Hello Shawn, a (hopefully) quick question for you concerning the challenge dice.
Hello Shawn, a (hopefully) quick question for you concerning the challenge dice.
I am curious about your thoughts on varying the dice for lesser/greater challenges or perhaps advantage/disadvantage.
For example:
lesser challenge/advantage: d8
typical challenge: d10
greater challenge/disadantage: d12
I suppose defining lesser/typical/greater could be tricky.
I figured to ask you before I think to much on it in case you already found this to be cumbersome or detracting to play.
(I can't seem to not start hacking rules even before I try them)
Thank you for your thoughts and for your game!
I am curious about your thoughts on varying the dice for lesser/greater challenges or perhaps advantage/disadvantage.
For example:
lesser challenge/advantage: d8
typical challenge: d10
greater challenge/disadantage: d12
I suppose defining lesser/typical/greater could be tricky.
I figured to ask you before I think to much on it in case you already found this to be cumbersome or detracting to play.
(I can't seem to not start hacking rules even before I try them)
Thank you for your thoughts and for your game!
Hey, ronald v. For the most part, my suggestion is to represent difficulty through the fiction and how that relates to your moves. Something that is easy/mundane may not even need a move. Something that is a great challenge may need multiple moves to overcome. The cost of failure should be greater for an overwhelming challenge, and more mundane for a less risky challenge.
ReplyDeleteAssets also give you things like re-rolls to represent strong advantage, and of course progress tracks represent the inherent challenge of overcoming a quest, journey, or foe. Finally, your momentum track is the mechanical representation of building advantage or suffering from disadvantage.
These dials give you quite a bit to play with when you want to represent difficulty through the fiction.
However, If I were to hack the system to do something along the lines of what you suggested, I'd probably do it this way.
Lesser Challenge / strong advantage = Roll 3 challenge dice, take the 2 lowest
Typical Challenge = Roll 2 challenge dice
Greater Challenge / strong disadvantage = Roll 3 challenge dice, take the 2 highest
Keeping the d10 as challenge dice is important for multiple reasons, including the way momentum is handled and the math behind matches.
Were I to use this, I would keep the use of advantage/disadvantage pretty rare. I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect it would have a fairly big impact.
Mostly I'd encourage you to try it without it, and see how that goes, but it's your game and it won't shatter the space/time continuum or anything (I don't think)
Shawn Tomkin Thank you! I'm still pretty green with games driven by moves.
ReplyDeleteI've been enjoying reading the APs and seeing how easily your system seems to port to other settings.
Back to the book!
I am currently playing with 2d12. Just to make it harder for my characters, as I felt like I want to fail more often. I didn't even consider the wider impact, thanks Shawn Tomkin for the pointer. Will have to think about that. Naive like I am, I just felt like I want to tell more of a grim story 😉
ReplyDeleteBernhard Lutz ... If you want to adjust things to lean toward failure a bit more, I'd say the safest space to play in is the stat array. Try 2,1,1,0,0 for example (just knock each of your present stats down by 1).
ReplyDeleteI finally had some flight time this week to read through the entire rule book. I thought about dice-tweaking as I read through the rules and the sample session at the end of the book, and I thought about using a simple modifier to the hit-against-d10...
ReplyDeleteRight now, the rules state that for a positive outcome the Action Score needs to be greater than the result on each Challenge die. Try using a tiny modification: greater than or equal to leans the results in the player character's favor. This leads to a single adjustment, if the player feels the dice are in a hating mood.
Though I do like the idea of using the "roll 3, take the two highest/lowest" as an adjustment, that might be just a bit heavy-handed. As it stands, this is supposed to be a difficult game, right? ;)
I'm definitely going to need to play a number of sessions to see how the default balance is. That should start this weekend, as I finally got home and printed/cut all of the Asset cards today... Cannot wait to start!