caputlupinum

The Merry Band

@caputlupinum

@PositronicWoman's thieving RPG

log in
caputlupinum
@caputlupinum
Edcrab
@Edcrab
Edcrab
@Edcrab

Critical thinking

Need to have a reckoning of sorts re: how many cool tabletop tales centre around "I rolled a 20 and then something cool happened". More than ever I feel like players should be able to invoke that neat narrative/mechanical effect on demand, albeit with some sort of rare resource, but at the same time I don't want to completely do away with being able to do it randomly because that can be pretty fun in and of itself

I do have a very basic "I don't want to crit on this roll, let me do it later" mechanic which I tend to sloppily port to every d20 system I've ran a campaign in. In some forms it meant carrying a +1d6 bonus with you until such a time as you wanted to deploy it. In others I simply stated that you could "bank" the natural 20 and announce the critical when you actually needed it. I don't think there's any kind of simulationist explanation for either of those but I can't say I care very much

Conversely I've got an "Exploit" system that I keep coming back to across multiple projects: the notion that a player's critical failure is less their fuck-up and more a sign of the dangerous skills of their opponent. A much more vague, abstracted, narrative way of saying "the enemy does something gamechanging in response".

And of course it should work both ways. If the hostile trooper rolls a 1 in melee with the berserker, you're damn right the berserker will suplex them as a free action. Rules of nature

Generally I just don't like the idea of a super-expert-specialist failing at a task 5% of the time, but I can buy that 5% of the time their opponent is ALSO some kind of super-expert-specialist who can exploit the narrowest of openings to even the odds

The superspy doesn't drop his pistol like a clutz, but their nemesis sure can disarm him during the climactic duel. The hacker didn't misclick, but she did finally attract the attention of the Anti-Hacker Corps that you invented on the spot.

But when the nemesis rolls their own Exploit, they're definitely getting shoved off the balcony. And the AHC will find that their database has been replaced with 300 million repeated instances of "lmao you suckers"

caputlupinum
@caputlupinum

and this is why The Merry Band will have auto succeeding skills unique to each job

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Edcrab's post:

bb8
@bb8

I wonder if it would make sense to have something like a "Danger Die": that is, most dice players rolls determine flat success or failure on a sensible curve, without extremes for critical failure or success. However, if they really need to push things, they can grab the Danger Die-- which have to be Red, probably-- and which contain only very swing-y results. Maybe a D4 (the most dangerous dice shape) where 1 is critical fail, 4 is critical success, and 2 and 3 are "failure-with-a-hint-of-success" and "success-with-a-hint-of-failure". Maybe not. Like, I think tend of day, "opt in" and "big swing" are the ideals that some of your points are orbiting. (I really love your Exploit view of fails, btw.)

login to reply
Edcrab
@Edcrab

Interesting! I wonder if your Danger Die is something the PC gets to choose, or is it derivative of the situation, or the opponent? Extremes as criticals, but the middle values are successes with complications: so if you're happy with a success with a complication, you're content to roll a d12, but if you really, really need that crit, you might risk the d4

Back in the mists of time I did have a "Gambit" ability (I think something a PC had to pick out, rather than a universal feature) which did something along those lines: toss a coin and either critically succeed or critically fail. Which was pretty absurd, and nobody was really incentivised to try it, but presumably the Danger Die has other uses. And ideally, nobody would be forced to use it! Unless the giant boss fight has a power that states "roll Danger"

Probably would be hard to slot into my current musings but I'm really liking the notion of the Danger Die as something adjacent with or outright connected to the 13th Age escalation die. Round goes on, things get more dangerous: maybe as the basis of a very safe, low-lethality system... unless you're starting to roll the Danger Die (which would of course go down a step as Escalation continues)

login to reply
binary
@binary

@Gahostan on twitter mocked up a spread modifying standard 5E procedure a few months ago which is: when making an attack, you can either skip the to-hit roll and go straight to rolling for damage OR you roll to hit, but if you hit it always deals max damage, and it can crit. Think that's a pretty neat way to approach it: you can opt into a high risk, high reward thing when you want. (Also doing both is pretty slow so anything that gets rid of doing both is ok in my book.)

