GaelofDarkness
2019-07-15, 04:26 PM
[Mechanic has been edited from original post]
I've been working on a fairly crunchy system and playing around with some dice mechanics and how they'd play into the system. I think there's something interesting here - or at least novel - and I'd love some feedback from the Playground! I've divided my thoughts up and I'm most eager to hear what you've got to say on the basics. The latter chunks maybe ramble on a bit (sorry) - but if you're willing to spare the time to read them I'd seriously appreciate your thoughts!
Most dice mechanics are about getting higher or lower on a single scale - how well or poorly the action went. The exceptions that jump to mind are some combats where one can roll offensive AND defensive bonuses (e.g. rolling X counts as a hit, but rolling Y counts as a block instead of a miss) or Fantasy Flight's Genesys system with its success/advantage/triumphs and failure/threat/despairs adding some nuance. So I was curious to see if there's a way to colour a result as well as giving it a numerical value of success. And what better way to colour than with coloured dice?
The Dice
A set of six coloured d20s: red, green, blue, black, silver and gold.
I had these handy, so let's go ahead and call those the canonical types. Of course, the point is to have six distinct d20s, so any way to distinguish between dice works just as well.
Basic Roll
You choose three of the six dice to roll. The result is the difference of any two dice and the colour of the third.
Any stat bonuses could be added as is typical. For an example, I roll the blue, black and gold dice (with no bonus), getting 8, 15 and 12 respectively. I take a Gold 7 as the result. I could also have taken a Black 4 or a Blue 3 if I was willing to take a lower number to get my preffered colour.
What do the colours mean?
Note: If it's not obvious, I'm taking inspiration from Fate Accelerated's Approaches.
Each colour represents (generally) the manner or perceived manner that an action was completed in. For example, you might succeed in convincing an NPC with an intense argument - but did it come across as passionate (red) or perhaps daunting (green)? You might fail a roll and take an injury, but was your instinctive response to react gingerly with care (black) or doggedly with determination (blue).
Colour
One Word Summary
Possible Meanings
Red
Passionately
"Your performance is made with gusto!" OR "You've lost face, looking too emotional."
Green
Dauntingly
"The blow of your club intimidates your foes." OR "You take the arrow strike with a menacing smile."
Blue
Doggedly
"You break open the door with gritted teeth." OR "Despite a thorough look, you don't find any clues."
Black
Carefully
"You stealth in with care, avoiding attenion." OR "You hesistate and your sword swings wide."
Gold
Amply
"You tie the knot confidently, no wasted movement." OR "The repair should be sufficient, but it won't work."
Silver
Stylishly
"Your charming smile wins over their hearts." OR "Your showboating costs you a handhold and you fall from the tree."
The exact meaning or consequences of the colours on a given roll are mostly going to be up to the GM or Player interpretation rather than set rules. Though, eventually I might have some rules for that - colours affecting some encounters in specific ways. Maybe some encounters care more about colours than numbers? I could see that being a cool fey encounter in a fantasy game, rolling high or low is unimportant but you must roll Silver to deal with the fey?
This is mostly meant to be something that can help guide RP and add a bit of mechanical nuance to certain encounters (like encounters that aren't tactical combat). I especially see this coming into play as something that changes the way NPCs interact with PCs.
Leaning in harder into the colour system could include things like different character archetypes preferring different colours. Taking the right colour can trigger a bonus to certain types of actions - sneak attacks deal more damage with Black while a song sounds better from a Silver tongue.
Some Thoughts
I mainly wonder what people think of the colour-system. Does this work as a way to introduce a multi-dimensional element to the dice roll? I think it might make players think about the kind of way their character acts more consciously - some PCs definitely being Green, Blue and Gold types while another might be more Red, Black and Silver, or any other combinations. Are there alternative traits people would rather see? Is six too many? Too restrictive?
The leverage and hindrance mechanics below means it's easier/harder to get your preffered colour with a higher number. I hope this engages players who wouldn't care as much about min-maxing so they have more control over the colours at play in-game. I was also thinking that there should be something that gives more control over colour for RPing (but post rule change I think leverage handles that pretty well).
