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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jedijon" data-source="post: 6694054" data-attributes="member: 49099">Fantastic System! You have a complete game described here in very little space. That is a fantastic job. It’s particularly helpful that you’ve included sample tasks governed by each of your statistics.In which I have some thoughts!  – yes I do; read on.Character Creation – one awfully small suggestion, in the paragraph “To design a character” you mention an array of dice that will be assigned; 1 to each statistic. It would be helpful if – at this step in your description you’d mention whether larger or smaller dice allow for a character to be more successful using that statistic. Hint, the bigger the die - the better the statistic.You’re using a “roll over X” mechanic with most DCs being 2 – 4 and this is described 2 paragraphs later at the beginning of the ‘Tasks & Challenges’ section. For some reason I almost felt this was hidden in that paragraph. Maybe a description of the core mechanic is something to lead with? I think those super long d20 manuals [say D&D] have something to this effect at the start—although they’re hundreds of pages long!!Using roll over instead of roll equal to or greater appears to be a great simplification. I’ll admit that the equal to or greater mentality is ENTRENCHED for me! When I’m playing with mechanics it’s just something I assume is at the core of every game. And there’s no reason it should be—the mechanics should flow from the math.Speaking of math, your simple task of DC 2 will have success probabilities from 50% to 83% and your complicated task of DC 4 will have probabilities from 0% to 66%. I’m sure you’re absolutely aware of that, just highlighting it. The granularity in the system is low [it’s for kids and that’s OKAY!] but feels like it plays well with transitions between die sizes. I mean – your in-between task of 3 – I like how it goes from 50% likely on a d6 to 63% likely on a d8. It feels like getting a +2 bonus. Nice job. We were speaking recently in thread on the Grimm d6 ruleset about how resolution mechanics can sometimes be too flat. In that case it’s exclusionary. The character wants to do something but has virtually no chance. I do see a risk of that in your system when you describe the Difficult – Heroic tasks. A difficulty of 8 excludes anybody and any statistic less than a d10, and it’s pretty likely to fail for those as well. That’s always a stylistic choice. It just means that in this system you can’t try to be heroic unless you are…and even then you’re FIVE TIMES more likely to fail than succeed. This gets more into how the scale is defined [i.e. what TERMS are attached to which categories] than it even does the mechanics. But the mechanics is where those terms play out.Maybe you’d prefer “die” to “dice” given the implied plurality of “dice” in the context of the sentence; “Both are resolved in the same fashion, by rolling the dice representing the character ability applicable to the task…”?Advanced rules: cooperative & opposed tasks – it wasn’t clear how a roll of 4 against a difficulty of 10+ in the example raised the difficulty of the recipient from 2+ to 8+. I’m guessing it was raised by the failure category but this isn’t explained. It’s also surprising that doing something generic vs. specific would go from a simple 2+ to a heroic 10+, perhaps an explanation of generally how to increase difficulty would be appropriate?Opposed tasks – the 2nd paragraph of this advanced rules section assumes the reader is already familiar with skills, superpowers and more—meaning they would need to return to this section after familiarizing themselves with those other components. A person with a gaming/RPG background is probably assuming an opposed roll is “whoever rolled highest including modifiers” and that seems to be what this is saying but those modifiers and their application, resolution, etc., are - at this point in the document -  yet to be introduced.Consequences – I like this section. Great list of consequences. As with other parts of the document, you’ve really compiled things that make sense to kids. This should encourage folks to game from the kids viewpoint. I personally think most kids will appreciate a sprinkling of grownup or really just generic verbiage in their games as well—so not just skinned knees but loss of objects, normally abstracted physical harm [in D&D this would be hitpoints and player death – but could also be wrestling, grappling, poison, ensnarement, etc], falling off a winged horse [that doesn’t even happen at the playground!], whatever tells the story. Which COULD be a few kids pretending to be ninjas [that might as well be grownups for the stuff the kids are having them do!] on a raid or it COULD be like some retelling of the Chronicles of Narnia – or whatever. Still, from the very intro and on throughout the system you’ve got a super consistent and very thorough “kid-centric” vibe and it’s fantastic! In your document you’ve separated these into two sections – fine and dandy. You’ve really hit the right tone and flavor.For what it’s worth, a die size shrink would be less ugly in all cases than a +2 difficulty [easier even in many cases than a +1 difficulty] and would still allow them to attempt most of the same actions they normally would just be worse at it. Anything would be pretty harsh unless you’re camping in that 2-4 range you mention early on in your post). The smallest penalty I could think of in your system would be a -1 to the die roll [oh no there’s math though!]. I was initially very surprised to see that consequence would generally be a blanked consequence. Such that heart consequence would affect feet. Normally you see that limited to the affected stat. You deal with that in the text and I’ll go with it. Again, the only reservation I’d have on that [because thematically it’s very cool] is that the math is really very, very tough! It’s effectively doubling the failure rate or making things categorically impossible depending on the size of your stat.Skills – at the risk of egregiously bloating both this reply AND requesting your document undergo a similar lengthening , the skill section is well done. If there’s anything missing here when you’re giving out broad general advice such as making a skill broad – sports vs. merely soccer – it seems important to include that when you’re making skills up on the fly the point is to tell the story. You sort’ve hit that when you caution against a player hogging the spotlight and using their skills to gain mechanical fighting advantage. But this is a system without hitpoints! You could call that out explicitly—if people [and we’re talking young kids] are metagaming a story-telling game system…yes we should watch out for that and call it what it is—unwanted! That would be an example of both a skill, and use thereof, that don’t advance the story. When a skill is first acquired it should be as a result of story [if you want your narrative to be consistent] and its use should also benefit the story. I think that’s what you’re saying—I’m just trying to see if it can/should be more explicit. And the last part is this; when the story is taking place – the person in charge should be looking for challenges or ways to incorporate those same skills into the narrative. This closes the loop. Now that hard-won skill is integral to the character’s success. And that’s a happy ending ;0Super Powers – about the only thing I didn’t easily follow here was “Like skills, super power dice are added to the result…” The result of what exactly? I think that SP, like skills, give a bonus to the result of the attribute check. However – unlike skills – that result is variable, hey – it’s a dice!  Can you wait till you see the results to roll your super power dice? Does it matter? Would it be better to say this a tough differently? Like; “Super Power dice give you a bonus to your roll – when your GM says you can use your SP, roll your attribute and super power dice at the same time and add them together”. ?? Probably worse! Just working through this one here. So it looks like the players do encounter a little math in your system?Advancing Characters – earlier you said 1-3 points in a skill and never zero [just razzing you there!], but here you’ve got a 25% chance to level up from rank 3 to 4, can never go above 4, AND don’t get any other benefit by whaling on your maxed out skill. It feels a bit like a phone game – where everything is happening fast for the first day or two. Then, every timer is 60 hours long and they want a $0.99 microtransaction to get that timer to finish NOW. It feels like there’s something meatier needed.Learning through Failure is a cool and thought provoking variant.Conclusion  – this went on way too long – heck I’ll push “post” and it’ll be longer than your elegant OP. Crap! Place two marks next to your patience skill! But, hopefully it’s not less useful to you than a random dude on the internet saying “nice job”. Anyway. Nice Job. Can we get some session reports sometime?</blockquote>

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