What do you want in a RPG? Part 3

This article is the third in a twelve part series that talks about the choices/decisions that need to be made when designing a role-playing game system.

In this article, I deal with time tracking, attempt resolution mechanics (including degrees of success), and special effects.

Q: What kind of time tracking system do you want in your game?

Time tracking systems can be concrete or abstract, complicated or simple.  I think the best way to explain these categorizations is by using examples.

I expect that most of the people reading this article have played a d20 system, so that’s where I’ll start.  In d20 systems, at least during combat, time is tracked in 6 second rounds.  Rounds are sub-divided into actions.  The available actions include at least standard actions (which might be called attack actions or something else), move actions, full round actions, and reactions.  The Star Wars Saga Edition RPG also has swift actions.  D&D 4e also has immediate actions, which are divided into multiple types; let’s just leave it at “it’s complicated.”  Within each round, each character gets a turn to spend their standard and move actions (and maybe swift or immediate if they have those), but they could choose to give those up to take a full round action instead.  Characters can perform reactions and/or immediate actions during other characters’ turns in response to triggering events; in some systems they may even be able to react to reactions.  If so, reactions are typically executed in the reverse order of their triggering.  The number of reactions each character gets in a turn may be limited (in particular I’m thinking of limits on “attacks of opportunity”).  The order in which characters take their turns is determined by an “initiative” system.  Initiative order is typically set by each character rolling a d20 at the beginning of combat and is then pretty much fixed for the duration of the encounter, but taking “readied actions” can change your place in the initiative order.  And there may be a surprise round before the first round of normal combat.  Outside of combat, things generally happen at “the speed of plot” but whether you get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep a day can have significant game mechanical repercussions.  I would classify time tracking in d20 systems as “concrete” and “complicated.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I offer the “Marvel Heroic Roleplaying” game as an example.  Who goes first in an encounter is chosen by the GM (who is called the “Watcher”).  That character’s player gets to roll one dice pool and then chooses which character gets to go next from among those who haven’t acted yet in the current round.  The character who goes last in the current round chooses who goes first in the next round (they can choose themselves).  Rounds don’t have fixed durations; they take however long is narratively appropriate.  Again, outside of combat things happen at the speed of plot (time passes and you jump to the next encounter).  I would classify time tracking in the Marvel Heroic RPG as “abstract” and “simple.”

In between these two extremes is the time tracking system in Fantasy Flight Games Edge of the Empire Star Wars RPG.  Everyone rolls for initiative, but this determines the initiative slots for TEAMS not individual characters.  When you cycle through the initiative order, anyone on a team can act in any of their team’s slots, but no character can act more than once in a round.  Rounds are abstract in length, and could represent a few seconds to a few minutes.  Within a particular character’s turn, they have an action and a maneuver to spend (although there are ways of getting additional maneuvers); they might also be able do something simple as an “incidental” action.  Because of the explicit but abstract action types and halfway-fixed initiative order, Edge of the Empire’s time tracking system is hard for me to classify as simple vs. complicated or abstract vs. concrete, but I’d guess that it lies slightly to the simple and abstract sides of the middle of both spectrums.

I’d classify the time tracking in my 3D RPG as “simple” and “concrete.”  The complete set of time units used in my system are: (6 second) rounds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, and millennia.  Regarding the millennia time unit, there are some fictional races that live on the order of 1000 years, so a single roll could represent some monumental task that spans the course of their lifetime or it could represent the attempt of a civilization.  Combat takes place in 6 second rounds.  The character that goes first is whoever wins the initiative check; they then choose who goes next using the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying time-tracking model.  There may be a surprise round and if so only those people who aren’t surprised get to roll initiative and act in the surprise round.  Within each round, a character gets to roll one dice pool, and they have a certain number of squares of movement (which they can also spend to do things like reload a weapon).  You can spend your squares of movement piecemeal, and even during other characters’ turns (but you can only spend squares of movement at most once on each other character’s turn).  If you’d like to move more than your base number of squares, then you can use your one dice pool roll for a movement check.  Typical movement checks represent 1 round, 5 rounds, or 5 minutes of time.  There are exceptions, but if the movement check takes more than 1 round of time, it will typically pull you out of combat time-tracking; it will always prevent you from taking other actions (except talking).  I’ll talk more about movement in Part 6 of this series.

