TMDM Pt 4: The Sign Die Risk Roll

I really don’t remember how the Sign Die Risk Roll came into being, but I think it was an inversion of the original risk roll. With it we return to standard ability scores. Muscle 14, Wisdom 10, etc. Modifiers are added as needed and at the very end of the action the dice are rolled for one final modifier. Everything is added together and that is the strength of your action, measured using the success table mentioned in the last blog post.

29 – 32 = 6 = Amazing
25 – 28 = 5 = Fantastic
21 – 24 = 4 = Incredible
17 – 20 = 3 = Terrific
13 – 16 = 2 = Great
9  - 12 = 1 = Average
5  -  8 = ½ = Half
1  -  4 = 0 = Failure

What is different is the die roll itself. It is made using two dice rolled simultaneously. The risk die and the sign die.

The first die is called the Risk Die and it is any single die you have in your dice pile, with the exception of percentile dice.

The second die is the Sign Die and it is an off-color six-sider. What it rolls determines if the risk roll is a bonus or a penalty.

1 2 3 = Penalty.
4 5 6 = Bonus.

You could also use a Fudge die providing you sharpied in an extra + and - on its blank sides. Or you could just get a blank die and paint an equal number of + and - signs on its sides. Which I did. Since I had to buy a whole pack to get one blank and because I had my paint out, I did a whole lot of them. Just in case.

If you have Muscle 14 and risk roll a d6 then you have an equal chance of rolling anywhere from Muscle 8 to Muscle 20. Risk roll a d20 and it expands that range to a ridiculous extent, stretching from Muscle -6 to Muscle 34. For this reason rolling a 0 or less is a Critical Fail and hopefully a decent deterent against using dice that can roll ridiculously high.

This turned out to be a whole lot of fun. The gratification of seeing a bonus or penalty turn up so suddenly almost feels like playing Operation.

The Sign Die Risk Roll may be a mouthful to say but the system itself is simple, quick, elegant and easy to understand. It gives you two dice to roll instead of one. You don’t have to add the dice together, just understand what you see. Most of all, it gives you the ability the throttle the amount of risk your character is taking. If stuck in a situation where you are on the winning side then just risk roll a d4. When stuck in a bind there is the d12, possibly even risking a critical fail if that’s what it takes to succeed.

(That sign die packs a helluva punch.)

WHERE IT FALLS SHORT

As much fun as it is, it is hard to criticize the d20 roll for being swingy and then create something even swingier. A risk rolled d20 creates an unthinkable _forty point spread_. Even with the threat of a critical fail hanging over a player’s head you know some jerk is going to do this over and over until they can declare the system broken. At one point I was almost tempted to say that there is no critical fail. Roll less than zero and your character dies. Grabs his heart and keels over.
Thunk! End of story.

It also feels as if there should be a curve to the risk roll, meaning it should be far easier to roll a +1 or -1 than a +6 or -6 as opposed to an equal chance up and down the range of numbers.

And yet! There is that matter of reality vs fun. I could have easily solved the problem of the original risk roll by having all rolls be 3d6, but what fun would that be? It makes you wonder about the nature of fun. Maybe fun has a lot more to do with our ability to defy reality rather than conform to it.


THIS JUST IN…

The design process never really ends. At least, not until something is published. While writing this essay I was conversing online with Emmet O’Brian and we stumbled upon the idea of using a d20 in place of a d6 for the sign die.

(sure glad I painted all of those dice)

A problem the d6 sign die is that it has no way of rolling a critical. Aside from the possibility of rolling a massive +20. The critical failure is also something that doesn’t hit you immediately. Critical fails need to have that quality of popping out of nowhere to put a whammy on your action.

But if you use a d20 in its place you could say….

20 = critical success
10 - 19 = bonus
2 - 9 = penalty
1 = critical fail.

The d20 is now the designated sign die so naturally your choice of risk die tops out at d12. This is still a bit swingy with a 24 point spread but at least it’s not a 40 point spread.

Another cool thing about this is that you don’t really need to read the number on the sign die to understand what it has rolled. A single digit number is a penalty. A double digit number is a bonus. I also like how the physical size of the numbers on the d20 are smaller than the numbers on the other dice, making it seem less consequential.

(Okay, maybe I didn't actually roll that last one, but it could happen!)

Now if only I could find a d20 covered in + and - signs. And no I am not going to break out the paints.

