[freeroleplay] New Fringe Mechanic Take 2

[Ricardo Gladwell]

Hi Jerry,

It's good to see you back on the list. Thought we'd lost you. Thanks for
you thoughtful remarks on new mechanic.

On Tue, 2006-07-11 at 09:44 -0700, Jerry Stratton wrote:
> 1) You might be able to make it look less complicated by not using
> negative numbers.

I'm not sure the complication is not warranted here: its a useful
indicator as to whether the trait belongs in the failure or success
pool. Is there some other means to signify which is a 'good' or a 'bad'
modifier?

>  Since you've divided "negative" modifiers out into their
> own roll, all of your modifiers are really positive. You  ought to be able
> to come up with cool names for success and failure so that "negative"
> attributes are really failure attributes, i.e., things the character isn't
> good at. For example, instead of Agility -2, a character would have a
> Clumsiness of 2. For things where clumsiness matters, that attribute adds
> to their failure pool.

Indeed, the new mechanic turns everything into a roll modifier. I can
imagine a Fudge-like system where, instead of fixed attributes,
characters have a free-form series of descriptive qualifiers each with a
score. Each time a players rolls they collect up all the appropriate
qualifiers and add them to the success or failure pool depending on
whether they are bonuses or penalties for the roll.

Instead of having negative numbers players interpret the traits to
either be helpful or obstacles depending on the situation. For example,
a character with Charisma 3 and Noble 2 would roll both traits in a
charisma roll to convince the King an army masses on his borders, while
the Noble trait might be considered to be a negative modifier trying to
convince a group of revolting peasants.

I'm not sure if this is the system I want Fringe to be though, although
it could certainly make an excellent free content roleplaying game if
someone wants to take the idea and run with it.

> Doing so will also more clearly describe the character's strengths and
> weaknesses. It should also make obstacles easier to imagine: this cliff is
> a difficulty 5, rather than a -5 to climbing attempts. This will also make
> your writing clearer; in your example below you assign a difficulty of -3
> to the cliff face. So what if the cliff face is really easy? Would that be
> described as a difficulty of 3?

I do like the idea that you give everything a simple trait. For example,
the cliff face could have a Treacherous 2 and High 4 traits which both
need to be overcome. This means the traits could be used in other,
unintended ways. For example, the High trait could also be used to roll
for damage when falling off the cliff. Neat.

> I also first read that "the game master may assign a negative modifier to
> the roll" as applying to the numbers (possibly because I just read Burning
> Wheel) rather than to the number of dice.

Whoops, quite right. Will fix.

> In actual practice if the success pool always has a lot more dice more
> than the failure pool this may not matter. But if the general situation is
> for the success and failure pools to have the same or similar numbers of
> dice, failure will be more common than success.

I totally agree: In general I see the system with more die in the
success pool. Attributes a -2 to +2 and skills 0 to +5 which means that
skilled characters would have always have more success die than failure
die on average.

> 3) I think that most failures will be critical failures. If a failure is
> when the failures equal or exceed the successes, and a critical failure is
> when the failures exceed the successes, then critical failures are likely
> to happen regularly.

I might ditch the failure > success == critical failure. If you get more
failures than successes you just fail, with the number of failures
indicating degree of failure. So, 5 failures would be a critical
failure, say.

> 4) Characters can fail even if they have no failure dice. By adding a
> failure pool, you're doing something special beyond just letting them
> fail. Perhaps you could make use of this.

> Some game I've read had players
> take on another player's bad side (I think it was some on-line RPG about
> role-playing angels, but I don't remember);

It certainly could be used for things like that. In a way it turns the
internal factors vs. external factors of traditional attribute + skill
vs. difficulty systems into positive vs. negative factors which means it
can be used model internal conflict quite well.

>  you might let other players
> roll the failure dice and make up some in-game reason for this.

I like it, maybe the GM could roll the failure pool? Other players could
roll them in opposed tests?

Kind regards...

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