What are your favourite single game mechanics?

Zhaleskra · Jul 22, 2019

World Tree . . . succeeding TOO WELL on a skill check can have unforeseen consequences. Not only did you beat the threshold, you beat it by 30 or more. The example given was of a singer entertaining a crowd, who gets potentially unwanted attention from a female in the audience. I like the idea that succeeding by too much can also be bad.

Same system: using the wrong skill to achieve the right result for the wrong reason. Telling a bedtime story using History instead of Storytelling and boring the kid to sleep.

Ginger McMurray · Jul 22, 2019

Zhaleskra said:
World Tree . . . succeeding TOO WELL on a skill check can have unforeseen consequences. Not only did you beat the threshold, you beat it by 30 or more. The example given was of a singer entertaining a crowd, who gets potentially unwanted attention from a female in the audience. I like the idea that succeeding by too much can also be bad.

Same system: using the wrong skill to achieve the right result for the wrong reason. Telling a bedtime story using History instead of Storytelling and boring the kid to sleep.

I used to lull my granddaughter to sleep talking about trigonometry.

Though inwraopen it in Native American myth before getting into the actual math.

GrahamWills · Jul 22, 2019

Ginger McMurray said:
Very interested in [Preparedness]. How does it work? Maybe I can port it to other games.

GUMSHOE defines each character's skill as a set of pool points. Players spend from the pool to make it easier to over come a target difficulty. So Preparedness is a skill a player has and may have pool points in (generally from 0-10 or so, but 12+ is not uncommon for higher power games).

The skill works like this: When a player thinks of some piece of equipment they would like to have at this point in the game, but didn't explicitly mention, they can make a preparedness check to have it, with the difficulty being set by the GM. In GUMSHOE the dice used is a d6, so a difficulty of 4 is the standard -- a 50-50 chance of success if you do not spend.

As a GM, I would make the difficulty of something 2 if it's something they really ought to have, but might be fun if the didn't remember to bring it; 4 if it's something they might have brought, 6-8 if they would have needed very clever forethought to have it, and higher if it would be essentially an amazing stroke of luck. Recall that a pool of size 6 is quite normal, so players could spend 3 and only need to roll a 3 on d6 to hit a difficulty of 6, so the game does aim at hyper-competent people. This skill's pool refreshes between scenarios -- not sessions -- and I tended to run 2-3 sessions per scenario, so people would spread it out a bit.

If I was adapting this to d20 games, I might try something like this:

Preparedness. Make a check to determine if you had prepared by bringing an object you describe with you. The GM will set the difficulty based on how available the item is, and how likely i would be for you to bring it (so bringing rope to a mountain-climbing expedition would be trivial, whereas bringing ancient history books to a bar might be hard). If you fail the check, you expend one use of this skill. The skill has a bonus provided by INT, and the number of uses per day is equal to your WIS bonus, minimum one.

Feat: Ready for Anything: You have a +5 bonus to Preparedness checks, and once per day may re-roll the skill check.

Ginger McMurray · Jul 23, 2019

GrahamWills said:
GUMSHOE Preparedness stuff.

Thanks! I'll try and figure out a way to port it to Scion. I really like it and it would relieve me of the need to say, "well... you DO have epic Intelligence, so it's possible you brought that..." and then not know how to handle it in other situations.

Campbell · Jul 23, 2019

Labels from Masks. Shifting stats to reflect a shifting sense of self in teenage superheroes. Absolutely brilliant.

GMMichael · Jul 23, 2019

Wightbred said:
I really love the concept of this, as the intensity of the fight rises to a crescendo and it stops them dragging on. . .Any advice on making it work, or other ways to implement it?

Another way: use it in horror games, for the BBEG (or MacGuffin, depending on your plot/theme). I called it the Tension Die, and as it increases, it adds to the BBEG's damage capability. It also increases your odds of a close encounter with the BBEG.

DammitVictor · Jul 23, 2019

Advantage in Honor + Intrigue. To represent the back and forth of a frenetic fencing duel. You can give a point of Advantage to negate a hit, there are other ways you can gain or lose it. If you hit 0 Advantage, you lose and your opponent gets to decide how-- I do not recall, at present, whether or not there are restrictions to this.

On a related note, Boon and Flaw dice in Barbarians of Lemuria and its variants. It's like a less swingy version of D&D's Advantage/Disadvantage, where you roll an extra d6 and keep the best (or worst) 2.

The XP Mechanic in Barbarians of Lemuria. BoL characters acquire loot like D&D characters, but to get XP for the session, the player has to explain why they're broke again already. You can earn bonus XP for making your losses colorful and characteristic.

Zhaleskra · Jul 23, 2019

Found something I missed in High Adventure Role Playing (HARP) Fantasy as I generally don't give too much thought to the general items list. On the description for the hammer, there's a note that it can be used as -30 mace. As bonuses and penalties tend to be given in 5s (except in difficulties, where it's 20s), that would make it in D&D a mace with a -6 penalty. Still, if you don't have an actual weapon.