A concern with this mechanic is that - because it involves sorting and then subtration - I find it's not as quick or automatic as summing 3d6 or counting successes in a dice pool. Maybe that's just because those are the kinds of mental arithmetic that I'm accustomed to and with some play this more novel mechanic will become just as habitual. It's not like the mental arithmetic is particularly difficult or anything. Does anyone have experience with mechanics that use differences? Any tips? Pros or Cons?
I think the rules change makes this version simpler - but I wonder if it could give players choice paralysis. The last thing I want is a player grinding play to a halt trying to decide if they'd prefer a Green 12 or a Red 11.
Circumstances and/or abilities might make an action easier or harder. This is a take on an advantage/disadvantage or boost/setback kind of mechanic. You can have up to three levels of leverage or hindrance. One level of leverage cancels out one level of hindrance - so you never roll with both leverage AND hindrance at the same time.
Rolls with Leverage
For each level of leverage you roll an extra die from the set of six, taking the difference of any two dice and the colour of any other die as the result.
For example, I roll with one level of leverage. I roll four dice - the red, green, blue and silver. I get 17, 16, 18 and 18. The best numerical result I can get is only 2, which I could colour Red, Blue or Silver. I could also take a 1 with any of the four colours or a 0 coloured Red or Green.
Leverage makes you more likely to roll a higher number while getting your preferred colour. You have to roll the colours you wouldn't roll in a basic roll, but taking the least preferred colour is never necessary to get the best numerical result.
Rolls with Hindrance
For each level of hindrance you roll an extra die from the set of six, but you can only keep the lowest-rolling three dice. The result is the difference of any two dice and the colour of the third.
For example, I roll with three levels of hindrance, so I roll all six dice. I get 4, 11, 11, 18, 7 and 8. I discard the 11, 11 and 18. I take a Gold 4 as the result, but I could also take a Silver 3 or a Red 1.
Hindrance makes you more likely to roll a lower number and can leave you stuck with colours you didn't want.
I reckon I'd set unmodified 1s as critical failures and unmodified 19s as critical successes. That actually seems to suit the symmetry of the distribution better. The more interesting question is what to do about unmodified 0s. I'm thinking of treating them as somekind of wildcard... somehow.
Since a player could take a 0 anytime they roll a matching pair - it's important that a 0 not be powerful, at least not powerful without a significant cost.
What I'm currently thinking is that while fresh, rolling a 0 incurs a cost - loss of resource, gain of some kind of stress. But when your character is on their last legs or in way over their head, they can get a last ditch surge to try and succeed. Maybe they can regain hp when they're at death's door or a mage regains mana if they're pool is depleted.
I've been toying with this idea for a "stress tree" (inspired by Torchbearer). It's a tree of conditions where you start with nothing and get put on one of the branches as you accrue stress. Each new lever of stress that targets a particular branch pushes you further up that branch, but you can't take a higher condition if any of the lesser ones are still vacant - so the stress spreads as well as rises, making slipping into more severe conditions slower and more manageable. By this I mean, e.g. if you took a second level of stress on the "Hungry" branch, but you weren't "Worn Out" yet, then you'd become "Worn Out" instead of "Tired". You'd only become "Tired" after getting another level of stress on the "Hungry" or "Worn Out" branches.
Maybe rolling a 0 when you have an otherwise debilitating stress level gives you a much stronger than normal result - so rolling a matching pair is exactly what you want to do when your back's to the wall.
I'm not set at all on what the points on the stress tree would be called or how severe the lower conditions would be. I imagine that, say, "dirty" wouldn't have a big impact outside of RP. Maybe a dirty PC would have more trouble getting into a swanky establishment? Maybe trying to treat a wound while dirty is harder? That stuff seems like it could become a lot of homework pretty quick, so I think the lower conditions are just flavoured pitstops to the higher conditions with actual impacts.
