No character creation as yet, but the engine is looking like playtest shape. I'm think I'm going to use this for a dragon slayer game, since Scott never did anything with Draconis.

Inspirations:

The Pool - James V. West
Otherkind - Vincent Baker
Draconis - Scott Knipe
Paladin - Clinton R. Nixon
Trollbabe - Ron Edwards
Fable - Benjamin E. Sones

Each character has three Aspects: Body, Mind, Spirit

Aspects range from 1 to 5 (average 3), used as targets for rolls. Each die that comes up equal to or less than the Aspect in question is a success.

Passions are things the character feels strongly about - important posessions, skills, codes of honor, relationships, ideals, and the like. Passions are the character's emotional engine. A character can draw on a Passion to get extra dice for a roll. To do this, the character's player simply explains how the Passion is relevant to the current situation, then adds a number of dice equal to the Passion's rating. Only one Passion can be used per roll. Whoever narrates the roll should be sure to incorporate the Passion into the narration. Passions are rated according to their importance to the character. The minimum rating for a Passion is 1, the maximum is 6. Passions need to be something meaningful to the character as a person. "Sword" is not a good Passion. Try, "the sword Lord Tirion gave him after he saved Lord Tirion's life."

Passions can be raised by use. Every time a Passion adds dice to a roll, check off one of the three character sheet boxes next to the Passion in question. When you fill in the last box, roll 1d6. If the roll is greater than the Passion's current level, the Passion goes up by one. Otherwise, erase the check marks.

New Passions can only be gained as a result of play. If you want a new Passion, explain to the GM why your character cares enough to warrant its creation. The GM must approve the Passion before you can add it to your character sheet. New Passions start out at level 1.

Power represents the character's vigor and life essence. A character has 9 levels of Power. When a character is hurt, cross out the Power level equal to the damage suffered. If that Power level has already been crossed out, cross out the next larger Power level. Lost Power levels replenish themselves between sessions. If the final (ninth) Power level is ever crossed off, the character is Defeated. Just what "Defeated" means depends on the context of the game. In combat, Defeat often means death. Outside of combat, it might result in insanity, or a broken will, for example. In any case, a Defeated character is permanently removed from the game as a PC. If the character actually survived the Defeat, it's possible that the GM may choose to keep the character in the game as an NPC.

There are 5 Failings: Anger, Fear, Greed, Lust, and Pride. Each character has a list of Failings numbered from 1 to 6. Each of the 5 failings must be listed at least once. The player decides which Failing to list twice.

When making a roll involving a Passion, the player has the option of making a Failing roll. Instead of adding the Passion's dice to the roll, reduce the Passion's rating by 1, and roll 1d6. Look up the roll on the character's Failings list to see which Failing the character betrayed his Passion to. Whoever narrates the roll should be sure to incorporate the character's Failing into the narration. The player may then cross out any available Power level and add a number of dice to his roll equal to the Power level crossed out. Yes, you can even cross out the final, 9th Power level to get 9 dice. The narration of the roll, however it turns out, must include your character's suitably spectacular end.

If a level one Passion is lowered, that Passion is removed from the character sheet. The character no longer cares enough about it to call it a Passion.

Dice rolls are made to resolve conflicts. When only one PC is involvde, the GM tells the player which Aspect the conflict involves. The GM also sets the Scale of the conflict and takes the appropriate number of dice. If the Scale is anything less than Mundane, then the player shouldn't be rolling.

Mundane 3
Heroic 4
Legendary 5
Epic 7
Mythical 9

The player then rolls 3 dice, plus any Passion dice or Power dice from a Failing. Each die that comes up equal to or less than the Aspect in question is a success. The GM rolls the Scale dice. Each scale die that turns up a 3 or less cancels out one of the character's successes.

The player uses uncancelled successes to pick from the following list (unpicked items default to GM control).

Outcome - Success (Picked) / Failure (Unpicked)
Degree - Total (Picked) / Marginal (Unpicked)
Narration - Player (Picked) / GM (Unpicked)
Damage to Opponent - Equal to PC Total Successes (Picked) / None (Unpicked)
Damage to Self - None (Picked) / Equal to GM Total Successes (Unpicked)

PC vs. PC conflicts are handled in exactly the same way, with the second player's successes replacing the Scale roll of the GM. The player with remaining successes buys his options, the GM handles the rest. The losing PC gets nothing.

