Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
by Berin Kinsman
http://BerinKinsman.com
With special thanks to Graham Campbell, Xose Lucero, Skyler Brungardt, and Stacy Lang
Introduction
Ken St. Andre once told me that one of his
major motivations for writing Tunnels & Trolls
version 7.5 was to make the game easy for him to
run at conventions. That's a great goal. As I've
gotten older I look at new game books and no
1 Yes, I know what fascist means. Now, do you know what
sarcasm means?
whole game.
In this rules hack, you start the game
with one Hero point per clich. This seems like
balance. If you went with 2 clichs, rated at 6
and 4, you get 2 Hero points. Not a lot, but you
have higher-rated clichs. If you take 5 clichs
rated at 3, 2, 2, 2, 1 you get 5 Hero points. you
can do a lot of stuff, but you're not particularly
great with any of it, so Hero points will help.
Cascading Success
Here's something I'm lifting from three
sources: Savage Worlds6, Doctor Who: Adventures in
Time and Space7, and a little indie game called
5 A game where you create and play television shows! Not a
freebie, but you can buy it at http://www.dog-eareddesigns.com/
6 The Explorer Edition core rulebook is under $10 for a
universal system. http://www.peginc.com/
7 The officially licensed game from Cubicle 7
Entertainment, designed for younger and/or less
for each statement, and the more successes you for every increment of 6. The problem with this
roll the more you actually achieve. For this is that there's no downside, no degrees of "no,
rules hack, it would be a series of "yes, and" but" or "no, and". It's just fail, succeed, or
successes. You can also spend Hero points, one succeed better. Bleh.
per additional "yes, and". So, if you got a
We could go with individual die results,
success and 3 additional "yes, and" levels, you rather than adding; count the 6's and ignore all
would 1. kick the bad guy 2. knocking him other dice. The more 6's you roll the better the
back 3. through the window 4. where he hits success. That still doesn't address the failure. We
flagpoles and cornices on
could make 1's failures;
the way down. You would
have 1's and 6's cancel
Table 1
not have him 5. tearing
each other. If it zeroes
Successes
Result
through the awning that
out, if you have more
6
"Yes,
and..."
x5
could have broken his fall
1's, now you have a
6. and landing on top of
degree of success, if
5
"Yes, and..." x4
his own car.
you have more 6's you
4
"Yes, and..." x3
have a degree of
3
"Yes, and..." x2
Putting It Together
failure. I have two
thoughts on this. First,
2
"Yes, and..."
There are a lot of
old school World of
different ways I could go
1
Yes
Darkness10 did this
here. What I want is
0
"No, but..."
except with d10's, and
simple: simple, simple,
they did away with 1's
-1
No
simple. I don't want players
canceling
successes
to have to spent a lot of
-2
"No, and..."
because it was a pain in
time adding up die rolls.
-3
"No, and... x2
the ass. Second, it kind
At the same time, I want
of feels like I'm
-4
"No, and... x3
nuance, degrees of success
reinventing Fate, and
so players can be
-5
"No, and... x4
the success ladder. Yes,
descriptive
in
the
-6
"No,
and...
x5
I had that in mind
characters' actions. No,
when I looked at
I'm not asking for much at
9
Doctor Who, but I think DW streamlines it
all.
Rules-as-written Risus has the player elegantly. Simpler; I want it simpler.
Now I'm thinking of the Ubiquity11
roll a bunch of dice and add them together.
Hopefully, the total beats a target number. If I system, where you roll any kind of dice and
stick with that, I need to create a base target count only the even results as successed. For
number. I want someone with a 1 to be able example, if you roll 3,6,3,5,1, and 4, that's 2
succeed on at least a basic level, so the target successes (the 6 and the 4). You don't need Fate
number has to be 6 or less. Say 6, to make it dice with pluses and minuses, you don't even
easy. We could keep the Savage Worlds 10 The original system, not the revised or rebooted one.
paradigm, and have "yes, and" levels of success
http://www.white-wolf.com/
9 Yes, I am.
need d6's, you can use any dice. Pair off evens scale and allow successes to stack. So if you
and odds and eliminate them, so you end up want to do cascading "yes, and" successes you
with nothing, all evens,
can. This is especially
Table
2
or all odds.
effective when you're
A single success
looking at combat
Successes
Result
or a single failure does
damage. 1 success is
All
even
"Yes,
and..."
the job. More of each
1 point of damage. 6
Most
even
Yes
gives you add-on effect.
successes is 6 points
A wash compromises
of damage. Going
Wash
"No, but"...
with a "no, but", which
back to my earlier
Most
odd
No
seems appropriate for a
example of the Orc
All odd
"No, and..."
wash; you don't win,
(1) and the Boss
but it's not a total loss.