Q: What type(s) of attempt resolution mechanic(s) do you want in your game?

I called this “attempt resolution” rather than “dice rolling” because RPGs don’t actually need to use dice.  For example, the Marvel Universe RPG by TSR used what’s been called a “resource management” approach; you get a certain number of “red stones” to spend, which refresh at a particular rate, and you get to spend them however you want (attack, defense, etc.).  Basically this is a completely non-random RPG.  Note that “red stones” aren’t actually a “resource” according to the definition I used in Part 2 of this series.

Despite the existence of other possibilities, most RPGs use dice rolling for their attempt resolution mechanic(s).  If you choose dice rolling for your RPG, you are still faced with a bevy of decisions to make.  There is no wrong or right order in which to ask and answer the following questions; they more or less get decided at the same time, but I’ve tried to impose a logical order on them.

A)     Who (GM and/or player) controls the narrative before and after the dice roll?

• The traditional answer is: the GM and player share control before the dice roll (the player describes what they are attempting and GM describes the circumstances affecting the roll, which sets the difficulty); then the player rolls the dice; and then the GM has full control of the narrative when he arbitrates/interprets the dice roll.  Every game I know of except one (well two counting my 3D RPG which hasn’t been published yet) follows this model.
• In the Fantasy Flight Games “Edge of the Empire” Star Wars RPG the GM and players share control of the narrative both before and after the dice roll.  After the dice roll players get to choose “special effects” (for their “advantage” and “triumphs”) subject to GM approval.  My 3D RPG has a similar mechanic; I’ll discuss it when I address the “special effects” question later in this article.

B)      What types of dice do you want to use in the roll?

• The standard set of polyhedral dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d%, d12, d20).
• A subset of the standard polyhedral dice.  Both Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and my 3D RPG use the d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12 but not the d% or d20.
• One die from the standard set of polyhedral dice.  The West End Games d6 system uses, you guessed it, only six-sided dice.  The Shadow Run system also only uses d6’s.  White Wolf’s Storyteller/Storytelling system only uses d10’s.
• Somebody else’s mass produced custom dice that players of your game can buy at a reasonable price.  Examples include the “FUDGE” d6 dice (which only have “+” and “-” symbols on its sides) used by FATE (FATE reused the custom dice for the earlier “FUDGE” RPG), and the “narrative dice” that Fantasy Flight Games uses in their Edge of the Empire RPG for the Star Wars setting (which has “success”, “advantage”, “triumph”, “failure”, “threat”, and “despair” symbols on them; then there’s the force die which has light side and dark side force point symbols on it).
• Your own custom dice.  I strongly recommend AGAINST this.  Making custom dice is very expensive on a per die basis unless you buy in bulk and I’m talking absolutely HUGE quantities.  A well established gaming company like Fantasy Flight Games can afford to bankroll that; you probably can’t.  If you force players to custom order dice for your game individually, then you’ve just killed your game.

C)      How many rolls do you want it to take to resolve an action?  Note that the fewer rolls needed to resolve and action, the faster game play is, and that’s a good thing.  The typical options are:

• One roll. (e.g. Shadow Run, White Wolf’s Storyteller/Storytelling system, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Edge of the Empire.  Note that the “one roll” of a handful of dice in the Shadow Run and Storyteller/Storytelling systems can trigger rerolls of individual dice so whether they count as “one roll” mechanics depends on your point of view.)
• One roll (to determine success) plus a conditional roll (if the first roll succeeds) to determine effect (for example attacks in d20 systems are resolved by rolling a d20 to see if the attack its and if it does then you roll damage dice to determine the effect).
• Two or more rolls for all actions.
• Different number of rolls depending on the action being resolved: many systems use one roll plus a conditional for attacks vs. one roll for skill checks (for example d20 systems, and the West End Games d6 system).

D)     What method do you want to use to determine the “numerical” result of a dice roll?  Note that this can be different for different types of rolls (e.g. success vs. effect).

