Meta-Mechanics Worth Stealing

[Jeph]

My favorite meta-mechanic is the 'currency' bonus from Sorcerer. It's a dice pool system where a successful roll results in one or more victories (think Successes from a white wolf game and it's pretty much the same thing). Your victories from one roll can become bonus or penalty dice on any related roll.

So say you're playing a thief, and you're trying to lift a key from the pocket of an NPC clerk. You roll your test and just fail -- the NPC wins with one victory. So when you try to save your hide by distracting the clerk ("what in the world could that be?!"), he'll get one bonus die to not be fooled. But say you win that test with two victories: then you'll get two bonus dice on your attempt to beat it and lose him in the crowd.

You can port it over into nearly any system. It's easiest with dice pools like nWoD, but you can also do it with d20. A +2 bonus, with another +2 per 5 full points of your margin of success, seems balanced for D&D.

 

[Thomas D]

One I like that I haven't used yet is Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits, available free at the Burning Wheel wiki. You know how a game session can just bog down because two or three players have different ideas of what actions to take and you spend an hour debating what to do? With Duel of Wits, you all script out debate maneuvers like Dismiss, Avoid the Topic, and Point to do social damage to each player's position. In-game debates are resolved by the characters using the character's skills at negotiation, debating, and persuading instead of by whichever player can argue the best (or loudest/longest).

I've used Donjon's Provisions to great effect. It cuts down on a lot of the shopping/equipping that slows down games. During the game session, if you need something that's not on your standard gear list, you just make a Provisions roll or spend a Provisions point to get the thing you need. You make the roll, you've had it all along.

While not a mechanic, I've stolen props of a sort from Primetime Adventures' Fan Mail. In games where the PCs have Hero Points or Fate or Karma or whatever you call them -- you know, spend a point and get some sort of bonus or game effect to help your character -- use tokens. Poker chips, coins, glass beads, whatever. If you have a stack of poker chips in front of you, you're going to remember to use them more than if it was just another scribble on a character sheet. Plus it just feels good to toss a physical object onto the table -- PLUNK. "I get to add 10 to that roll."

 

[LostSoul]

So the interesting twist is that Burning Wheel has the player define three beliefs: one past, one present, and one future. I like it.
This is perfect for D&D.

Hmm, that's not how we're playing it. We're using beliefs as goals that drive play. (Also left out, I think, is that if you act against a belief you get some Artha/"action points". Which makes it really good mechanically to have beliefs that conflict each other. It also makes for good drama.)

If you were going to do a dungeon-crawl Burning Wheel game, you might have a belief like "My temple needs cash to fight against the onslaught of evil. I will go into the Caves of Chaos and take their ill-gotten loot." Then you get some Artha when you loot guys, and if you clear out the Caves of Chaos you get better Artha.

People have played that dungeon-crawl Burning Wheel. Here's one guy's beliefs:

- There's too much evil in this world to sit idle in a temple and not bash in its head! God demands action!
- By assisting me against the evil, my companions earn the grace of God. I will make them realize this and join me in celebrating His name.
- This castle is just the tip of an evil iceberg. I will vanquish it in God's name and expose further plots of wickedness.

 

[jdrakeh]

The Demeanor/Theme wheels in The Chronicles of Ramlar are neat, as they cut down on the bookeeping where XP is concerned, while allowing players to work toward both meta-goals (e.g., raising an attribute rating) and story goals (e.g., aquiring the rank of Captain in the Elven army). Also, the resulting progression is organic (i.e., natural in terms of the game setting) as opposed to artifical (i.e., there are no overnight growth spurts).

Also, the Supreme Bull!@$! Action rule from the fan-created Orange Road game is a very easy way to inject "anime" into your games -- once per game session a character can do something that totally smashes the fourth wall and shreds the game setting's standard physics something awful. For example, your charcter may do some crazy Jet-Li wire-fu and walk across a battlefield atop moving arrows (i.e., arrows in flight).

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

Let It Ride from Burning Wheel.

 

[eyebeams]

My favorite meta-mechanic is the 'currency' bonus from Sorcerer. It's a dice pool system where a successful roll results in one or more victories (think Successes from a white wolf game and it's pretty much the same thing). Your victories from one roll can become bonus or penalty dice on any related roll.

So say you're playing a thief, and you're trying to lift a key from the pocket of an NPC clerk. You roll your test and just fail -- the NPC wins with one victory. So when you try to save your hide by distracting the clerk ("what in the world could that be?!"), he'll get one bonus die to not be fooled. But say you win that test with two victories: then you'll get two bonus dice on your attempt to beat it and lose him in the crowd.

You can port it over into nearly any system. It's easiest with dice pools like nWoD, but you can also do it with d20. A +2 bonus, with another +2 per 5 full points of your margin of success, seems balanced for D&D.

It's a good system; magic rules in Mage: The Ascension also uses this kind of porting principle. The thing you have to be careful of is compromising niche protection, since it's otherwise possible to have a guy be good at everything for the price of successive arguments about serial applicability. That's why other iterations of this sytem introduce diminishing returns or a cap on stacking. It also accentuates differences in ability, which is great in some situations but kind of sucks for the underdog.

 

[eyebeams]

Let It Ride from Burning Wheel.

Ugh. I can't stand Let it Ride. It was designed with good intentions (rolls should be meaningful, GMs shouldn't call for rerolls when they don't get what they want), but in execution it's actually kind of brutal to players. Even the example in the book goes from saying how the rule will protect players from GM arbitrariness, to an example of play where the GM uses it to arbitrarily hose the player by denying a new roll to track. Generally, when the example of play is the opposite of the stated design goal, that's no good.

I think a rule that works much like this, where the initial roll is the baseline for deviations using similar rolls of that type, would be a step up. In other words, rolling well means future rolls in that series will usually also do well, but not *exactly* as well as the first roll.

 

[eyebeams]

My nomination: The d20 Diplomacy skill and attitude rules. They're clean, applicable to multiple games and serve as a way for the DM to submit NPC reactions to player intervention without just making a snap ruling. Attitude stages can also be scaled up to large groups pretty easily.

Oh yeah -- also, descriptor-based traits as found in Over the Edge, FATE, etc.

 

[roguerouge]

interesting developments

I've always liked how essential d20Modern made the starting occupation and its level dependent action points kick ass.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

I think a rule that works much like this, where the initial roll is the baseline for deviations using similar rolls of that type, would be a step up. In other words, rolling well means future rolls in that series will usually also do well, but not *exactly* as well as the first roll.

Not a bad idea at all.