Stream of Consciousness [2025-02-23]

Today's post will be a bit of a meandering, scattershot affair. Consider yourself warned.

As I had mentioned in a fairly recent post, the math involved with just doing skill checks entirely as a d6 pool (without any static modifiers) is appealing, but this problem still persists:

My first intuition was "Skillsets add ranks, and Attributes also add ranks," or in other words, neither adds a flat modifier, but both could add to the "d6 pool." The problem with this (as was brought to light in discussion) is that it amounts entirely to randomness, whereby you're just rolling more and more dice and hoping for some combination of 5s and 6s on two of those dice (or a 4 and a 6, obviously.)

From a tactile perspective, this is really a problem; no matter how many dice you're rolling, it's really only the 5s and 6s that matter, and the rest are kind of a big waste. The combat mechanics avoid this problem by turning unused attack dice into damage dice, but the skill mechanics don't have any comparable sort of "release valve" for excess dice.

So the temptation is to work flat modifiers into the skill mechanics, so that dice results other than 5s and 6s can still make a difference. The problem then becomes the fact that (obviously) a +0 modifier does nothing, and a +2 modifier (stacked with another +2) does too much -- so in other words, it feels like we almost want there to be a flat +1 modifier to all skills, combined with the +0/+1/+2 Attribute bonus. In which case, what's the point? Put another way, the already narrow +0/+1/+2 range for Attributes is likewise narrowed down to (just) +1 and (maybe) +2, for Skillsets. It might be the case that a reroll or "mastery" mechanic is necessary for the skill math. Perhaps something like, in addition to the modifiers adding dice to the pool, you can also reroll a number of 1s equal to the total modifier? I wouldn't even begin to know how to calculate that (aside from drawing it out on a very long, wide spreadsheet.) Maybe the rerolls are instead of the pool, rather than in addition to it?

Anyways, I feel like I've harped on these proposed sequel mechanics enough, and I'm kind of running around in circles with it. So, onto something else!

Foundations & Building Blocks
An idea that recently came to my mind was that of using a standard set of dominos, for some sort of RPG mechanics. For those unfamiliar, each domino basically has two numbers, between 0 and 6, with each combination of numbers occurring only once -- creating a total of 28 dominos. So why this? Well, it harkens back to a couple of other things I've mentioned before, on the blog:

1. In the game Feint Wars (that I did some playtesting for) 3 suits of cards were used, effectively numbered 1 through 6; each suit trumped one of the other suits (almost like rock-paper-scissors) giving it a +3 bonus in combat, which was resolved by using opposing cards (much like the simple card game War.) Cards were also effectively action points, so they could instead be used to move, up to the number of spaces on the card.
2. Italian Cards: As I've mentioned previously, these cards use 4 slightly different suits, but also the numbered cards only go from 2-7 (aces are still included) rather than the usual 2-10; this range more closely mirrors that used in Feint Wars, but also, a maximum movement speed in the 5-7 squares/hexes range is pretty standard for tabletop RPGs.
3. I've played Settlers of Catan with an add-on deck of cards that sort of mimicked rolling 2d6, just with the deck representing a standardized/normalized/(whatever the proper mathematical term is) bell curve of the range of rolls, equally represented -- thus, removing most of the randomness.

This last one in particular probably most reminds me of the number ranges/values used on the dominos, because the dominos are so closely mapped to 6-sided dice. I know I've also mused about using a full standard deck of 52 cards somehow in RPG design (such as in the random campaign generation system, for TNP) as well as pivoting the current sequel designs towards purely d6 mechanics.

I think these kinds of things are important, because they are so ubiquitous, accessible, and present such a low barrier to entry, both in terms of availability but also cost. In an increasingly online world (where I've heard it said by someone in the RPG space that, "all games are becoming video games,") I want to make games that are simpler and more down-to-earth. I think this is even reflected in the earliest seeds of TNP, where each die shape represented the entire suite of mechanics for one class.

Perhaps my earliest great love in tabletop gaming was the original Axis & Allies, but I also ended up playing a lot of Risk with my friends, since it was a little bit more digestible. I never was one to think of making a whole new map, or adding all sorts of different new types of units; I always wanted to make alternate/historical scenarios out of what the game already had, so that I could create a fun, new, accessible experience for people who owned and loved the game. I feel the same about these fundamental pieces of gaming, such as dice, dominos, and cards.

How can we bring RPG design back to these sorts of fundamentals? It's a question that I find is very rewarding to explore.

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With the shortest month out of the way, this leads us into the part of the blogging schedule where updates are """""planned""""" to be on the 5th, 15th, and 25th of each month, until the scheduled break during the month of July. Check back on (or about) March 5th for the next post!