• One die (e.g. a d20 to determine success).
• Sum of multiple dice (the West End Games d6 system is an example of this, d20 systems may also use this to determine the effect, i.e. damage, for a successful attack roll).
• A dice pool.  Dice pools typically use one roll resolution (all the examples I gave for one roll systems use dice pools) where the actual “pool” is a collection of dice chosen by combining multiple “sources” that depend on the situation.  After the roll is made, different dice are interpreted either separately or as subsets.  For example, in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying you assemble your dice pool by combining an “affiliation” die, a “distinction” die, “power set” dice (more than one power set and/or more than one power from and individual power set can be used at the same time), and “specialty” dice (here “specialty” refers to the character’s specialty not custom dice).  After the roll, two dice are added to determine your (success) total, one other die is used to determine your effect, and any dice that came up as 1′s create “opportunities” for the GM/Watcher.

E)      How is the outcome of an attempt adjudicated-based-on/interpreted-from the result of a dice roll?  This potentially has 2 aspects: success and effect.  I’m defining “success” to be a “yes/no” answer and “effect” to be and “if yes, then how much” answer.  “Special effects” are covered later in this article and are not included in this definition of “effect.”

• Success by comparing the value to a difficulty, resulting in a constant effect.
• Success by symbols not values on the dice.
• Success and effect using different dice.  Note that the success and effect dice may or may not be different types of dice and may be rolled either separately or at the same time.  Marvel Heroic Roleplaying uses this method for all rolls.  D20 systems, the West End Games d6 system, and my 3D RPG use this method for attacks.   In my system, the “first die” (the die with the largest rolled result) is used to determine success vs. failure and the sum of the other two dice (the “second die” and “third die”) determines the effect, i.e. damage.
• Effect by how much a value beats/misses the difficulty; some d20 systems use this for skill checks rather than straight success/failure.
• Effect by counting the number of successes (either success symbols or by individual dice beating a difficulty); the Shadow Run, Storyteller/Storytelling, and Edge of the Empire systems use this method.

“Winner” by *FotoN-3 @ deviantart

F)      Do you want your dice rolling mechanic to distinguish between varying degrees of success? A degree of success mechanic can represent something besides the normal “effect” and “special effects” (I’ll talk about “special effects” shortly), but it often overlaps with one or the other.  In my 3Dice system, the degree of success is separate from both the “effect” and “special effects.”  If you roll more than one success, it can either reduce the time it takes to complete the task or let you accomplish more than one action (the benefit has to be chosen before you roll because the choice affects which dice are in your pool).  In a double attack, the “first die” and “second die” determine success vs. failure for the two attacks; each attack still gets two dice of damage but the “third die” is counted twice.  Note that degree of success is not one-directional in my system.  For single action skill checks, after seeing the roll, you can decide to increase the time you spent on the action by one or two time units in order to add the first and second dice or all three dice (respectively) and compare the sum to the difficulty to determine if your roll succeeds.

G)     How do you set the difficulty of the check?

• A flat target value.  This is typical of most d20 systems.  It’s also what I use in my 3D system where difficulties range between 2 and 12; tying the difficulty or rolling higher results in success.
• A roll of one die plus a constant; the original core rulebook for the Wizards of the Coast d20 Star Wars RPG had an optional rule where instead of a static defense score (10 plus your defense modifier) you could roll a d20 and add your defense modifier to the roll.
• The number of difficulty dice that are rolled.
• The type of difficulty dice that are rolled.
• The number and type of difficulty dice that are rolled.  This is used in Edge of the Empire, where difficulty is set by the combination of “difficulty” dice, “challenge” dice, and “setback” dice that are in your dice pool.

H)     How is proficiency at a task represented?  I’ll go into qualitative detail about proficiency systems in Part 4 of this series; for now I’ll just list a few basic game mechanical approaches.

• A numeric value that is added to your roll (this is used in d20 systems and FATE).
• The number of dice you roll; this is used in the West End Games d6 system, Shadow Run, and the Storyteller/Storytelling system.
• The number of rerolls you get; this is similar to but not exactly the same as the number of dice you roll.
• The type of dice you roll; I use this in my 3D RPG.
• The number and type of dice you roll.  This is used in Edge of the Empire (your chance of success is represented by the combination of “ability” dice, “proficiency” dice, and “boost” dice in your dice pool); it’s also used in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.

There is a dizzying array of options available when you choose a dice rolling mechanic for your game.  I’ve mentioned some of the important aspects for many games.  However, I’m sure that there is some game somewhere out there that isn’t adequately covered by what I’ve just said, so don’t take this as an exhaustive list of dice rolling options; there are others.  Before we move onto special effects, there are a few systems that I want to call out specifically because they have slightly unusual dice rolling mechanics.

