The Tao of Rules Hacking, Part 2

If you’re just tuning in, go back and read Part 1.

There are a lot of different ways I could go here. What I want is simple: simple, simple, simple. I don’t want players to have to spent a lot of time adding up die rolls. At the same time, I want nuance, degrees of success so players can be descriptive in the characters’ actions. No, I’m not asking for much at all.

Rules-as-written Risus has the player roll a bunch of dice and add them together. Hopefully, the total beats a target number. If I stick with that, I need to create a base target number. I want someone with a 1 to be able succeed on at least a basic level, so the target number has to be 6 or less. Say 6, to make it easy. We could keep the Savage Worlds paradigm, and have “yes, and” levels of success for every increment of 6. The problem with this is that there’s no downside, no degrees of “no, but” or “no, and”. It’s just fail, succeed, or succeed better. Bleh.

We could go with individual die results, rather than adding; count the 6′s and ignore all other dice. The more 6′s you roll the better the success. That still doesn’t address the failure. We could make 1′s failures; have 1′s and 6′s cancel each other. If it zeroes out, if you have more 1′s, now you have a degree of success, if you have more 6′s you have a degree of failure. I have two thoughts on this. First, old school World of Darkness did this except with d10′s, and they did away with 1′s canceling successes because it was a pain in the ass. Second, it kind of feels like I’m reinventing Fate, and the success ladder. Yes, I had that in mind when I looked at Doctor Who, but I think DW streamlines it elegantly. Simpler; I want it simpler.

Now I’m thinking Ubiquity: even/odd. You don’t need Fate dice with pluses and minuses, you don’t even need d6′s, you can use any dice. Pair off evens and odds and eliminate them, so you end up with nothing, all evens, or all odds.

Successes / Result
6 / “Yes, and” x5
5 / “Yes, and” x4
4 / “Yes, and” x3
3 / “Yes, and” x2
2 / “Yes, and”
1 / Yes
0 / “No, but”
-1 / No
-2 / “No, and”
-3 / “No, and x2″
-4 / “No, and x3″
-5 / “No, and x4″
-6 / “No, and x5″

A single success, or a single failure, does the job. More of each gives you add-on effect. A wash compromises with a “no, but”, which seems appropriate for a wash; you don’t win, but it’s not a total loss.

The only logic problem I have here is that degree of failure is tied to skill level. Someone with a 1 can’t screw up spectacularly, but someone with a 6 can. That doesn’t feel right. Sure, we could try to justify it be saying bigger numbers mean bigger risks, but fie on that. Since characters with higher scores get fewer Hero points, their ability to mitigate failure is decreased as well. We have a “broken” system here. Back to the drawing board. The obvious solution is to cap it. I’m now seeing something like this:

Successes / Result
All even: “Yes, and”
More even than odd: Yes
Wash: “No, but”
More odd than even: No
All odd: “No, and”

Hey, that’s simple! Cuts to the heart of the matter. Yes, it takes away stacked success and failures, but that’s not necessarily bad. “Yes, and” just does all of the narrative stuff you asked for without itemizing each additional effect, and I can live with that. Now I have a new problem; what real advantage do I have for having a 6 rating in a cliche versus having a 4? I don’t want to crunch probabilities here, I want to know from my gut, from a cursory glance. Someone with a 1 rolls one even, it’s “all even” and a “yes, and” and that’s pretty cool, but if I roll all 6 dice and get six evens, where’s the extra OOMPH! in my action for that?

Let’s keep the simple all/more than/wash scale AND allow successes to stack. So if you want to do cascading “yes, and” successes you can. This is especially effective when you’re looking at combat damage. 1 success is 1 point of damage. 6 successes is 6 points of damage. Going back to my earlier example of the Orc (1) and the Boss Wizard (6) having the same target number, 1 success will kill the orc but barely nick the boss, 6 successes will kill the wizard (unless he has villain points and other tricks up his sleeve, hoo-HAH!).

However, failure is limited to a single “no, and”. That favors the players, and I like that. The GM can make the “and” part as bad as he or she needs it to be.

Okay, I think I’ve got the basics of this licked. Now, in the next part, we can get all philosophical and figure out what, exactly, this monstrosity is.