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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 9841191" data-attributes="member: 6704184">Sweet! So when you level up, every numerical limit goes up by 1. So, your number of Skill Ranks, number of SKill plus Specialty or Total Ranks, number of points in a given Attribute, all increase by 1. So, at chargen you have2 Skill Ranks3 Total Ranks4 Attribute Points in a single AttributeAnd most of your skills and attributes will not be at the limit. Part of how that is insured is that Attribute choice isn't always up to you in play, so you cannot just pump every point into Grace and always use that. The other part is that over half of your skill ranks are prescribed from your Origin and Archetype, and I have been careful to avoid the Origins and Archetypes having the same skills between options. Archetypes tend to focus on very active skills and conflict related skills, while Origins tend to be skills you can use in every day life. There is overlap and it isn't "always" just "mostly", but it is enough to help ensure that you aren't getting doubled up more than once or twice from those lists. Cursed Failure is 1-9Failure is 10-14Mixed Success 15-19Total Success 20+I don't have a document with all the math, but I used AnyDice and ran it by a friend who teaches math. I think I recorded somewhere what the frequency of hitting 15 is with 1,2,3,4,5,6 rank dice. I'll see if I can find it and post it. In play it feels good. With the action die being a d12, you don't get cursed failure that often even when rolling with only 1 rank, and it basically disapears at like 4 ranks or higher. I might eventually add a rule that you get a curse failure if you get a failure and more than a single result of 1 on the dice. We will see. yes. Simply, In each phase, the side who has Initiative can act before the other side.Critically, they can also choose to go after another character who is acting in that phase, potentially doing something that would be a bad idea to do before an enemy aggressive takes their action. Actions do not have to be declared with any specificity before you take them, other than Complex Tasks which you have to describe what you are doing in the moment when you start it (like drawing a magic circle with chalk on the ground, or hunkering down at the electrical panel to mess with it). This means that sometimes it is much more advantageous to act after another character, because you can just say that you are acting in this phase and then wait to say what you do until you do it and the other character has taken their action.  Initiative is gained as conflict begins by comparing checks made with a dice pool determined by circumstance, number of combatants, and any checks or actions taken before the scene to get the upper hand. The details of which don't really effect conflict once it starts. One of the things you can do in conflict scenes is try to shift the balance by taking Initiative from the other side. Phase 1 of the first round of conflict you choose a stance before the phase begins. If you are in Forward Stance you can take an Aggressive Action in the first phase. ANyone in a Defensive Stance or Neutral Stance can only use Quick Actions and move in this phase, or begin a Complex Task like casting a complicated spell or dealing with a complex hazard of obstacle in the scene. Phase 2 anyone who hasn't acted or declared a complex action can take an Action, and anyone can use Quick Actions and move. (movement is limited per round) You can declare a complex task in this phase but it is more dangerous because the aggro characters will have more time to plan to disrupt you before they act. The safest way to do complex actions is to let the enemy aggros take their actions and then declare yours, but that only works if you have Initiative because you control when you go. Phase 3 anyone who hasn't taken their action must do so or lose it, and complex tasks started in Phase 1 resolve by the end of the phase. There is some other chaff I have thought of that I am currently working on cutting out from the process of conflict scenes because the game doesn't need it and it slows down the transition from one round to the next. Right, the game features no static numerical modifiers of any kind. Advantage began as dnd style but only for the d12 action die, and it sucked because then circumstances could also add or subtract dice, so it was too many different mechanics messing with the check process. So now, advantage and disadvantage are terms used for bonus die and die penalty, and so you can have Advantage from multiple sources, but the same source cannot stack. That is, you cannot stack a bunch of enchantments to get 4 extra dice, but you can stack an enchantment, an ally giving you a die forward before the scene, high ground, and the die you earned with a preparation task. The only exception is that when you get help from an ally in the scene, they roll an action die, and you use the higher of yours or theirs. This is because I have found over the years, including when gaining advantage from help in dnd 5e, that it is more satisfying when the ally helping adds a small step to the process where the player physically does something to represent the help. So one example could be turning the basic attack of Electromancy into a sustained chain of lightning. Normally, a basic attack just hits one creature and if you succeed they take 1 Injury and are Dazed for a round, or hits all creatures within 1 yard of a point you choose, and targets are Dazed but don't mark Injury. Or it can be added to a weapon attack as a Quick Action, but then the skill check is for the weapon not the magic skill. This is basically the same for any ranged magic attack, except that different skills have different rider effects described in their skill description as being normal to inflict with the skill. So having said that, when you do a complex task without any trained special ability, it costs AP and you must hit a Total Success or you can only do a basic action but still spend the AP. How many AP is determined by the general magic skill guidelines, but simplified for this task you'd probably spend 3 to 5 AP, which means you cannot do it without Momentum. With a special ability