Tell Me About Your Favorite Mechanics

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Seriously, though, advantage/disadvantage from 5E and playbooks from PbtA/Beyond the Wall, the stress dice mechanic from Alien.

 

[Reynard]

Seriously, though, advantage/disadvantage from 5E and playbooks from PbtA/Beyond the Wall, the stress dice mechanic from Alien.

I really love Playbooks and think that any number of games, trad and otherwise, can benefit from them.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Escalation die - you have a d6 that turns up by one every round, and that adds to hit rolls. However in 13th age the monsters have different powers that work if the escalation die is odd or even. It's a narrative rule that does the "losing at the start of the fight, figuring out how to fight the opponent and winning" feel of action movies.

The countdown dice pool. Lets say you have the PCs in a situation where something dire is about to happen, but you don't want to decided a specific time, so you put a pool of D6s into the pool. At the end of reach round you roll them, and remove any that have a specific number (I think six is the default). So each round there is a chance of 0-lots of dice being removed. When all the dice are removed the event happens. It helps build tension, and isn't some arbitrary amount of time. The players can see the pool get smaller and smaller and adjust their actions accordingly.

Thanks! They both sound very cool.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I really love Playbooks and think that any number of games, trad and otherwise, can benefit from them.

Yeah, I love Playbooks, too. I think I said something about "class abilities in Dungeon World" but really that means Playbooks, from all PbtA games.

Also, I mentioned TOR and DW dice mechanics, but I'll broaden that to: "Simple dice mechanics that have a range of possible results, not just binary pass/fail."

 

[payn]

I like play books in theory, though they get repetitive.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I love hero, and in theory I love the speed chart. Until there's a speedster in the party.

Oh man, I agree so much. I once had a player who insisted that his speedster, with a speed of 24!!* (that he'd paid for with an elemental control!!!!) was a perfectly fine character. It was not.

Luckily, there are other ways of modelling speedster tropes. I'm fond of things like selective area of effect attacks to model running around a space and punching every single baddie. And change environment to do all that cute "instant clean room" thing. You can limit the speedsters to speed to 1 or 2 over the campaign average and still hit all those speedster tropes.



*for people not familiar with Hero, speed only goes up to 12.

 

[aramis erak]

I can see that. But for 25 years the only people in my groups that wanted to play a speedster was me.

My fantasy hero setting had +1 speed for elves as a racial... which lead to a 2 of 3 elves maxed in each group... PC elves tended to be speed 6, everyone else speed 3-4... There was one Speed 4 elf... but he bought Pre to 30, and took the disad, "Hunted, local badass, 15-"...

Oh man, I agree so much. I once had a player who insisted that his speedster, with a speed of 24!!* (that he'd paid for with an elemental control!!!!) was a perfectly fine character. It was not.

I've had a couple people who couldn't keep straight move vs speed. They were die-hard AD&D 1E players... and to them, speed always meant movment range.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I may not have made myself clear. Sorry.

When I said that that character had a speed of 24, I mean the Speed characteristic, not the character's Running (or any other movement.) This guy wanted to go, that is take a phase, twice every segment of the turn.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

Oh man, I agree so much. I once had a player who insisted that his speedster, with a speed of 24!!* (that he'd paid for with an elemental control!!!!) was a perfectly fine character. It was not.

Luckily, there are other ways of modelling speedster tropes. I'm fond of things like selective area of effect attacks to model running around a space and punching every single baddie. And change environment to do all that cute "instant clean room" thing. You can limit the speedsters to speed to 1 or 2 over the campaign average and still hit all those speedster tropes.



*for people not familiar with Hero, speed only goes up to 12.

Holy Cow!

When I ran speedsters if the Brick was a speed 4 (or 5 for higher powered games) and the standard EP was a 6, I'd try for a 7.... maybe an 8, but I tried to keep is no more than couple higher than the slowest. I love the tricks. I remember going through the core book and finding a speedster based effect for every power in the book. Like you I liked area effects with that kind of thing. I loved all the Change Environment tricks. I actually pulled off the Kid Flash trick (from the Teen Titans / X-Men book) of taking an engine apart as the minor bad guys were driving away.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Zweihander/Flames of Freedom, minus the woke stuff in FoF (I like my history accurate).

The tidy turn handling (three Action points), the collection Fate Coin Pool (use a Coin, get an advantage, and the coin now goes to the GM to buy bennies for the NPCs), the dealy, unpredictable combat, the elegant PC growth system, the listing for lawyers in the monster section.