeled "Lose" and the last square is labeled "Win." The arrangement is as follows:

LOSE-RED-RED-YELLOW-YELLOW-GREEN-GREEN-WIN

They pull out some 6-sided dice; a red die, two yellow dice, and a green die. It looks like these dice have custom sides. The GM gets a normally labeled 6-sided die for himself.

The dice are as follows:

Lose: You tried and failed. Move back 1 square.
Pause: You were about to do something dumb but you caught yourself. Don't move.
Win: You tried and succeeded. Move forward 1 square.
Critical x2: You tried and you dominated. Move forward 2 squares.

THE FORCEFUL DIE (RED)
you roll this one when you're not holding back

1: lose
2: lose
3: pause
4: win
5: win
6: critical x2

THE CAREFUL DIE (GREEN)
you roll this one when you're paying attention

1: lose
2: pause
3: pause
4: win
5: win
6: win

THE QUICK DICE (YELLOW)
you roll these two dice when you're rushing

1: lose
2: lose
3: pause
4: win
5: win
6: win

1: lose
2: lose
3: pause
4: win
5: win
6: win

The heroes each have a token set on the center-most of the yellow squares. In this situation, it's two yellow squares, so the GM decides to start them off on the one closer to the winning side (these are just ninjas after all, not something serious). The GM can start the heroes anywhere on the spectrum he wants, but usually on the Yellow.

LOSE-RED-RED-YELLOW-YELLOW-GREEN-GREEN-WIN

PC 1's turn; he grabs the quick dice (you get a reroll if you're using the properly colored dice. This is the 'if you don't like your result, roll again and you have to accept the second result even if it's worse' kind of rerolling.) This basically makes it so that when you're about to lose, you're more likely to resort to desperate tactics, while when you're winning you might want to risk less to make sure you stay on top.

He describes two actions (because he's being quick) and rolls, getting a Lose, and a Win. So he doesn't move at all. This isn't to his liking, so he rerolls. Lose Lose. Sorry, dude; you move back two squares -- closer to the LOSE square!

Now the ninjas can do stuff, too. Every time a hero has a turn, the GM gets a turn, too! The GM doesn't roll those goofy colored dice tho he's got a normal one and compares the result to the PC's defenses, D&D style. On a "hit," the hero in question moves back one square.

Once per turn, you may spend a point of stamina to move forward one square automatically. You can't roll the dice on this same turn. When you have zero stamina, your character dies/leaves the story/turns evil/whatever. Basically, you can influence victory over the conflict through sheer guts, but it takes a lot out of you. Most characters have two points of stamina, but TOUGH ones have four (in exchange they are easier for the GM to smack around). If the stakes of the conflict are something along the lines of "your face is at stake" you can die that way, too.

Oh yeah, also your character has a favored way of doing things. If you're a CAREFUL character, for example, you can always re-roll the Careful Die, even if you're on a red or yellow space. This doesn't stack, though, so on a green space you can still only reroll once. It does mean that you may choose between your favored die or the appropriately colored die on the other two colors, though. Yay for the illusion of variety!

So basically, this system makes the stakes of the conflict nice and visible in the form of a scale, where it's assumed that whatever you do is done for the purpose of getting closer to the WIN side of the scale. This frees you up to describe whatever you want, while the three kinds of dice let you get a bit more specific; you're either doing something vaguely recklessly, rushed, or precise. The Pause result makes the careful characters look like badasses who only mess up 1 out of 6 times, while the Critical x2 lets the characters who put everything into it feel powerful. The quick dice lets you describe TWO actions, which feels "quick" I hope, but then again reading two results instead of one might, ironically(?), slow the game down.

Now the stamina rules exist to give the heroes an edge while also creating the whole "win but fail," "succeed but lose" concept. You can also die if you land on LOSE, but only if the GM tells you beforehand. I haven't yet decided on how forfeiting would work. The stamina rules might need some editing.

This "battle track" can also be used for social conflicts I bet. Forceful statements, rushed statements, careful ones, yeah I can see it. Social stamina would be... like resolve or something.

So, thoughts? criticisms? gushing praise? pure unadulterated hatred? Lay it on me!

Hi,

Assuming you want to engage fiction, that's not happening there. There is no fictional coupling device, as I'd put it.

