A while back I put up some notes on a game I was working on. Details can be found in this other post but here's the quick summary:

1. Characters are agents of Balance in a 5-fold cosmos.
2. The dice mechanic: make an opposed roll with a number of d10s equal to the relevant attribute. Highest roll wins. If your highest roll is doubles (or triples) then add them together to determine your rolled value.
3. Characters can bend and recreate reality locally. One of the attributes works for this.

The main snag I hit was that what I wanted to emphasize was the theme of Retaining Balance. Balance is the largest aspect of the game and concept: balancing your previous mundane life with your cosmic perspective, balancing creation and destruction, balancing your power and your responsibility.

But I can't think of a mechanic to show and reinforce this premise.

I decided to have the gameplay method bring some of this about by having the characters assigned to dealing with outbreaks of Entropy and Chaos on their former homeworlds. That would be like their "beat". This would serve to contrast the unknowing lives of mundanes against dealing with menaces from abstract realms of existence. This would also prevent them from making pat decisions without thinking of the consequences. ("This world's infested with entropy. Let's just declare it a loss and destroy it." "Wait, my mother lives there!")

But is that enough? Shouldn't the mechanics of the game help enforce the style of play I'm trying to push?

I've hit a barrier and am looking for some feedback to help me push through it. Any advice is welcome.

My favorite mechanic for this sort of thing works like this (posted in the most generic fashion I can think of).

You have some pair of traits that always add up to some number. Let's say Trait A and Trait B equal ten. Such that if Trait A goes up, Trait B goes down the same amount. The effectiveness of the character is determined by multiplying the two taits together. Thus, in this case, the best case would be where each was a 5 for a 25 total effectiveness rating. You'll note that the worst rating is 9 (9x1) or zero if you allow either trait to go to zero (or, heck, negative if that works).

This works for a number of different cases. For example, someone recently had a mechanic where you rolled a number of dice equal to a rating to get over that rating. This had the best outcome with a rating at the center of the die type's range. It's the same thing, because calculating expected value is done by multiplying the number of dice my the chance of success.

Does this give you any ideas?

Mike

Yes, but here's the attributes I have (slightly tweaked from the original post).

Brawn - physical size and power.
Speed - a measure of how fast you think and react.

These two could be opposed but there's no real reason to.

Empathy - the ability to continue to relate to others outside of the war that you fight in.

Creativity - a measure of your ability to shape Potential and Dream.

Focus - your sense of self and the ability to ignore external distraction and stimulus. This is what allows you to preserve your sense of self when you travel outside of Reality. This is also the trait that makes you stand out and thus be chosen to be an Agent.

Creativity and Focus are linked in that a Creativity without Focus doesn't allow you to alter reality (Ideas without Power). Focus without Creativity makes you resistant to changes but equally unable to alter reality (Power without Ideas).

Focus would also not really be used as actively (meaning no die rolls) but is more of a measure of raw ability (like Arete in Mage).

The scale goes from 1 (mundane) to 5 (freakin Cosmic Master). Agents have minimums of 2 after undergoing their training. Mundanes have Focus-0 because they can't shape reality or deal with unreality. A few might have Focus-1 (such as typical PCs before their training). These people have limited abilities to bend reality and depending on their world are psychics, mages, witches, etc.

So there's most of the mechanics. (I haven't locked down shaping reality formally yet.) How or where should they be balanced by something else, I'm not sure.

Hi wyrdlyng,

I personally like what Mike's saying about a sliding scale (I remember something similar to that used to track alignment back in the day) but you might be reluctant to tweak your mechanics that far.

A simpler (and somewhat less elegant) solution would be to add another trait---call it Distraction (that's really a bad name, what I'm looking for is some cool sounding antonym for Focus). Distraction would be rated from 1-5 but it would fluctuate during play somehow. For each point in Distraction, the character would detract the same number from his Focus, effectively lowering his power level as he struggled to maintain a grasp on his sanity, awareness of the great cosmic struggle, what have you.

Does that make any sense?

You could also have permanent Distraction and temporary Distraction, say you need 10 points of temporary Distraction to get one point of permanent. Of course permanent might not be the best word either because I think there should be some way of getting rid of permanent distraction.

Anyway, hope this helps.

Pete

Demonspahn wrote: A simpler (and somewhat less elegant) solution would be to add another trait---call it Distraction (that's really a bad name, what I'm looking for is some cool sounding antonym for Focus). Distraction would be rated from 1-5 but it would fluctuate during play somehow. For each point in Distraction, the character would detract the same number from his Focus, effectively lowering his power level as he struggled to maintain a grasp on his sanity, awareness of the great cosmic struggle, what have you.

Does that make any sense?

Demonspahn wrote: You could also have permanent Distraction and temporary Distraction, say you need 10 points of temporary Distraction to get one point of permanent. Of course permanent might not be the best word either because I think there should be some way of getting rid of permanent distraction.

I can tie this attribute into the rules for altering reality.

Thanks for triggering my brain. It needs a jumpstart every now and then.