Spending Attribute charges per turn

[Kyutaru]

Got a concept I want your take on as far as engaging mechanics and enjoyable play goes. It's non-competitive so don't worry about balance just about what might be interesting for storytelling and resolution. Your character has a dice pool and rolls to generate his turn's attributes. A die has 6 facings and there are 6 attributes. So if you roll a 1 you generate a Strength charge for that turn. Various abilities can be used to convert rolls into other rolls to generate more Strength out of say Wisdom with each class having its own preferences. You can spend these charges to execute certain abilities in and out of combat. The rolls ensure you can't reliably do the same actions turn after turn in combat because battle is chaotic and you might not always be in a good position to go for a trip or bull rush. Likewise you don't just autododge fireballs and arrows because sometimes your luck just wasn't in it.

Definitely seems to lend towards balanced characters who can do something with every attribute but then comes combo costs like requiring Strength 3 and Intelligence 1 to execute a whirlwind or something. Some abilities may even require generic costs like mana in Magic the Gathering, so you can spend ANY three dice in addition to at least 2 Strength dice. Actions per turn are only limited to your resource availability and you have to dynamically decide how to react to each turn according to circumstances with the dice rolls telling you what the current situation is looking like and what available assets you can use. Ideally people don't just min-max 40 strength 10 other stat characters and actually consider the value of pumping their Charisma or Wisdom for battle.

[Knaight]

Dice actions is a pretty standard thing in board games, (and you could probably steal the roll all dice, 2 rerolls as you see fit mechanic wholesale), but the applicability of the 6 D&D attributes in particular is questionable. Making a six attribute set could easily work, as could a three attribute set (where the die faces would likely cover both an offensive and defensive use of each attribute in combat, along with other roles in other situations).

[clash]

I really like this idea. I would be interested to see an implementation of this.

[olskool]

Got a concept I want your take on as far as engaging mechanics and enjoyable play goes. It's non-competitive so don't worry about balance just about what might be interesting for storytelling and resolution. Your character has a dice pool and rolls to generate his turn's attributes. A die has 6 facings and there are 6 attributes. So if you roll a 1 you generate a Strength charge for that turn. Various abilities can be used to convert rolls into other rolls to generate more Strength out of say Wisdom with each class having its own preferences. You can spend these charges to execute certain abilities in and out of combat. The rolls ensure you can't reliably do the same actions turn after turn in combat because battle is chaotic and you might not always be in a good position to go for a trip or bull rush. Likewise you don't just autododge fireballs and arrows because sometimes your luck just wasn't in it.

Definitely seems to lend towards balanced characters who can do something with every attribute but then comes combo costs like requiring Strength 3 and Intelligence 1 to execute a whirlwind or something. Some abilities may even require generic costs like mana in Magic the Gathering, so you can spend ANY three dice in addition to at least 2 Strength dice. Actions per turn are only limited to your resource availability and you have to dynamically decide how to react to each turn according to circumstances with the dice rolls telling you what the current situation is looking like and what available assets you can use. Ideally people don't just min-max 40 strength 10 other stat characters and actually consider the value of pumping their Charisma or Wisdom for battle.

How about an alternate take?

The PC/NPC gets a number of "ACTION DICE" equal to a given Characteristic's bonus score which would be ranked 0 through 5 based on 2 to 3-point increments of the characteristic score (the 3 to 20 score). like so...

Characteristic Score = Bonus ACTION DICE
1-3 = 0
4-6 = 1
7-10 = 2
11-14 = 3
15-17 = 4
18-20 = 5

The above dice are the maximum allowed ACTION DICE per Encounter (or between Short Rests if you prefer). The PC can "allocate" an ACTION DIE based on the Characteristic in question. STR-based ACTION DICE can be used to augment Damage, Melee To-Hit, or any strength-based test. INT-based ACTION DICE can be used for mental tasks like spell casting or knowledge skills. The other Characteristic ACTION DICE can be used for actions based on that Characteristic as well. The only limits are that you can allocate only ONE Characteristic ACTION DIE per round of activity. When an ACTION DIE is used, you roll the appropriate die and apply its result as a bonus to the task in question. Once you're out of dice, you can generate no more bonuses to tests until you reset the Encounter (or take a Short rest).

PROFICIENCY BY LEVEL:
This is used to determine the type of die used based on the character's LEVEL.

Character's Level = Dice Type Used

0 level = 1D3
1st to 2nd level = 1D4
3rd to 5th level = 1D6
6th to 9th level = 1D8
10th to 14th level = 1D10
15th to 20th level = 1D12

The die listed (by Character Level) is used to generate a bonus for the action you are trying to augment. You can switch up dice as needed (based on the appropriate characteristic) during the encounter.

[DeTess]

I've seen a system kinda like you describe used in a card-game called ashes: rise of the phoenixborn. It used dice as its mana system, with four different types of dice related to different styles of cards (kinda like mtg colors). Each dice had 2 'basic' symbols, 3 'intermediate symbols' and 1 'advanced symbols'. The basic symbols where the same for all dice types, while the other 2 differed per dice. The cards then required some combination of symbols to be cast.

By picking which dice made up your mana-pool you could influence what results you where likely to get, but things where never guaranteed, and the drafting system naturally encouraged you to mix at least two types of dice, and maybe as many as all four. This meant you could decide on a general play-style, but you'd have to decide how best to spend your resources from turn to turn to get the best results. I reckon you might be able to adapt a similar system to a TTRPG as well.

[Yakk]

There are 4 and 6 and 8 sided dice, so we don't need only 6 attributes.

Sliding it over to "more generic" also works.

Start with a pile of adjectives.

Powerful
Tricky
Tough
Clever
Fast
Deliberate
Vicious

then winnow it down. Maybe use synonym clumping, like big 5 does, to cluster words and pick one from each cluster.

Done right, a wizard type's "powerful" and a fighter type's "powerful" can have different meanings.