To give a rough example by changing your layout

THE CAREFUL DIE (GREEN)
you roll this one when you're paying attention

1: lose
2: The GM, after listening to your narrations for your character so far, whether you pause or lose
3: pause
4: The GM, after listening to your narrations for your character so far, whether you pause or win
5: win
6: win

Granted the coupler will only come in one third of the time. But apart from that, here an opportunity is given for someone to react to the fiction, and to also choose one of the options. And it's unlike in traditional RPG's, where the GM can set an unlimmited difficulty number (and is only limited by the groups passive aggressive bitchyness) or auto allow the action through.

I'm not saying this is exactly how you should do it - I'm basically inserting a particular imagination coupler in your mechanics, since it'd probably make more sense that way. It's basically to give the idea of someones judgement controlling the currency, but NOT in an absolute way that traditional RPG's do. Only in a limited window, as defined by system.

That's if you want to engage fiction with this. You might not and want it pure engagement of mechanics with a nifty layer of fiction painted onto the mechanics, or inspiring fiction just for it's own sake rather than inspiring fiction that has a chance of feeding back and affecting currency.

It seems to me that this battle track method could detach players from the fiction i.e. the focus seems to be set on the mechanics rather than on what they are supposed to represent.

@ Callan S.

That's if you want to engage fiction with this. You might not and want it pure engagement of mechanics with a nifty layer of fiction painted onto the mechanics, or inspiring fiction just for it's own sake rather than inspiring fiction that has a chance of feeding back and affecting currency.

It seems to me that this battle track method could detach players from the fiction i.e. the focus seems to be set on the mechanics rather than on what they are supposed to represent.

Let's say that a player (GM or hero or otherwise) is explicitly not allowed to roll the dice without narrating something occurring in the fiction. Would that mitigate the "detachment" problem at all?

So it is up to the participants to interpret the dice?  Are there mechanics devised to ground the players to the fiction or is it that anything goes within the broad confines of the roll?

I am not a fan of subjective wishy-washyness when it comes to the mechanics.

This is basically the kernel from which I started Zombie Cinema. The problem with the basic set-up is that you have no way for escalating the conflict towards a climax here; the system doesn't enforce a conclusion in other words, which might cause a conflict to drag on unnecessarily long.

The way I solved this in Zombie Cinema was to make the loss space of the track move: after each round move that space up one step, thus ensuring that the characters bouncing up and down the track sooner or later either win or lose instead of just bouncing indefinitely. (Of course in practice it's not the space that I move, it's a "zombie pawn" that comes up the spaces.)

Another way to ensure solution is to increase the variability of the results over time. For example, you could say that everybody spends a point of stamina every time they roll a die, and when the points run out they start losing ground every turn. Perhaps the stamina pool fills up each time it empties, but at the cost of adding a "fatigue die" into the rolls, thus ensuring a resolution over time. Or maybe it's not a fatigue die, but simply a multiplier: whatever results you roll, they're doubled after a certain number of turns; the extra volatility does not need to be entirely negative, after all, as long as it increases the stakes of individual turns in relation to the overall conflict.

A third way to ensure resolution is to skew the math against losing or against winning so strongly that it's unlikely for the conflict to drag on too long. For example, if you basically intend the player characters to win all conflicts, then you might make sure that the dice that are rolled favour them clearly - perhaps all effects added together amount to an average of +1 space on the track per round per character, for example. After ensuring this you can actually control the length of conflict relatively well by simply choosing how far from the victory space the players start from: they likely won't lose the conflict (not unless they right next to it, anyway) and that loss outcome is really not supposed to ever happen, but instead you know that after X rounds of vigorous dice-rolling the players will win and the game can move on. This sort of conflict-resolution mechanic, while seemingly pro forma, might be pretty good for a game where the GM doesn't actually want to put the outcome under question; the journey is more important than the goal, or something like that.

I like the dispositions: hasty, cautious, forceful.

This "battle track" can also be used for social conflicts I bet. Forceful statements, rushed statements, careful ones, yeah I can see it. Social stamina would be... like resolve or something.

So I took a hard look at the game I was making here and essentially decided that everything I was REALLY trying to accomplish was already done -- and, frankly, done better and with more elegance -- by Trollbabe, without the use of gimmicky battle tracks or what have you.

Back to the drawing board...