[freeroleplay] New Fringe Mechanic Take 2

[Ricardo Gladwell]

On Tue, 2006-07-11 at 17:27 +0100, Samuel Penn wrote:
> Compared to the previous system, there may be fewer dice involved,
> since attributes average 0 rather than 2. It depends on how common
> positive/negative modifiers are. What happens if you have an attribute
> and skill of zero, and no other modifiers?

I imagine that by default the success pool would always have at least
one die to ensure everyone has a chance of success.

> It is introducing the problem we had with the Storyteller system.

I thought the main problem with the old Storyteller system was that you
roll botches with the same dice you roll to successes. So, the more dice
you have the more chance you have of rolling a botch.

This meant that even someone with a dice pool of 8 was as likely if not
more so to fail as a character with a dice pool of 3. The new mechanic
here does away with this, allow characters with higher scores a
decreasing chance of failure.

> Too often we'd get a number of successes, only to loose them all
> to 1's. It was annoying, to the point that we all agreed to change
> the rule to get rid of the fumbles. Psychologically, having good
> rolls cancelled by other results was seen to be much worse than
> simply making a bad roll in which you got no good rolls. We still
> counted 1's as fumbles if you also got zero successes.

I see your point. That said, given the other advantages of the system
(uses d6, degree of failure, WYSIWYG results) I think this is relatively
minor. Its the sort of thing that players used to other systems can
adapt to.

> If you roll 3 6's in the success pool, and 3 4's in the failure
> pool, you've failed. The 6's count for nothing.

They do count for something because they count against the failures. So,
instead of failing with 3 failures you only fail with 1 which is a
lesser failure.

Kind regards...

-- 
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free RPG Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
president at freeroleplay.org