I'm curious about how you see things getting resolved using the resolution system...could you provide a couple of examples?

Thanks
Sparky

Sparky wrote: I'm curious about how you see things getting resolved using the resolution system...could you provide a couple of examples?

Count me in on a playtest if you run one with the indie-netgamers!

Always liked the Otherkind dice assignment idea.

:)
Alright! I can picture a gritty setting, with tragic characters working quite well here. Though, it doesn't limit itself to that. Nicely done. (Of course, that means you have to run it for us. :D )

:(
The failings system takes a couple of readings to get solid, and may not appeal to the masses (though, I like it). If your going to put it together formally, I would definitely want an example. Also, maybe a benifit of narrating (or some other cost) would be to choose your own failing, instead of rolling it, though I'm a bit on the fence with that one.

:D
One thing I would really like to see is something kind of like the Insight attribute in TRoS. Since I, as a player, could "kill off" my character at any time, it would be neat if I could do things to influence the passions of the next character to take his place, instead of starting from scratch.

P.S.
I wasn't joking. You have to run this one for us!

MachMoth wrote:
The failings system takes a couple of readings to get solid, and may not appeal to the masses (though, I like it). If your going to put it together formally, I would definitely want an example. Also, maybe a benifit of narrating (or some other cost) would be to choose your own failing, instead of rolling it, though I'm a bit on the fence with that one.

One thing I would really like to see is something kind of like the Insight attribute in TRoS. Since I, as a player, could "kill off" my character at any time, it would be neat if I could do things to influence the passions of the next character to take his place, instead of starting from scratch.

P.S.
I wasn't joking. You have to run this one for us!

So, I hacked out some more mechanics this evening with Moth on IRC.

Chargen is pretty simple stuff, mechanically:

Distribute 9 points among the Aspects. A starting character may have as many Passions as the player wishes. One of the passions may be level 4, two of them may be level 3, three of them may be level 2, all the rest are level 1. The player may save any or all of the non-level-1 Passions for later definition. Passions saved from chargen can be defined by the player at any time during subsequent play.

Moth sold me on his idea of defeated characters contributing to the creation of replacement characters; I'm pretty happy with the mechanics we came up with for that:

Each time you lower one of your character's Passions, add one to your character's Saga score. A newly created character has a Saga score of zero. Saga points do not have a during-play function. Instead, Saga points are used when a player is creating a new character to replace a defeated character. After determining the new character's Passions, the player may make a number of Passion improvement rolls (exactly as previously described) equal to the defeated character's Saga score. These rolls may be made on any of the new character's Passions. The only limit on the number of attempt to raise a single passion is the number of improvement rolls available.

This game looks very interesting; I might give it a spin some time.

Comment on the Passion Improvement system: It's clunky. I don't want to be checking off little boxes during play. It's totally unrelated to what I'm doing, takes time, and doesn't take into accound how much passion was actually put into using the passion.

To fix this, I suggest changing the phrase "When you fill in the last box," to "At the end of a scene in which a Passion played a major role." That eliminates what I suspect could be quite a deal of book-keeping and takes circumstance and situation more into account.

Good luck with this, it's looking quite cool.
--Jeff

Jeph wrote: Comment on the Passion Improvement system: It's clunky. I don't want to be checking off little boxes during play. It's totally unrelated to what I'm doing, takes time, and doesn't take into accound how much passion was actually put into using the passion.

Chargen is now 8 points for the 3 attributes, not 9. Just FYI.

Paganini wrote: It's not an unusual mechanic. I mean, I know that's not exactly a counter argument, but really, this method has been used a lot - it's time tested. It's interesting that you say "klunky," because I personally feel it's one of the more elegant parts of the system; it fufills its function with no extra fuss. The search time involved is practically nil. Maybe you could elaborate a bit?

Jeph wrote: I was speaking mostly in a physical sense, rather than aesthetic. I agree that the concept is quite elegant, and like it a lot--however, it currently adds 1-2 extra steps to almost every die roll. Each time you use a Passion, you have to pick up your pencil and mark a box, in addition to gather and roll your dice. Every third time, you also have to erase your marks, and roll another die above and beyond those to resolve the conflict. The micromanagement of it just seems out of place to me, in the context of the rest of the game.