The Palladium system uses the standard set of polyhedral dice.  For attacks you roll a d20 and compare its result (without modifiers) to a defense score.  However, skill checks are resolved using a percentile and you succeed at a task by rolling under your skill percentage.  Note that your probability of success depends only on YOUR skill percentage; it does not depend on the task that you are attempting.

Shadow Run uses only standard d6 dice in a “one roll” mechanic that probably qualifies as an early example of a dice pool.  This is because more than one source of dice can be included in the fistful of d6’s that you roll.  Each die succeeds or fails individually and you add up the number of successes to determine the effect.  Target difficulties greater than 6 can be reached because when a d6 comes up as 6 you reroll it and add that to the previous total, 6, and you keep rerolling and adding it to the previous total as long as it keeps coming up a 6; thus its classification as a “one roll” mechanic is also questionable.  The Storyteller/Storytelling system (used in White Wolf “World of Darkness” RPGs) has the same basic dice rolling mechanic as Shadow Run but it’s been adapted to use d10’s rather than d6’s.

Q: What kind of “special effects” do you want in your game?

Most RPGs have some kind of “special effect” mechanic that gets triggered when you roll very well or very poorly.

In d20 systems, a natural 20 (“natural” means that’s what the die comes up as before any modifiers get added to it) on an attack roll is an automatic critical hit and a natural 1 on any d20 is an automatic failure. However, most of the gaming groups that I’ve played in have house-ruled that a natural 1 on a d20 results in a critical failure.

In the West End Games d6 system, if the wild die (a d6 that has a different color, or is rolled separately from the rest) comes up as a 6, you get to reroll it and add it to the total.  Moreover, you get to keep rerolling the wild die and adding it to the total as long as it keeps coming up as a 6.  If the wild die is a 1 the first time you roll it, then you suffer a mishap.

In the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game, when players roll 1’s it creates “opportunities” for the GM and vice versa.  Activating opportunities generally costs a “plot point.”

The “narrative dice” in Edge of the Empire make it the most narrative RPG system that I know of.  “Boost” (custom d6) dice and “ability” (custom d8) dice have “success” and “advantage” symbols, while “proficiency” (custom d12) dice have “success,” “advantage,” and “triumph” symbols.  You can think of “triumph” as critical success; it’s pure epic glory.  You can spend advantage to accomplish things like giving a boost die to an ally or imposing a setback die on an opponent’s next roll, but you need to come up with a narrative explanation for HOW the advantage/triumph is applied.

In Edge of the Empire, the “difficulty” (custom d8) die is the negative equivalent of the “ability” die.  The “setback” (custom d6) die is the negative equivalent of the “boost” die.  The “challenge” (custom d12) die is the negative equivalent of the “proficiency” die.  “Failure” is the negative equivalent of “success.”  “Threat” is the negative equivalent of “advantage.”  “Despair” is the negative equivalent of “Triumph.”  The number of failures is subtracted from the number of successes to determine the effect, but the specials effects of “threat” and “despair” do not cancel with “advantage” and “triumph” (respectively).  This means that a lot of post roll narration occurs and that the players are heavily involved in it.  The GM gets to choose how to spend “threat” and “despair;” so be afraid, be very afraid, of “despair.”

In my 3D RPG, when a die comes up as its maximum value it generates 1 advantage.  Advantage in my game is very similar to advantage in Edge of the Empire, but it occurs less frequently, and does slightly different things.  For example, advantage could impose positive or negative “circumstances” rather than a boost or setback die.  I’ll talk about “circumstances” in Part 5 of this series.  If you have more than one advantage you can spend them separately or together.  For 3 advantages, you can buy an extra dice pool roll that must be used immediately or an automatic critical hit.  Automatic means it succeeds even if the roll isn’t high enough to hit normally.  Critical hits ignore damage reduction; they still get 2 dice of damage, but the “first die” counts twice.  If an automatic critical hit is rolled on a double attack, both attacks count as automatic critical hits, and both double count the “first die” to determine damage.