Wizard (6) having
See Table 1.
the same target number, 1 success will kill the
The only logic problem I have here is orc but barely nick the boss, 6 successes will
that degree of failure is tied to skill level. kill the wizard (unless he has villain points and
Someone with a 1 can't screw up spectacularly, other tricks up his sleeve, hoo-HAH!).
but someone with a 6 can. That doesn't feel
However, failure is limited to a single
right. Sure, we could try to justify it by saying "no, and". That favors the players, and I like
bigger numbers mean bigger risks, but fie on that. The GM can make the "and" part as bad as
that. Since characters with higher scores get he or she needs it to be.
fewer Hero points, their ability to mitigate
failure is decreased as well. We have a "broken" What Do We Have Now?
system here. Back to the drawing board. The
I'm thinking about the takeaway from
obvious solution is to cap it. I'm now seeing this rules hacking, and the next steps. Before I
something like what's on Table 2.
present it to any players I'll have to clean up my
Hey, that's simple! Cuts to the heart of verbiage a little bit, and if I wanted to publish it
the matter. Yes, it takes away stacked success I'd have to do some playtesting to work out any
and failures, but that's not necessarily bad. "Yes, kinks I didn't foresee when cobbling it together.
and" just does all of the narrative stuff you The real question is, what do I have here? I
asked for without itemizing each additional showed my work every step of the way. I
effect, and I can live with that. Now I have a started with Risus and Fate and grabbed ideas
new problem; what real advantage do I have for from other games, smashed them together in
having a 6 rating in a clich versus having a 4? I ways that I, at least, find logical. Obviously, it's
don't want to crunch probabilities here, I want derivative. But it is so far distant from the
to know from my gut, from a cursory glance. original sources, so much of a mashup, that it
Someone with a 1 rolls one even, it's "all even" counts as original?
and a "yes, and" and that's pretty cool, but if I
My personal ethics say that if I
roll all 6 dice and get six evens, where's the published this system I would at the very least
extra OOMPH! in my action for that?
need to acknowledge the influence of those
Let's keep the simple all/most/wash
The primary problem I have with Fatebased games is explaining the concept of
aspects to gamers from a more "traditional"
background. John Wick goes into this issue a bit
when explaining aspects in own Fate hack,
Houses of the Blooded14. When people are used to
clearly-defined skills, and you're allowed to
make up your own, the clever players will make
broad, open-ended aspects that can be used for
a lot of things. I'm perfectly okay with that. It's
the players that are used to having "pick lists"
that I'm concerned about. I've seen peoples'
eyes glaze over because there's not some finite,
neatly ordered list of options. They can't make
the intuitive leap from "these are the things
you're allowed to do" to "you can do anything
you can describe". I tend to focus them toward
archetypes, templates, and classes. If you can't
grok aspects right away, and you think of your
character as a thief, just write down "thief" for
now.
What I really want to share with them,
though, is the true power of aspects. That, to
me, is the abstractness of them. They way I try
to explain it is that it's not about the concrete
description of what the character can do, it's
the narrative power of what they're doing.
Frodo, in Lord of the Rings15, isn't a "thief" as
some game systems have tried to describe him.
The aspect wouldn't be "thief". It would be
"He Must Destroy the Ring". The things that
happen don't happen because he's a thief. He
doesn't get away with the stuff he does because
he's particularly stealthy, or any sort of a
fighter. It's because He Must Destroy The Ring.
He's got to evade the orcs, because if he gets
14 For sale at http://housesoftheblooded.net
15 Again, honestly, do we need to go all crazy with the
footnotes here?