[freeroleplay] [Fringe] New Mechanic

[Ricardo Gladwell]

Hi All,

I was playing around with some ideas and I came up with the following
mechanic. Its good in that it allows everything (attributes, skills,
difficulties, roll results) to be on the same 0-5 range. I was thinking
of modifying Fringe to use it, so please let me know what you think.

Core Mechanics
--------------

To keep things as simple as possible all scores in Core range from 0 to
5(+). This includes all die rolls, traits, difficulties and action
results. To enable this, Core uses the 1d5. To roll a d5 simply roll a
six-sided dice and count all 6s as a null value or 0.

Character traits are divided into two main groups: attributes and
skills. Attributes are the raw characteristics of your character: how
strong or smart they are. Skills are acquired abilities earned through
life experience.

The mechanic for Core takes the idea that for each action a character
can take, attribute represents the maximum you can achieve but skill
represents how good the actual result of the roll is. For each action,
the GM declares which attribute and a skill are appropriate, and sets a
difficulty for the role between 1 and 5 (difficulty 0 rolls should not
require a roll: they are so trivial all characters succeed).

The dice pool for the roll is equal to the characters ability score. The
target for the roll is equal to the characters skill score. Roll
modifiers are add to or subtract from the dice pool.

The player then grabs a number of d5 equivalent to the dice pool and
rolls them. Each dice _equal to or less than_ the roll target counts as
a success. In other words, it is better to roll low.

Players then add up their successes and this is the result of their
roll. If the result is greater than or equal to the difficulty they
succeed. If it is less than the difficulty they fail.

Problems
--------

There are a couple of problems with the above. Most importantly, only
characters with attribute score at least equal to the roll difficulty
have any chance of beating the odds.

This could be solved by making difficulties generally lower or ruling
that nulls add an extra die to the pool. Or we could only use
difficulties for extraordinary tasks and allow extended rolls

Kind regards...

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