Rolling two 1’s is an automatic failure.  Rolling three 1’s is a critical failure, and the GM is supposed to visit some horrifically humorous punishment upon you.  For example, you might fall off a tall building into the back of an open manure truck, and lose something important in the manure truck, and there’s a TV news crew filming as you try to climb out of the manure truck and/or look for the important item you lost in it, and it goes viral on the internet.  Basically it’s something that your character will NEVER live down.  But you can opt to spend white Karma to turn it into a normal failure.  The GM can also choose to change one white Karma chip to black if he can’t think of a sufficiently embarrassing fate for your character.

Putting this all together for the attempt resolution mechanic in my 3D RPG system:

Once per narrative time unit (rounds, minutes, hours, etc) you get a single roll of one dice pool which can completely resolve up to 2 actions.  In combat, “rounds” are generally used as the narrative time unit.  The dice pool always contains 3Dice (hence the name of my system, “3D”).  It is assembled from dice associated with Attributes, Skills, and/or equipment that are appropriate to the task(s) being attempted.  There is generally one required skill for each check.  For the other 2 dice, you can use anything that you can justify with a narrative explanation; you are encouraged to get creative with your explanation (wild and crazy ideas are OK and make the story more fun).

The candidate dice are d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12.  A d4 means bad or completely untrained.  A d6 means neutral or average.  A d8 means “professional.”  A d10 means “expert.”  A d12 means “Heroic” or “World Class.”  Other than there always being 3 dice in the pool, there is no restriction on the number of dice of a particular type in the pool (for example, pools of d4 & d6 & d10, 2d6 & d8, and 3d8 are all allowed).  If you don’t have enough relevant dice, you fill in with d4’s.

Rolling high is good; you need to tie or exceed the difficulty.  Difficulties are static numbers that range between 2 and 12.  The die with the largest rolled result is called the “first die.”  The die with the second largest, i.e. the middle, rolled result is called the “second die.”  The die with the third largest, i.e. the smallest, rolled result is called the “third die.”

For a single action skill check, success vs. failure is determined by comparing the first die against the difficulty.  If the second die (or second and third dice) also tie or beat the difficulty, this reduces the time it takes to complete the action by one (or two) time step(s); for example, from hours to minutes (to rounds). If your first die isn’t high enough to succeed at the attempt, then you can opt to increase the duration of the action by one or two time steps in order to add the first and second dice or all three dice (respectively) before comparing the sum to the difficulty.

For a double action, the first die is used to determine success vs. failure on one action, and the second die is used to determine success vs. failure on the other action.  The two actions can have different difficulties.

For attacks made as a single action, the effect/damage is determined by adding the second die and the third die (depending on the weapon this may be multiplied by a constant like 2, 3, or 10).  For an attack made as part of a double action (whether the other action is another attack or not), you still get 2 dice of damage but the third die twice counts twice.  This means that individual attacks made as part of a double action tend to do less damage than an attack made as a single action.

For each die that rolls its maximum possible result you get one “advantage” which you can spend to accomplish special effects.  An automatic critical hit costs 3 advantages or a Karma chip.  Rolling a critical hit would normally be a very rare event, but you can “bank” your rolled dice in your “Destiny Pool.”  Rolling two 1’s results in automatic failure.  Rolling three 1’s results in critical failure. You can avoid critical failure by spending white Karma or swapping one of the rolled 1′s with a non 1 in your “Destiny Pool.”  I’ll talk more about Karma and the Destiny in Part 5 of this series.

The thought process behind the attempt resolution mechanic of my 3D RPG.

Note that this section transitions to an almost stream of conscious, asking myself questions, and answering them format to better illustrate my thought process.  You should also know that this with-self conversation took place over the span of a few months; I didn’t instantaneously have good answers as soon as I asked myself the questions.

It was mid November 2012 and NaGa DeMon (NAtional GAme DEsign MONth) was on my mind.  I was thinking about how I could fix/redesign my previous attempt at a 3D (3Dice) RPG.  I knew I wanted attempt resolution to always involve the roll of three dice.  And one roll dice pools were the “new and shiny” attempt resolution mechanic (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and the Edge of the Empire beta release) so I decided to go with that.  I knew I wanted to use the following subset of the standard polyhedral dice: d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12, to represent how good someone was at a task.  I was in a d20 mindset, so without actually being aware that I had asked myself the question, I had already made the decision to have Attributes and Skills which isn’t a necessity in an RPG.  I knew I wanted equipment, in particular weapons and armor, to provide dice too.  I was thinking of a traditional fantasy type game as I was developing the core mechanic and I wanted weapons to have the same damage dice that people were familiar with from D&D (e.g. d8 for a long sword); that was what I was basing the initial design of my core mechanic on.  However, my end goal was an RPG system that I could use to run a home game in the Rifts setting (side comment: the absolutely amazing Rifts setting/fluff makes buying the books worthwhile despite the archaic and needlessly complex Palladium system).  I knew I wanted armor to provide Damage Reduction, represented by a die and that there would be 4 defenses: Mental, Fortitude, Social, and Reflex.