Re: crit-fail doing something bad in the sense of "an enemy gets an advantage" that's an idea that more modern systems definitely run with: LUMEN in particular has "success with complication means it works but an enemy gets to act at the same time" baked into its roll mechanics, which almost entirely replaces the idea of missing. It's great for a lot of reasons, most of all because it really speeds things along.

login to reply
Edcrab
@Edcrab

Due to my PBP roots I've often insisted on rolling to-hit and damage at the same time. Lends itself well to allowing mechanics where the values can interact with each other

I'm aware your total//effect system was built with such things in mind! It's a very intriguing setup and I'll probably post about it later when I've rounded up my thoughts

And death to misses, yes. I'm all-in on graze effects/minimum damages now. Something should happen when you roll! I did toy (and may return? I don't know) to the concept of ablative armour class, in that the value challenged went down by 1 every time it caused an attack to graze instead of hit. I was thinking going as abstract as possible and labelling it something like "Nerve" to explain why it can challenge everything from gunfire to psionics, but at some point there's just too much to track on a character sheet and you question what it'd really bring to proceedings

login to reply
binary
@binary

This is one of those reasons I greatly prefer when systems label their AC-equivalent something generic like "Defense" - it's easier to imagine general defenses getting worn down over time, or buffed by various things.

login to reply
smm
@smm

I have recently taken a shine to a simultaneous d6 vs d8 roll (or flip it for easier tasks). The player rolls both, with the objective for the d6 to beat the d8, the idea being the world isn’t always a set challenge—there are unknowables that hassle characters. I wrote it into one game recently, and am looking forward to writing it into others. It needs some variations , since I think an unmodified throw fails about 56% of the time, so it’s the sort of mechanic that probably only sees use in games where you only need rolls to resolve high-stakes situations.

login to reply
gaw
@gaw

In our system, Rosette Diceless, each character has one or more Secrets that they can hint at once a session to boost a roll. Revealing a Secret automatically succeeds with an unblockable Edge, which is basically the best possible result a challenge can have. You can also do this by sacrificing a Rare Resource (e.g. crashing your spaceship into a target). These are both easily ported to other systems, giving an advantage (in 5e this could literally be advantage on a roll) for hinting at a Secret and auto-critting on revealing a Secret or sacrificing some irreplaceable and unique item.

login to reply
Edcrab
@Edcrab

I like that, and did something very similar with the resources in an old WIP I had, even right down to using the word Edge! (Because it is indeed a great word for a tabletop mechanic, heck yeah)

One problem that system had was an awkward disconnect between Edge Points, a PC resource based on level, and resources that could be sacrificed to fuel an Edge ability but weren't technically Edge themselves. So uh, yeah that'd be reworked if I ever came back to it, but players could do the same sort of thing from RD you mentioned, albeit much less bombastic, by sacrificing the damage reduction of their armour or helmet to negate a would-be lethal hit and so on.

I love the narrative push prompted by revealing Secrets. It makes me wish my own attempts at background-invoking worked: few players ever made use of it, probably because the mechanic was so nebulous, but when lacking Edge you could instead invoke a background in its place but in turn you'd apply a Compromise (sigh, better name pending) with an element of the background coming back to haunt you in the wider narrative. Definitely something with a lot of promise with proper exploration

login to reply
gaw
@gaw

The Secrets mechanic was definitely inspired by a sublime LARP experience I had where a PC was unaware that he was the kid of my and another player's PCs. I'm pretty solidly in the camp of bonuses coming from narrative justification first rather than simulation, I think; I don't want Fahid to be good at running because she spent 10,000 hours training, I want her to be good because she was a member of a track team that she still thinks of when she's feeling down.

The only downside to Edge as a game term is that something like 10% of players smirk slightly when it's said and the rest aren't sure why.

login to reply