like a Technique (think 4e powers basically) or an Archetype Trait, you just read the trait for the cost and what skill is used, but since it is something you have trained success works like normal. A Technique that shoots lightning a normal range (about walking speed or 10 yards), is an aoe, skips friendlies, and does the full effect to each target, would cost 3 or 4 AP, OR 2 AP and use your Action and Quick Action. One thing you can do in play is improve Techniques, which can include reducing the AP cost, but tbh I don't wanna get into the complex downtime activity stuff. (No one automatically has any Techniques of any kind, except the Druid who has some spells. They are otherwise purely something you find, train, create, or otherwise aquire during play)Resting, Critical Success, spending Momentum. Only a Full or Extended Rest restores all AP at once, otherwise it is only half on a Rest, 1 from a Critical Success, or all spent AP from a single Attribute from spending 1 Momentum. You have Injury and Stress tracks. Physical threats cause you to mark Injury while mental or spiritual threats target Stress. You can also mark them in order to do certain things with certain specific abilities, but nothing in the general rules. We're talking the Athlete's Heroic Effort ability to Mark Injury in place of spending AP to Push a skill cehck with a Physical Skill. Or the Human's ability to turn Injury into Stress, or the Warlock's Curse ability to turn Stress into Injury while also making you mark stress when you fail at something. Actually, no. The fact that enemies can mess without dice pool helps, but also you gain ranks fairly slowly, and your ranks start out quite spread out, and you don't gain levels quickly because levels are more like tiers in daggerheart than it's levels. In between levels you spend Experience to gain new traits or improve skills or attributes, but you are subject to your current level's skill rank limits so you aren't using all those experience to max out skills, you tend to gain more breadth of skills as well as specialising in one or two skills consistently. And we haven't played high levels in a few years, but when we did it was still quite fun you just have to run the game differently past level...ten or so. The game actually accounts for that with rules for becoming demigods and the like. It also speeds up as scenes start to be resolved with a few quick skill checks rather than actually going into rounds and phases, and the full conflict rules only come out in situations where the adversaries or obstacles are such that they can still challenge you. yep. I started out way back in 2012 using d100 plus d10 rank dice, and while the math is very rational and easily understood on paper, in play it just kinda...got weird. IDK. I never figured out why it confused people but it did. People kept expecting results over 100 to be crits for some reason, for one thing. Then I tried 1d10 plus 1d10 ranks, and it worked okay but eventually i realised that things worked much better if the action die was larger than the rank dice, and I finally went back and played some The One Ring again after a few years, and realised that 1d12 plus d6s worked really well. True. I ended up abondoning a system where you could have any number of actions in a round but lost 1 die per extra action, because even 2 actions per PC per round was just too much to stay fun and allow for any depth of action economy beyond that. it also needed actions to be declared all at once, while I prefered to be able to more fluidly react to stuff. In play it hasn't ever been disruptive and instead is very satisfying. If I get a lot of feedback like this when I expand my playtesting pool more and more, I will consider doing as you suggest, though. Well, 99 percent of the time a check is just "I am doing this skill, oh i rolled a partial so i will Push using this attribute", and there is no discussion because no one objects, because it all makes sense. Even when it's slightly different from the basic assumed attribute for a skill, like Wits for Acrobatics, it's "I'm going to draw on my quick thinking and spacial awareness and mental reflexes to quickly change my planned route and instead of doing a wall run I will do a panther leap and slide over the HVAC unit and under the pipe." Which also just kinda immediately makes sense and the table tends to go, "Hell yeah!" rather than, "Well actually that doesn't make sense, in this ted talk I will..." Thank you! There are things where the AP is set in stone, mostly in special abilities. The format will have "1 AP, Will" or "1 Will" (still revising the trait layouts for the changes i have made over the last year or so). But yeah I suspect that many groups will play even more fast and loose than the game encourages with which AP is used for what, and that is fine in terms of balance, tbh. Very good observation, though. Thank you. Thank you! I am still working on simplifying some of the general rules and the like..."if, then" rules, if that makes sense. Haha thanks. I really appreciate your post and this spefically. I have struggled a lot with my brain telling me that this entire endeavor is a waste of time and that I am not doing anything interesting, and stuff like advantage and quick actions makes it just a shadow dnd clone, etc, etc. When my head is right i know that's all BS, but when I am doubting myself in general...comments like this help. Oh! I should clarify in the OP that it is the whole character sheet and has a lot of the game mechanics right on it. That is a large design goal for us, that you just need your sheets, printed trait and technique cards included, a table cheat sheet, and your campaign's Lorebook, to the play the game, with the rules document/book being almost entirely a between sessions and "Interlude Session" thing. Interlude Session is a working name for the sort of "Session X.5" or "Session 0 between sessions", where you level up, take care of more in depth downtime stuff, check in on how the game is going and if everyone is having fun, etc, etc. It's recomended to have such a session whenever the group levels, which should be anywhere from 5 to 10 sessions depending on session pace and length.</blockquote>

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