Hungry
\
Tired
Worn Out
/
\
Exhausted
Dirty
\
/
\
Unwell
Infected
Frail
/
\
/
\
Sick
Septic
Groggy
\
/
\
/
\
Confused
Shock
Death
Numb
/
\
/
\
/
Terrified
Fainted
Nervous
\
/
\
/
Afraid
Panicked
Morose
/
\
/
Desperate
Irked
\
/
Angry
Sore
/
I figure making a mock up of this thing to put on character sheets would be OK. Put it over a nice tree design or something. Then just have players mark with some dots how their PC is doing on the stress tree.
All the math here is based on the assumption that you would always take the best possible numerical result from a roll - regardless of colour.
The basic roll has a nice curved distribution - not like a bell curve really since the edges of the distribution do not taper, but I like it. If you throw out the 0, the probabilities for 1-19 are symmetrical about the mid-point of 10. This is what led me to thinking of 0 as some kind of wild card rather than just a critical failure.
The distributions for leverage and hindrance become gradually more skewed to the left or right. A single level shifts the mean by about 2, the second by a further 1.33 and the third by another 0.95 (roughly), and each level reduces the spread of the distribution significantly. Your odds of rolling above a 10 with Leverage x3 are over 85%, and the probability of rolling a 19 more than quadruples to just over 6%.
The distributions for leverage or hindrance aren't exactly reflections of each either - but they're extremely close so I think having leverage and hindrance cancel each other out is pretty fair. Again it's most apparent if you toss out the 0s. By assuming only non-zero rolls (and rescaling the distributions under that assumption) the largest discrepancy from Leverage xN and Hindrance xN being perfect reflections of each other is ~0.05% points. Which is REALLY dang close.
Some approximate values for reference. The Basic Roll is in bold.
Result Number
Hindrance x3
Hindrance x2
Hindrance x1
Basic Roll
Leverage x1
Leverage x2
Leverage x3
0
1.19%
0.8%
0.4875%
0.25%
0.0125%
0.000625%
0.00003125%
1
6%
4.23%
2.68%
1.425%
0.166%
0.0178%
0.00184%
2
9.75%
7.24%
4.84%
2.7%
0.5625%
0.101%
0.0169%
3
11.7%
9.17%
6.48%
3.825%
1.169%
0.303%
0.0718%
4
12.2%
10.2%
7.66%
4.8%
1.94%
0.66%
0.204%
5
11.8%
10.5%
8.42%
5.625%
2.83%
1.2%
0.457%
6
10.8%
10.3%
8.8%
6.3%
3.8%
1.92%
0.874%
7
9.34%
9.59%
8.86%
6.825%
4.8%
2.82%
1.5%
8
7.75%
8.62%
8.625%
7.2%
5.775%
3.87%
2.34%
9
6.16%
7.47%
8.15%
7.425%
6.7%
5.04%
3.42%
10
4.67%
6.23%
7.49%
7.5%
7.5125%
6.28%
4.73%
11
3.37%
5.0%
6.67%
7.425%
8.18%
7.52%
6.23%
12
2.3%
3.83%
5.75%
7.2%
8.65%
8.67%
7.83%
13
1.46%
2.78%
4.77%
6.825%
8.88%
9.64%
9.43%
14
0.847%
1.88%
3.78%
6.3%
8.83%
10.3%
10.9%
15
0.4375%
1.168%
2.81%
5.625%
8.44%
10.6%
11.9%
16
0.191%
0.6375%
1.915%
4.8%
7.685%
10.26%
12.3%
17
0.0641%
0.285%
1.14%
3.825%
6.51%
9.23%
11.8%
18
0.0134%
0.0894%
0.5375%
2.7%
4.86%
7.30%
9.87%
19
0.000877%
0.0117%
0.141%
1.425%
2.71%
4.29%
6.125%
By the way, does anyone have any tips on how to get a graph up on here? I figure it's a LOT easier to look at than a table of numbers - if anyone has had the patience to stick with my waffling, that is. Sorry for my ignorance.
