Development Cycle: A Brief Dice Mechanic
Edit: Forgot the text, ha!
So last night I came up with an intriguing dice system for our as of yet unnamed game. It’s pretty simple.
It’s a roll under system vs. how challenging the task at hand is, rather than how good you are at a skill. Your stats, such as Strength, determine how many dice you roll, and you skill determines the size of the dice you roll. So if I had a 3 in Strength and a d8 in Brawn and I wanted to lift a rock, my GM would determine the challenge of lifting that rock from 1-19, with 1 being nearly impossible and 19 being almost impossible to fail. Let’s say she said the challenge was a 7. I would roll 3d8 and if any of those dice came up as 7 or below, I would succeed. I am thinking about some things requiring multiple successes at higher levels of challenge, maybe to represent complexity, great danger, ect.
There are two more mechanics that come into play. The first is Action Points. Whenever you roll at least one pair of matching dice on a roll, you get a single Action Point, that lets you activate abilities and maybe even fudge rolls or change the narrative a bit.
The other mechanic is the Danger Tracker: whenever you roll and at least one of the dice is at the top of the die (4 for a d4, 6 for a d6 ect.) , the Danger Tracker goes up and gives the GM more ammo to mess with the players or maybe even makes the game generally harder. This gives us a nice “death spiral” that pushes the narrative along.
As a side note, as you progress, both Action Points and the Danger Tracker will become more common place. Maybe this represents and oncoming disaster? I’ll have to think about that some.
Signed,
Mythossanta/Benjamin S. Paulson