So given those parameters I was considering 2 different dice rolling mechanics.

Candidate 1:  Roll your 3 dice, sum them, subtract off a defense score equal to the sum of the Reflex and Fortitude Defense to determine the damage that the target took.  This would result in a lot of variability in the damage done by each hit, and potentially a large amount of damage would be done fairly regularly, unless the defense score was high which would make hitting some opponents near impossible.

Candidate 2: The largest (rolled result) die would determine whether the attack hit or not by being compared to Reflex Defense, and the sum of the other two dice would be the damage dealt to the target minus a single die (using its average value not a roll) of damage reduction.  This would result in frequent hits that do a few points of damage.  Explanation:  the largest of three dice will usually be a good deal larger than the average value, so hits will be frequent; the middle (rolled result) die will have most of its “probability mass” near the average value so it should usually cancel out Damage Reduction to within a point or so; the damage that the target takes (after DR is applied) should therefore usually be roughly the lowest (rolled result) die.  Of course the sizes of the dice in the pool affect this and randomness allows for considerably larger damage with low probability.

I went with the second option because I thought that frequent hits that inflicted a small amount of damage would be more-fun-for/less-frustrating-to players than hard to hit opponents that died after a single hit; it would also make accidentally killing PCs a lot less likely.

Of course critical hits and critical failures are fun, so I decided that a critical hit would happen when all three dice came up with the maximum possible result and critical failures would happen when all dice came up as 1’s.  Critical hits would ignore DR and deal damage equal to the sum of all three dice.   That would be fairly impressive without “one shot”-ing a PC at full health (say about 40 hit points).  But it would come up very rarely.  I had just heard about the doom pool mechanic in the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game (that was one of the answers to the “what are your favorite mechanics?” survey, I’d posted on the d20radio.com forums), and thought that having something like that could help players pull off a critical hit when they needed it so I added a fourth set of dice called the “luck pool” that the players could swap dice with.

I later renamed the “luck pool” to the “Karma pool” and then swapped its name with the “Destiny pool,” which at the time referred to the morality mechanic with double sided black and white tokens, because the word “Karma” is associated with “good vs. evil.”  I’ll talk more about Karma and Destiny in Part 5 of this series.  Even later, because of the obscene damage that mega mini-missiles (for the post apocalyptic setting) could do on a critical hit, I decided to change the critical hit damage to double the first die; this would also make (morality type) Karma triggered critical hits a lot more like rolled critical hits.

After the initial implementation of attacks, it was time to implement non-attack skill checks and I returned to the two candidate mechanics I mentioned above.  But in the context of skills candidate 1 would have difficulty scores up to 36; candidate 2 would have difficult scores up to 12 and drop the determination of “effect” from the 2 smaller dice.  Again I decided to go with candidate 2 because it made success a lot more likely, which is more fun for players, and to make it a close copy of the attack roll mechanic.

But I had 2 dice left-over in a skill check.  I could use those to break ties in opposed checks.  But in non-opposed skill checks I’d still have 2 left-over dice; what benefit could players get from that if they rolled really well?  And also the hardest difficulty being 12 would make it too easy to succeed at near impossible tasks.

Maybe tasks could have 3 difficulty scores, one for each die, and the number of successes would determine the degree of success.  No!  That would be a very bad idea because having three difficulty ratings and three levels of success for every skill check would make things too complex.  Simple is good; simple is key.

So there is only one difficulty rating for skills, but how can I prevent players from building a warp drive in just a few minutes of in game time?  That’s it!  Time!  All skill checks will be associated with an amount of time it takes to complete them.  And additional successes could decrease the time it took to complete the action; maybe half the time for each extra success?  No!  Making gamers divide by 4 regularly would slow down game play too much.  I know, just have it decrease time units, like from hours (on one success) to minutes (on 2 successes) to rounds (on three successes).  But what about tasks that only take rounds to complete?  Well then… they could just “bank” the other good rolls in their “luck pool.”