I've been working on a fairly crunchy system and playing around with some dice mechanics and how they'd play into the system. I think there's something interesting here - or at least novel - and I'd love some feedback from the Playground! I've divided my thoughts up and I'm most eager to hear what you've got to say on the basics. The latter chunks maybe ramble on a bit (sorry) - but if you're willing to spare the time to read them I'd seriously appreciate your thoughts!
Most dice mechanics are about getting higher or lower on a single scale - how well or poorly the action went. The exceptions that jump to mind are some combats where one can roll offensive AND defensive bonuses (e.g. rolling X counts as a hit, but rolling Y counts as a block instead of a miss) or Fantasy Flight's Genesys system with its success/advantage/triumphs and failure/threat/despairs adding some nuance. So I was curious to see if there's a way to colour a result as well as giving it a numerical value of success. And what better way to colour than with coloured dice?
The Dice
A set of six coloured d20s: red, green, blue, black, silver and gold.
I had these handy, so let's go ahead and call those the canonical types. Of course, the point is to have six distinct d20s, so any way to distinguish between dice works just as well.
Basic Roll
You choose three of the six dice to roll. The result is the difference of any two dice and the colour of the third.
Any stat bonuses could be added as is typical. For an example, I roll the blue, black and gold dice (with no bonus), getting 8, 15 and 12 respectively. I take a Gold 7 as the result. I could also have taken a Black 4 or a Blue 3 if I was willing to take a lower number to get my preffered colour.
What do the colours mean?
Note: If it's not obvious, I'm taking inspiration from Fate Accelerated's Approaches.
Each colour represents (generally) the manner or perceived manner that an action was completed in. For example, you might succeed in convincing an NPC with an intense argument - but did it come across as passionate (red) or perhaps daunting (green)? You might fail a roll and take an injury, but was your instinctive response to react gingerly with care (black) or doggedly with determination (blue).
Colour
One Word Summary
Possible Meanings
Red
Passionately
"Your performance is made with gusto!" OR "You've lost face, looking too emotional."
Green
Dauntingly
"The blow of your club intimidates your foes." OR "You take the arrow strike with a menacing smile."
Blue
Doggedly
"You break open the door with gritted teeth." OR "Despite a thorough look, you don't find any clues."
Black
Carefully
"You stealth in with care, avoiding attenion." OR "You hesistate and your sword swings wide."
Gold
Amply
"You tie the knot confidently, no wasted movement." OR "The repair should be sufficient, but it won't work."
Silver
Stylishly
"Your charming smile wins over their hearts." OR "Your showboating costs you a handhold and you fall from the tree."
The exact meaning or consequences of the colours on a given roll are mostly going to be up to the GM or Player interpretation rather than set rules. Though, eventually I might have some rules for that - colours affecting some encounters in specific ways. Maybe some encounters care more about colours than numbers? I could see that being a cool fey encounter in a fantasy game, rolling high or low is unimportant but you must roll Silver to deal with the fey?
This is mostly meant to be something that can help guide RP and add a bit of mechanical nuance to certain encounters (like encounters that aren't tactical combat). I especially see this coming into play as something that changes the way NPCs interact with PCs.
Leaning in harder into the colour system could include things like different character archetypes preferring different colours. Taking the right colour can trigger a bonus to certain types of actions - sneak attacks deal more damage with Black while a song sounds better from a Silver tongue.
Some Thoughts
I mainly wonder what people think of the colour-system. Does this work as a way to introduce a multi-dimensional element to the dice roll? I think it might make players think about the kind of way their character acts more consciously - some PCs definitely being Green, Blue and Gold types while another might be more Red, Black and Silver, or any other combinations. Are there alternative traits people would rather see? Is six too many? Too restrictive?
The leverage and hindrance mechanics below means it's easier/harder to get your preffered colour with a higher number. I hope this engages players who wouldn't care as much about min-maxing so they have more control over the colours at play in-game. I was also thinking that there should be something that gives more control over colour for RPing (but post rule change I think leverage handles that pretty well).