Honestly, the sign die risk roller could be a strong contendor for the Agama’s dice mechanic. I like the inherent optimism of this roll. Most of the time we look at an ability score and consider it to be the upper limit of a character’s ability. The sign die risk roll says you can do better or possibly worse, if you’re just ready to take that risk

The only thing it lacks is the truly immediate gratification of the dice trees - which you have yet to read about, but are coming up next!

TMDM, Pt 3: The Original Risk Roll

A roll of the dice is the matter of uncertainty being resolved, and one of my biggest problems with the 1d20 roll is that it provides a static amount of chance. There’s no gradation involved. You go from a world of perfect certainty where the player says “I do this thing” and the GM says “ok, sounds reasonable, you do that thing” to one where you stand a 1 in 20 chance of having the earth open up beneath your feet and suck your character into a volcanic vent (figuratively speaking, of course).

(never trust a smiling volcano)

So with my first attempt to deviate from the standard d20 roll I focused on giving it some gradation. First off the abilities were changed from scores into modifiers. Subtract 10. A Strength 14 becomes Strength +4. I also turned Strength into Muscle so as to free up the word. I do have a few hang-ups one is making sure that a term is not used more than once per thing. So Strength now refers to the sum total of your modifiers and die roll. It is literally “the strength of your action” a measure of how well your character did with whatever you were doing.

I also changed the score value structure to use just one range of numbers for explaining everything.

29 – 32 = 6 = Amazing
25 – 28 = 5 = Fantastic
21 – 24 = 4 = Incredible
17 – 20 = 3 = Terrific
13 – 16 = 2 = Great
9  - 12 = 1 = Average
5  -  8 = ½ = Half
1  -  4 = 0 = Failure

Average is the success point, so you need a 9 or better to succeed at what you are doing. A Half success is exactly that. You partially succeeded. You jumped the abyss but are now dangling on the other side by your fingertips. The single numbers next to the descriptions are success counts. A great success is two times better than an average. Terrific is three times. This becomes more obvious in combat where they multiply the damage done.


THE RISK ROLL

Risk is something you take with the hope that it will make you perform better but understanding that there is a good chance it will make you do worse. The greater the risk the greater the glory but also the greater the chance of utter failure.

Every action a character makes ends with a risk roll of the player’s choosing. BTW, a critical fail happens when the dice roll the lowest number possible. A critical success happens with the greatest. A roll of 3d6 crits on a 3 or 18, not a 1 or 20. Special thanks to anydice.com for the probability app these screen snips came from.

Low Risk = 3d6 = Most people take little to no risk in doing what they do on a day to day basis, and this is what they use. 3d6 has a nice probability curve which will do a lot to make sure that a 9 or 12 turns up with only an occasional surprise venture out towards the edges of 3 and 18.

Medium Risk = 2d10 = This is the adventurer’s roll, the one recommended to new players. The curve on a 2d10 is more of a pyramid than a bell. You will most likely roll somewhere between 7 and 14 with a better possibility of rolling a 2 or 20.

High Risk = 1d20 = And this is the wild die. This is a character risking it all to succeed. With a 1d20 you have an equal chance of rolling anywhere between a 1 and 20.

Lazy Risk = 4d4 = And this is what utter slackers roll. Just kidding, although the curve would fit in as something less risky than a 3d6. Asking anyone to roll 4d4 on a regular basis? That’s just cruel.

No Risk = 10 = This option is for GM’s only. You take a 10. No risk is taken, nothing gained and nothing lost. It is not very believeable but it does help when dealing with huge hordes of creatures.


HOW DOES IT WORK?

Actually, it is not all that different from the standard 1d20 roll.

1.) The character does something.
2.) The GM asks for a check (the GM can impose a modifier to make it harder or easier).
3.) The player chooses the risk they want to take.
4.) The dice are rolled.
5.) Everything is added together.
6.) The adventure changes course depending on the action strength.


WHERE IT FALLS SHORT.

This is actually a pretty good alternative to the 1d20 roll which does not totally abandon the 1d20 roll. It gives players the option to take less risk when they feel the need to but it also imposes “a no guts no glory” aspect on the matter of dice choice.

I think I dropped it because the system just did not deviate enough from the norm. You can tell people to always end their action with a risk roll but you know that force of habit will bring us back to starting our actions with a die roll and wasting too much time deliberating over modifiers afterwards.

