manwad

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@manwad

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manwad
@manwad

Skill System That Actually Has Legs

some unholy combo of LUMEN 1.0, LUMEN 2.0, and 6e.

So, you have your three Approaches. [what basically boils down to] Strength/Boisterous, Speed/Witty, Smarts/Methodical.

They all start at 1.
You use them in Scenarios.

There's two kinds of Scenarios.

[need better names but] Introduction and Dicey Scenarios.

Introduction scenarios, the stakes are low~ish. You can invoke an Approach freely to solve whatever Problems are there. This increments your Approach by 1. So, if you use Strength, Strength goes from 1 to 2.

maybe have the increments also be the amount of times you need to use that approach to increment it. So, to be The Fucking Strong, gotta act it 2 more times to get it to 3, then 3 more times to get it to 4. Cap at 4.

maybe cap total stats at uh... 8. 7. dunno. will need to finagle.

Dicey scenarios, the chips are down and your (HP, ally lives, the Mission, etc) is at stake.

During these, you use your Approaches as in LUMEN 1.0.
Roll d6s equal to Approach.
Take Highest.
1-2: Success at horrible cost.
3-4: Success at self cost.
5-6: Clean Success.

that's it.

made as a thing when I first looked at HUNT, ran the numbers behind the approaches and, man as a GM you'd REALLY need to put 'em through the wringer to burn 'em down.

but that's just my power fantasy of, I like the underdog approach to it, of juuuuust squeaking by vs power overwhelming.

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binary
@binary

I reckon something worth noting re: HUNT scaling is what made it to that CLAW draft: each scene has a number of challenges that scale with the number of players. This feels like the good move going forward because then you get a proportional number of Things To Do.

But yeah, this is why from the getgo I was thinking you'd have to like. Reduce LUMEN approach numbers, require multiple-spends, or make them have to be spent on more to make it work. I do firmly believe that if you can't reasonably ever run out of a resource then there's not much point tracking it.

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manwad
@manwad

That indeed was some good tech in the CLAW draft.

one off the cuff fix I also thought for HUNT's somewhat absurd amount of resources was just

you get 5 total across all Approaches, use 'em as prompts. 'cause with a 4man that's still fuckin'... 20.

but it's being lowered to 4 now! so! Hmm.

Legit a lot of ground to cover with LUMEN 2.0, very exciting to work with and see how it develops.

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binary
@binary

A ton of ground, yeah! It's cool to see something in flux shape up.

Tangential because I don't think it's appropriate everywhere but it's on-topic: So for ANOINTED I initially had a system that tracked individual points per Attribute, and spent them proportionally - like you need 6 of your Prowess tokens to do this Hard thing which leaves you not able to do the thing later. Writing it all out, though, it felt clunky as hell and I didn't want to add 4 more bars to track in a game that already has too many. So instead of that, I decided to assign difficulties to tasks; you can only use each Attribute once per rest, higher values just let you do harder things, tools halve the difficulty, and players can combine forces to meet difficulty but both of them have to expend it.

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manwad
@manwad

Na that's super on-topic because the "tracking 4 more bars" plus the multi-part things got me thinking of an immediate flaw in my thing, which is:

Hey, GM, do you want players in your 4-man to have some specialization and give them at least a 3 in a stat? Toss them 12 softball narrative-beats before throwing something dicey at them.

that shit's way too much before stakes are raised.

back to the drawing board.

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