ry's Drama Rules

[rom90125]

The death flag is definitely designed for campaigns where characters can't come back from the dead. I should have been clear about that.

Sort of like this:

Say I'm a player character. I get Conviction (awesome!) and I can kick ass six ways from Sunday. My death flag is, by default, down. This means I'm not going to get killed randomly. You reduce me to death and I somehow manage to hang on. Maybe I rolled off the cliff into the water, maybe I'm taken prisoner, whatever. But random stuff isn't going to kill me; I'm an action hero.

But sometimes something is very important; I'm up against the Lich that killed my father. I have to put my all into this. I'm putting EVERYTHING on the line. Damnit, I'm going to do this even if it kills me (at the game table, my player raises the death flag). I'm still an action hero, and I get 6 more Conviction points to spend. But now I'm an action hero on his death run. Somehow, be it the camera work or the lighting, you can tell that the stakes are higher now. Right now, anything that can kill me, kills me.

This is a big change in the "social contract" between players and GM. The player decides what's worth risking the character on, compared to standard lethal games where the player is always at the mercy of the GM.

beautiful man, just beautiful. I have already proposed the Conviction rule to my group, and I'm going to add Death Flag to the wish list as well. Ideally, they would be willing to pursue the E6 variant, but, that is going to be a harder sell. Good work Ry.

 

[kaomera]

I'd be interested in knowing what your thoughts where behind allowing re-rolls from Conviction, rather than "action dice" (ie: +1d6 or +1d8 to the roll)...

 

[Ry]

I'd be interested in knowing what your thoughts where behind allowing re-rolls from Conviction, rather than "action dice" (ie: +1d6 or +1d8 to the roll)...

I've tried both; in play, I don't find 1d6/1d8 action points go far enough.

Action points are designed to give D&D a more action-movie feel. But they dont' help if you have a really cool idea but roll a 1 or a 2 doing it. The other thing about Conviction as it's shown here is that it's easier to put everything into a roll in advance than it is to recover from an embarrasing failure.

Also, I allow multiple attempts for those re-rolls, and multiple dice for that dice pool. So if you want to put EVERYTHING into a roll you pay 2 Conviction and pick up 3 dice instead of 1. Your average roll has now jumped from 10.5 to about 17.

 

[Ry]

I like these a lot, though I'm not certain I'd use them with D&D -- I think that they'd be a great addition to C&C or BFRPG though, as combat in both of those games can quickly devolve into a rather stale series of pass/fail checks. These rules, I think, would really 'beef up' combat in both systems.

Great - honestly, they can work for any system that sets "pass or fail" stakes for actions, and some kind of translation for the standard and move actions.

 

[Ry]

Good work Ry.

Thanks Rom!

 

[Ry]

Here's the most current version of this as an .rtf

Changes
1) Conviction can be spent on any roll
2) Conviction can be regenerated daily or per-session, at the GM's option
3) More clarification on how raises work.