I've got this game setting idea that I dig, and I was considering applying FUDGE rules to it, but man, what's the fun in that? I think I need to do the whole package.

So I started brainstorming some systems ideas, and I had a couple. I was messing with. See if these float your boat. Heck, you might have thought of 'em first. If you did, tell me to piss off and quit using your ideas. It's so rude of me.

1. Dn - Dn. That is, take the absolute value of the difference between the dice. Makes a nice curve. The only trouble I have with this is that it'd be tricky to apply levels of success than with a dice-pool mechanic. And the whole roll + stat + attribute thing isn't as fun as rolling gobs of dice.

2. Skills = number of dice in the dice pool. Attribute = TN to roll (or less) to get a success. OR you could switch it so that attribute = DN, or hey, maybe the player gets to choose which is which.

Anyone tried using either of those? I kind of like the latter one better. The first one I think would be okay if the numbers were small, so that you could measure something like Silhouettes MoS.

-Matt

Hi there,

I'm a dice-system junkie, so I love posts like this.

One thing you might consider is not Setting or System, but rather Premise. This term has some strange levels of meaning here at the Forge, so if you're interested, check out my big essay GNS and other matters of role-playing design. It works much better for me, anyway, when a game proposal gets discussed in these terms.

Looking at your notions though ...

1) This method produces a rather odd distribution, if I understand it correctly. Say we used d6's, so you have 36 possible outcomes on the dice. Of those, six instances are 0, ten instances are 1, eight instances are 2, six instances are 3, four instances are 4, and two instances are 5. It's a straight line with a sharp "corner" at one end.

You might also consider that there are lots more options out there besides "stat + skill" and "dice pool." Also that each of these contains a fair amount of diversity as well.

2) The game The Riddle of Steel uses the method in which the attribute provides the number of dice to roll and the skill provides the target number.

Finally, you mention the "degree of success" a couple of times (e.g. your reference to MoS in the Silhouette system). You might be surprised that quite a few systems out there don't concern themselves much with this effect, or achieve it in very simple ways that don't involve arithmetic.

Best,
Ron

Ron says wrote: I'm a dice-system junkie, so I love posts like this.

Ron Says wrote: One thing you might consider is not Setting or System, but rather Premise. This term has some strange levels of meaning here at the Forge, so if you're interested, check out my big essay GNS and other matters of role-playing design. It works much better for me, anyway, when a game proposal gets discussed in these terms.

1) This method produces a rather odd distribution, if I understand it correctly. Say we used d6's, so you have 36 possible outcomes on the dice. Of those, six instances are 0, ten instances are 1, eight instances are 2, six instances are 3, four instances are 4, and two instances are 5. It's a straight line with a sharp "corner" at one end.

You might also consider that there are lots more options out there besides "stat + skill" and "dice pool." Also that each of these contains a fair amount of diversity as well.

Finally, you mention the "degree of success" a couple of times (e.g. your reference to MoS in the Silhouette system). You might be surprised that quite a few systems out there don't concern themselves much with this effect, or achieve it in very simple ways that don't involve arithmetic.

Ron Edwards wrote:

One thing you might consider is not Setting or System, but rather Premise. This term has some strange levels of meaning here at the Forge, so if you're interested, check out my big essay GNS and other matters of role-playing design. It works much better for me, anyway, when a game proposal gets discussed in these terms.

Although it's interesting to look at possible mechanics for use in a game, and there are certainly things you can say about them, discussing them in a vacuum like this isn't particularly useful to game design.

That is, you've got to start from what it is you want your mechanic to accomplish, and then look for a way to accomplish this.

As an example, a friend of mine came to me with a game that was grossly unbalanced. By his reckoning, because of the way the setting worked, player characters would start with maybe ten to fifteen "hit points", but could work their way up to the point that they could survive attacks that would destroy planets, with seven-digit values. He could see no way to preserve the aspect of the game in which these advanced characters could throw around sci-fi weapons and still give new players any chance to survive in the setting. My response was to revamp his entire damage value system into three aspects, with limits on each. As characters advanced, they would be able to improve each aspect to achieve the effect of millions of points without actually having those millions of points. A character would have:
--Raw Points, that which actually measured the damage, but never more than one hundred.
--Damage dividers, the ability to withstand the damage from an attack by dividing it by a number not greater than ten before subtracting; this would be rounded up, so an attack that did one point of damage to a character with a 0 damage divider would still do that same one point to a 10 damage divider character.
--Probable Immunity; this was divided into types of damage, such as kinetic, photonic, radiation (I don't recall the entire list), and a character would build up this probable immunity in each area independently, up to 95%. If the attack was of a type to which the character had probable immunity, a die roll determined whether he avoided damage from that attack entirely, or took full damage.
Thus by combining the three aspects, one could create a character that could survive combats in which planets were destroyed, but could never escape the possibility that the next hit might be fatal.

Now, that worked very well for his game, because he had an objective of creating a game in which characters could become unbelievably powerful, god-like in the natural universe, but still at risk. The mechanic was designed to meet the objectives of the game. It would make no sense in most games.

So the question is, what do you want the mechanics of the game to accomplish? Until you know that, you really can't make intelligent choices about how to design them.

--M. J. Young

M. J. Young wrote: Although it's interesting to look at possible mechanics for use in a game, and there are certainly things you can say about them, discussing them in a vacuum like this isn't particularly useful to game design.

That is, you've got to start from what it is you want your mechanic to accomplish, and then look for a way to accomplish this.

itsmrwilson wrote: I want a mostly narrative feel, but a little simulationist as far as character introspection goes (consider that whole "what is it to be human" theme in Star Trek).

Mike Holmes wrote:

itsmrwilson wrote: I want a mostly narrative feel, but a little simulationist as far as character introspection goes (consider that whole "what is it to be human" theme in Star Trek).

What's the Sim part in that? "What is it to be human?" is about as Narrativist a premise as I can imagine.

Mike

A possible development of the “vampire” premise in terms of Character Exploration might be, What does it feel like to be a vampire?

Hi there,

Mike, I think you're being a little strict with the Narrativism thing - for purposes of the present topic, it wasn't hard for me to fill in the necessary gaps to make "What does it mean to be human" into a Simulationist example. Maybe "feel like" rather than "mean" would be the easiest translation (granted, it's shallow and vague, but c'mon, we're talking about a side point here).

Best,
Ron

My point is that I think that he could stay away from the Sim side, if he wanted by just looking at the "Humanity" question from the Narrativist angle. And his Star Trak reference is very Narrativist IMO, as well as it being about introspection (as opposed to, say, Kewl Powerz). In play the issue comes down to player decisions on such issues.

If it's just a matter of having CharGen where you have a lot of options that can make you extra-human, then that's a fine Sim point, as well.

Or he can do both, actually.

Mike