How bout this for an alternative (not that I mind the current system at all):

Each time a passion adds dice to a roll, roll a # of dice equal to your passion. If they all come up six, that passion goes up by one. Otherwise, the passion stays the same.

I've found that die pool rolls like that get really sticky, statistically around the higher numbers. I was going to suggest integrating it into the roll, like if you roll a number of sixes (or perhaps the actual value of the passion) equal to your passion number during your resolution roll, it goes up. However, past attempts at this lead to a very sharp stat curve, making low ones too easy, and high ones too hard. That is part of the reason I actually went back to a system similar to the tally method in my die pool creation. I added back a system to gain points through the roll, but that only worked because it worked with the point counting, not against it.

Currently, a Passion will advance every 18/(6-current rating) uses. Thus, if you have a Passion at 3, it will advance every 6 uses (on average). In total it should take 41.1 uses for a Passion that started at 1 to get to 6. If this, Paganini, is a rate that you are comfortable with, any alternate mechanic you devise should probably stay close to it. If it's a rate you're not happy with, then you definitely need a new mechanic. :^)

The one Lxander proposes would advance characters much more slowly--it would take 6 uses on average to advance from 1 to 2, as opposed to 3.6 using the original method. It would then take about 36 more uses to get up to 3, 128 to get to 4, 768 to get to 5, and 4,608 to get to 6, for a total of about 5,000 uses--in otherwords, advancement would go really really really slowly. I personally would prefer a quicker method, but again, to each his own.

Another possibility would be to have the Passion advance whenever all dice come up as successes. This would start and end advancement much slower than the original method, and start slower than Lxander's but end quicker. It also has the quirk of being tied to what Aspects the Passion is frequently used with.

Dumping from the Brain,
--Jeff

Jeph,

Thanks for posting the numbers! You've given me a lot to work with.

Here's the main concern as I see it:

The Passion raising mechanics mainly serve as a balance to the Power dice mechanics. That is, if you lower a Passion to take a Failing and get Power dice, you're eventually going to want to raise that Passion back up. I want Passion increase to be slow enough that the choice between adding Passion dice, and taking a Failing is something the player really has to think about. Yeah, you can lower the Passion and get dice now. The Power loss is a danger, true, but Power regenerates between sessions, so it's not a *lasting* danger. I want there to be a real choice between loads of dice now, and diminished effectiveness for the future.

One thing to think about is that taking a Failing doesn't really give you "loads" of dice--typically about 3 extra or so, I'd guess. (Side note: as I currently understand it, when you turn to a Failing you get bonus dice from power loss instead of your Passion. Is this correct, or do you get dice from both?) So, the cost of turning to a Failing should probably be worth about 3 bonus dice. Directly, this would be using the passion about three times at its reduced form before it goes back up again. At the moment the original mechanic is the one which most closely mirrors this rate, although the wait inflates the higher a passion gets...

This specifically is a bit odd in a purely statistical sense, for this reason: the relative benefit for turning to a Failing and the cost change inversely. IE, if you have a high passion, you will effectively gain fewer extra dice, but it will take you longer to get your Passion point back.

Example: I've got the passion of Knitting at 2, and I want to knit socks for the Dragon of Skuthing Deep. However, he has a high standard for his socks, and will kill me if I don't knit satisfactorily, so I turn to Fear and take out the 7th power level, for 7 bonus dice. It will take me 3.6 uses of my Knitting passion to return it to level 2, and I gained 5 extra dice on the roll. That's 1.28 bonus dice per passion use.

Suppose I'd had Knitting at 5. I'll still take out the 7th PL. So, in this case, I only get 2 extra dice on the roll, but it will take me 9 uses to return to my old PL. That's 0.22 bonus dice per passion use, about 1/6 the benefit I'd have gotten were my Passion at 2.

...I'm not sure what my point is. Just more food for thought I guess.
--Jeff

Paganini wrote: Each time you lower one of your character's Passions, add one to your character's Saga score. A newly created character has a Saga score of zero. Saga points do not have a during-play function. Instead, Saga points are used when a player is creating a new character to replace a defeated character. After determining the new character's Passions, the player may make a number of Passion improvement rolls (exactly as previously described) equal to the defeated character's Saga score. These rolls may be made on any of the new character's Passions. The only limit on the number of attempt to raise a single passion is the number of improvement rolls available.

Jeph,

You are correct: when a player takes a Failing, he does *not* get dice from the Passion.