But it’d be nice if players could make 2 attacks in a round with a single die roll.  I know!  The first and second die could be used to determine success on two attacks.  And… the effect/damage for each would be determined by counting the smallest (rolled result) die twice; that way they still get 2 dice of damage for each attack and each one would do less individually than a single attack.  And if each attack needs to overcome DR separately then double attacking isn’t a-no-brainer/the-default-option.  But what about skill checks?  If they can make 2 attacks with one roll, then they should be able to make 2 skill checks with one roll too.  OK, the second largest (rolled result) die can be used to determine the second action instead of reducing the time for a task, and we’re good.

But what about “almost critical hits,” where you get 2 or even just 1 maximal dice?  It’d be nice if they could do something cool with them instead of having to wait until all three dice get the maximal result.  Well there’s this cool “advantage” mechanic in Edge of the Empire; people will be familiar with that so I’ll call my “almost critical” mechanic the same thing, and critical hits will cost 3 advantages.

And that was the thought process behind my 3D RPG’s 3Dice attempt resolution mechanic.  If my 3D RPG system sounds kinda cool or interesting to you, and you’d like to playtest it, then you can send a PM to EliasWindrider on the d20radio.com forums.

In Part 4 of this series, I’ll talk about how games represent ability, proficiency, and specialization at different tasks.

You can find the first part of this series here and the second here.

Help Wanted

Since GM Dave announced it in episode 14 of the Order 66 Podcast (Edge of the Empire edition), I can now say that Gamer Nation Studios is the game design company that will be publishing my 3D RPG.  The first book is going to feature a slightly stripped down version (e.g. no cybernetics/robots chapter) of my system for a traditional (D&D style) fantasy setting.  If you have the time, inclination, and talent to be a world builder then send a PM to EliasWindrider on the d20radio.com forums.  Initially I’ll be looking for 1 to 3 fluff/setting writers who would get a share of the profits.

Here’s a brief outline of this setting.  It’s a primitive prison planet.  There are wormhole gates from various technologically or techno-magically advanced worlds that periodically open and deliver new convicted felons: humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, trolls, goblins.  Each race generally (but not always) arrives at a different gate and settlements have sprung up around them.  The gates are techno-magical artifacts, and an artifact really amps up the magic in its immediate vicinity, but the “Wardens” (NPCs) prevent that from being abused.  While the world is a bit seedy and rough, good people do live there, in fact many of the inhabitants were born on this planet.  You can think of it being like real world Australia which started a penal colony for Great Britain.  There are bastions of civilization, albeit at late medieval or early renaissance level of technology (archaic firearms like muskets and flintlock pistols exist), amid the wilderness and wild beasts. Many of the major centers of cultural sprang up in the vicinity of one gate or another under the protection of the gate’s Warden.

Magic is part of the setting.  The “Karma effect” is well known and accepted as true (the evidence for it is overwhelming), but what causes it is the subject of a fierce debate among the inhabitants of the game universe.  Some assert that conservation of Karma is a natural law like the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy.  Others believe in an all powerful, primal, dualistic good and evil, semi-aware, mystical energy field created by all living things that binds the universe together.  Still others place their faith in a supreme being who rewards the good and punishes the wicked, although different religions disagree on the exact nature of this supreme being.  One of the more pragmatic religions proclaims the existence of an omnipotent “unknown god” who is unknowable by mortals, but chooses to reveal his/her just nature through the Karma effect.  If you want to create a religion in the game world, go for it, but it’s not going to be the only one, and won’t be established as “true.  You can read more about my Karma system in part 2 and part 5 of this series.

Two other things I’d like help with are:

1. Coming up with spells, now I don’t mean rules, I mean effects, descriptions, inspiration. Fireballs, disintegrate, etc. are obvious.  I’m looking for the less obvious stuff.
2. A list of mythological creatures you’d like to see in the game.

I’d like to have this first book be more or less “done” (subject to later revision based on play testing) by mid November (which will be one year since I started developing it), so time is short.  If you’d prefer to publish a separate setting book using my system that’s OK too and I don’t need to be involved in it; my system is going to be released under the Open Gaming License.