[freeroleplay] [Fringe] New Mechanic

[Samuel Penn]

On Saturday 24 June 2006 18:50, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:
> 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.

Firstly, there's two immediate issues I have. They are merely down to
personal preference, and don't affect the playability of the mechanic
in any way. The first is that I like my dice to be WYSIWYG - I want the
number on the die to mean what it says. The 6 = 0 breaks this. The
second issue is that I like high = good.

For the above reasons, I probably wouldn't use this idea myself. However,
onto a more objective analysis.


Your 'd5' is not really a d5 - a die of type dX will give results 1 - X,
so d5 should give a result range of 1-5. Yours doesn't, it gives a result
range of 0-5, which is actually d6-1. Not sure how else to easily describe
the die type however.

> 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.

This is pretty standard. Would it be possible to raise attributes during
the game? Or is that 'out of scope' and dependent on the system using
the mechanic?

> 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.

This means that a gifted newbie can occasionally outshine an mediocre
professional, but the latter will get more consistent results. In
general I like this sort of mechanic.

> 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).

This does limit you to only 5 difficulty levels. What do these represent?
It seems limited for a gritty and realistic system, but more suited to a
high fantasy type game which is what I think Fringe is aimed at.

Related to this, is the 1-5 scale only for humans? Would a dragon have
a strength of only 5? Would Bruce Lee only have a martial arts of 5?

> 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.

Why? The difficulty is set by the number of required successes, so
any modifiers should modify this, not modify the number of dice rolled.
Having both complicates the decision of where to stick a modifier.

> 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.

A character with a skill of 5 will always succeed, so never needs to
roll. Is this what you want? How rare would you envisage a skill level
of 5 to be?

> 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.

Would you have degrees of success?

How do people combine their skills?

> 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 is a biggie. There's two fixes I can think of:

1) Allow re-rolls. So a 6 is a success, plus roll again. This allows
   any number of successes. Possibly reduce the skill in the 2nd and
   subsequent rolls if you want to give an advantage to high skill
   characters (just noticed you mentioned this one).

2) Allow a character to reduce their skill in exchange for extra dice.
   This enables highly skilled characters to be really good.


You possibly need to think about what the numbers represent. Is a
strength of 5 an olympic weightlifter, or is it Superman? If a
typical professional is never going to see a difficulty above 3
in their working life, then an average attribute or 2 is probably
reasonable (there will be some tasks an average person will always
fail at). However, if 3 is merely 'moderately hard', then the
mechanic as it stands has a problem.

I'd like to see what the numbers really mean to get an idea of how
well it would work in a real game, but otherwise it seems reasonably
simple and workable. 

-- 
Be seeing you,                         http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.                        
              IM: samuel.penn at jabber.org or samuel.penn at gmail.com