A concern with this mechanic is that - because it involves sorting and then subtration - I find it's not as quick or automatic as summing 3d6 or counting successes in a dice pool. Maybe that's just because those are the kinds of mental arithmetic that I'm accustomed to and with some play this more novel mechanic will become just as habitual. It's not like the mental arithmetic is particularly difficult or anything. Does anyone have experience with mechanics that use differences? Any tips? Pros or Cons?
I think the rules change makes this version simpler - but I wonder if it could give players choice paralysis. The last thing I want is a player grinding play to a halt trying to decide if they'd prefer a Green 12 or a Red 11.
Circumstances and/or abilities might make an action easier or harder. This is a take on an advantage/disadvantage or boost/setback kind of mechanic. You can have up to three levels of leverage or hindrance. One level of leverage cancels out one level of hindrance - so you never roll with both leverage AND hindrance at the same time.
Rolls with Leverage
For each level of leverage you roll an extra die from the set of six, taking the difference of any two dice and the colour of any other die as the result.
For example, I roll with one level of leverage. I roll four dice - the red, green, blue and silver. I get 17, 16, 18 and 18. The best numerical result I can get is only 2, which I could colour Red, Blue or Silver. I could also take a 1 with any of the four colours or a 0 coloured Red or Green.
Leverage makes you more likely to roll a higher number while getting your preferred colour. You have to roll the colours you wouldn't roll in a basic roll, but taking the least preferred colour is never necessary to get the best numerical result.
Rolls with Hindrance
For each level of hindrance you roll an extra die from the set of six, but you can only keep the lowest-rolling three dice. The result is the difference of any two dice and the colour of the third.
For example, I roll with three levels of hindrance, so I roll all six dice. I get 4, 11, 11, 18, 7 and 8. I discard the 11, 11 and 18. I take a Gold 4 as the result, but I could also take a Silver 3 or a Red 1.
Hindrance makes you more likely to roll a lower number and can leave you stuck with colours you didn't want.
I reckon I'd set unmodified 1s as critical failures and unmodified 19s as critical successes. That actually seems to suit the symmetry of the distribution better. The more interesting question is what to do about unmodified 0s. I'm thinking of treating them as somekind of wildcard... somehow.
Since a player could take a 0 anytime they roll a matching pair - it's important that a 0 not be powerful, at least not powerful without a significant cost.
What I'm currently thinking is that while fresh, rolling a 0 incurs a cost - loss of resource, gain of some kind of stress. But when your character is on their last legs or in way over their head, they can get a last ditch surge to try and succeed. Maybe they can regain hp when they're at death's door or a mage regains mana if they're pool is depleted.
I've been toying with this idea for a "stress tree" (inspired by Torchbearer). It's a tree of conditions where you start with nothing and get put on one of the branches as you accrue stress. Each new lever of stress that targets a particular branch pushes you further up that branch, but you can't take a higher condition if any of the lesser ones are still vacant - so the stress spreads as well as rises, making slipping into more severe conditions slower and more manageable. By this I mean, e.g. if you took a second level of stress on the "Hungry" branch, but you weren't "Worn Out" yet, then you'd become "Worn Out" instead of "Tired". You'd only become "Tired" after getting another level of stress on the "Hungry" or "Worn Out" branches.
Maybe rolling a 0 when you have an otherwise debilitating stress level gives you a much stronger than normal result - so rolling a matching pair is exactly what you want to do when your back's to the wall.
I'm not set at all on what the points on the stress tree would be called or how severe the lower conditions would be. I imagine that, say, "dirty" wouldn't have a big impact outside of RP. Maybe a dirty PC would have more trouble getting into a swanky establishment? Maybe trying to treat a wound while dirty is harder? That stuff seems like it could become a lot of homework pretty quick, so I think the lower conditions are just flavoured pitstops to the higher conditions with actual impacts.
