MCDM starts work on its RPG Monday!

[aramis erak]

Cool. So there’s what critical failure, failure, success, critical success on one axis and a narrative “extra good thing” along with an “extra bad thing” along the other?

Not quite.
Many rolls have limited benefit from extra success symbols.

• Success and Fail symbols cancel each other; whichever is left is the determinant. If neither in the roll, it's a fail.
• Advantage and Threat cancel each other; whichever is left is the determinant of which. More is ALWAYS better on advantage, unless people are being lazy. Likewise, opponent threat is always more is better for you and worse for them
• Triumph (which is closest to a D&D critical hit) is a success and a Triumph result. Note that for almost all combat attacks, it literally can be spent to roll a critical hit. The success portion can be cancelled by fails or despairs, but the triumph symbol effect cannot be cancelled.
• Despair (which is closest to a D&D fumble) is a fail and a despair. The fail can be cancelled by triumph or success. The despair cannot.

This leads to the following permutations:

• No symbols at all - a simple failure
• failures alone- usually a simple failure (in a very few cases the margin of failure matters)
• Success alone
• Advantage alone
• Threat Alone
• Success and Threat
• Success and Advantage
• Failure and Threat
• Failure and Advantage
• Success, Advantage, and despair
• Success, Advantage, and triumph
• Success, Advantage, triumph and despair
• Success, Threat, and despair
• Success, Threat, and triumph
• Success, Threat, triumph and despair
• Failure, Advantage, and despair
• Failure, Advantage, and triumph
• Failure, Advantage, triumph and despair
• Failure, Threat, and despair
• Failure, Threat, and triumph
• Failure, Threat, triumph and despair

Noting that each of those outcomes is theoretically a gradient from 1+...

Critical Hits are triggered by any of...

• success >=1 & hit drives wounds past threshold
• Success >= 1 and Advantage spend of the weapon's crit rating in Advantage
• success >= 1 & one triumph spend

It's possible to do a crit on a minimal damage hit... multiple triggers stack, and increas the roll on the critical hits table...

 

[DMZ2112]

People said the same about d4, d8, d12, and d20 back in the day.... Didn't bleeding matter... them funky dice became standard...

I will die on this hill, no pun intended.

Specialty dice are anti-consumer. In the unlikely event that I like Genesys so much that it becomes my primary game, playing it once a week or more, then great, everybody wins.

But if I don't, I never develop the muscle memory to read the twenty-plus unique dice results as second nature, which slows down every game, and the money I spent on the stupid dice doesn't carry value.

I have the same opinion about any game in which die results are not instantly obvious at a glance (any additive system, for example, or any system with paper success charts), but at least they don't cost me $15 for more cheap bubble-filled plastic that's only good for one game.

Do it with the standard seven, or stay on the clearance shelf.

 

[DMZ2112]

View attachment 272090

Two very different things. One open TTRPG license, good. One system, bad. Let's have a bevy of options for every table that can adopt and adapt from everything else on the market, regardless of whether they depend on d20, d100, d6, or packaged sliced bologna and Mountain Dew (I'm coming around on the Mountain Dew, but honey ham, come on, that's ridiculous).

 

[overgeeked]

• Success and Fail symbols cancel each other; whichever is left is the determinant. If neither in the roll, it's a fail.
• Advantage and Threat cancel each other; whichever is left is the determinant of which. More is ALWAYS better on advantage, unless people are being lazy. Likewise, opponent threat is always more is better for you and worse for them
• Triumph (which is closest to a D&D critical hit) is a success and a Triumph result. Note that for almost all combat attacks, it literally can be spent to roll a critical hit. The success portion can be cancelled by fails or despairs, but the triumph symbol effect cannot be cancelled.
• Despair (which is closest to a D&D fumble) is a fail and a despair. The fail can be cancelled by triumph or success. The despair cannot.

Okay. So four graded axes. Internally exclusive axes: success/null/fail & advantage/null/threat. Non-exclusive axes: triumph/null and despair/null.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

I'm not a super Colville fanboy, but any game that explicitly point out a political pillar in gameplay is interesting, funky dice or not. Definitely gonna keep an eye on this.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I'm not a super Colville fanboy, but any game that explicitly point out a political pillar in gameplay is interesting, funky dice or not. Definitely gonna keep an eye on this.

That is probably the bit I would never use. My players would never go for it,

 

[Reynard]

Specialty dice are anti-consumer.

I don't buy it, any more than video game specific peripherals are "anti-consumer."

 

[DMZ2112]

I don't buy it, any more than video game specific peripherals are "anti-consumer."

So, speaking as a rabid fan of Taiko no Tatsujin, a video-game-specific peripheral can be an integral part of the game, often in a deeply rewarding way. There are MANY video-game-specific peripherals that are cash grabs and little more.

Specialty dice aren't a custom drum controller, they're a couch-top arcade stick with a flash brand decal and dodgy third-party solenoids.

We've already got dice that do everything specialty dice do. Okay, maybe not everything, because no game needs twenty-plus unique outcomes to their core mechanic. It's bad design.

Is this an opinion? Yes. Is it correct in a thoroughly incontrovertible way? Also yes.

 

[overgeeked]

We've already got dice that do everything specialty dice do. Okay, maybe not everything, because no game needs twenty-plus unique outcomes to their core mechanic. It's bad design.

Agreed. Looking at the discussion of the Genesys/Star Wars dice, you could easily replicate that with standard dice. The percentages would be off, but you could easily roll a few standard dice and map that to each of the axes presented. This die is success/fail. That die is advantage/threat. Etc. Put together as one “roll” you’d get the same spread of results.

 

[Reynard]

So, speaking as a rabid fan of Taiko no Tatsujin, a video-game-specific peripheral can be an integral part of the game, often in a deeply rewarding way. There are MANY video-game-specific peripherals that are cash grabs and little more.

Specialty dice aren't a custom drum controller, they're a couch-top arcade stick with a flash brand decal and dodgy third-party solenoids.

What a thoroughly arbitrary distinction.

We've already got dice that do everything specialty dice do.

You can use regular dice with Genesys, and YZE, and even Fate. You just have to think a little.

Okay, maybe not everything, because no game needs twenty-plus unique outcomes to their core mechanic. It's bad design.

Some people think that a robust outcome is good design because it doesn't lock them into boring binary results.

Is this an opinion? Yes. Is it correct in a thoroughly incontrovertible way? Also yes.

Is this like that "military intelligence" joke?