Hungry
\
Tired
Worn Out
/
\
Exhausted
Dirty
\
/
\
Unwell
Infected
Frail
/
\
/
\
Sick
Septic
Groggy
\
/
\
/
\
Confused
Shock
Death
Numb
/
\
/
\
/
Terrified
Fainted
Nervous
\
/
\
/
Afraid
Panicked
Morose
/
\
/
Desperate
Irked
\
/
Angry
Sore
/
I figure making a mock up of this thing to put on character sheets would be OK. Put it over a nice tree design or something. Then just have players mark with some dots how their PC is doing on the stress tree.
All the math here is based on the assumption that you would always take the best possible numerical result from a roll - regardless of colour.
The basic roll has a nice curved distribution - not like a bell curve really since the edges of the distribution do not taper, but I like it. If you throw out the 0, the probabilities for 1-19 are symmetrical about the mid-point of 10. This is what led me to thinking of 0 as some kind of wild card rather than just a critical failure.
The distributions for leverage and hindrance become gradually more skewed to the left or right. A single level shifts the mean by about 2, the second by a further 1.33 and the third by another 0.95 (roughly), and each level reduces the spread of the distribution significantly. Your odds of rolling above a 10 with Leverage x3 are over 85%, and the probability of rolling a 19 more than quadruples to just over 6%.
The distributions for leverage or hindrance aren't exactly reflections of each either - but they're extremely close so I think having leverage and hindrance cancel each other out is pretty fair. Again it's most apparent if you toss out the 0s. By assuming only non-zero rolls (and rescaling the distributions under that assumption) the largest discrepancy from Leverage xN and Hindrance xN being perfect reflections of each other is ~0.05% points. Which is REALLY dang close.
Some approximate values for reference. The Basic Roll is in bold.
Result Number
Hindrance x3
Hindrance x2
Hindrance x1
Basic Roll
Leverage x1
Leverage x2
Leverage x3
0
1.19%
0.8%
0.4875%
0.25%
0.0125%
0.000625%
0.00003125%
1
6%
4.23%
2.68%
1.425%
0.166%
0.0178%
0.00184%
2
9.75%
7.24%
4.84%
2.7%
0.5625%
0.101%
0.0169%
3
11.7%
9.17%
6.48%
3.825%
1.169%
0.303%
0.0718%
4
12.2%
10.2%
7.66%
4.8%
1.94%
0.66%
0.204%
5
11.8%
10.5%
8.42%
5.625%
2.83%
1.2%
0.457%
6
10.8%
10.3%
8.8%
6.3%
3.8%
1.92%
0.874%
7
9.34%
9.59%
8.86%
6.825%
4.8%
2.82%
1.5%
8
7.75%
8.62%
8.625%
7.2%
5.775%
3.87%
2.34%
9
6.16%
7.47%
8.15%
7.425%
6.7%
5.04%
3.42%
10
4.67%
6.23%
7.49%
7.5%
7.5125%
6.28%
4.73%
11
3.37%
5.0%
6.67%
7.425%
8.18%
7.52%
6.23%
12
2.3%
3.83%
5.75%
7.2%
8.65%
8.67%
7.83%
13
1.46%
2.78%
4.77%
6.825%
8.88%
9.64%
9.43%
14
0.847%
1.88%
3.78%
6.3%
8.83%
10.3%
10.9%
15
0.4375%
1.168%
2.81%
5.625%
8.44%
10.6%
11.9%
16
0.191%
0.6375%
1.915%
4.8%
7.685%
10.26%
12.3%
17
0.0641%
0.285%
1.14%
3.825%
6.51%
9.23%
11.8%
18
0.0134%
0.0894%
0.5375%
2.7%
4.86%
7.30%
9.87%
19
0.000877%
0.0117%
0.141%
1.425%
2.71%
4.29%
6.125%
By the way, does anyone have any tips on how to get a graph up on here? I figure it's a LOT easier to look at than a table of numbers - if anyone has had the patience to stick with my waffling, that is. Sorry for my ignorance.