There is also the matter of the die rolls themselves. They sound great in theory, but rolling 2d10 and 3d6 on a regular basis becomes quite tedious quite quickly. The math is simple and small but the repetitive nature gangs up against it.

(trust me, I know all about the basic math)

From a player’s perspective there is not a whole lot to be gained from rolling 3d6 or 2d10. Sure you are better protected from critical fails and failing in general, but players don’t often think in that direction. When we roll the dice we want to win and win big. A 5% chance at rolling a critical success sounds a lot better than a 1% or a 0.5% chance which is what you get with the other rolls, even though it also means running a 5% chance of a critical fail.

Another problem is that you are a little too protected from failure. Granted the goal is to be as successful as possibly, but all you need is a Ability +4 or better and you will never fail at anything you do.

And so the original risk roll was abandoned. It wasn’t bad, much in the way that the traditional 1d20 roll isn’t all that bad either. It just wasn’t a whole lot better. Change is so hard to bring about that anything less than significant change isn’t worth the work.

Up next, a second and exceedingly different take on the risk roll. Stay tuned….

TMDM, Pt 2: What's Wrong with the d20?

This seems to be the week where everyone is venting their unpopular opinons about D&D, so what better time is there to dive into the heart of my search for a new die mechanic and talk about all that is wrong with the d20 roll?

Enlighten me oh blogger! What is wrong with the d20 roll?

Nothing actually. If it works it works. The d20 roll is tried and true and accepted by millions as the standard for role playing games.

• You roll 1d20.
• If it’s not an obvious fail you add a bunch of modifiers.
• Think about it, add in a bunch of other modifiers.
• Eventually call it quits with the modification and present a total.
• If greater than or equal to the number you need to beat you succeed, otherwise you fail.

What’s wrong with that? Nothing could be simpler!

Designing a dice mechanic is a bit like designing a vehicle. It’s hard to screw it up. Four wheels and a platform gets you a go-kart. It will send a kid flying down a hill screaming with joy and/or fear, but it is nothing anyone wants to drive to work in. Making a dice mechanic better is the hard part. Creating something that takes people where they want to go, as quickly and efficiently as possible, but with a ride so comfortable they barely notice they are in a car? That is the challenge at hand! Of course, to face such a challenge we need to take a shrewd look at the d20 roll and see where it could use some improvement.

(Cup holders. It needs more cup holders.)

TOO MANY NUMBER RANGES
This is one of the most insidious of problems because once you get over it you stop noticing it. You forget about your own struggles to learn the game and start to wonder why others cannot see something which to you now seems so obvious.

Consider this - in D&D - how good is a 10?

As an ability score it is completely average.
As an ability modifier it is off the charts.
As a difficulty class it is pretty easy.
With ascending armor class it is so-so.
With descending armor class you are standing naked on the battlefield.
With hit points? _Nobody really knows._ In a game like B/X D&D you are a competent fighter. In D&D 5e you are a total push-over.

And now explain all of this to someone who has never played the game. Toss in a bunch of strange looking dice which have no consistent scheme of use as well as a slew of tables to consult while playing and….

Simple right?

A number by itself is meaningless. It needs something to measure and those measurements need to follow a predictable method of incrementation. Is a 2 twice as important as a 1 or is it just a nudge in the right direction? Is a 2 the right direction? Or is this one of those times where it is better to roll low than high? Multiple inconsistent number systems are a serious barrier to entry when it comes to recruiting new players. The fewer a game uses the better.


D20 IS NOT VERY REALISTIC
A perfectly average character with an ability score of 10 and a 1st level +2 proficiency bonus will only succeed at what they are doing 60% of the time. Imagine hiring a plumber who only fixes your busted pipes 60% of the time. Or a dentist who sends you home with a throbbing toothache 40% of the time. Or that guy you hired to mow the lawn finishing about 60% of it before failing somehow.

(I mowed a 1!)

Maybe it happens, but most people when they set about performing a task do not simply pass or fail. They perform at a fairly consistent level of ability. Occasionally, luck will have them doing a bit better or worse but for the most part they do what they can do and hope it fits the bill. Failure happens when the goal they are striving for hangs too far out of reach. At that point they could try harder to make it work but that isn’t what the d20 roll is about, now is it? Actually, can you name a system where a character can simply “try harder” to make it work? Hmmm. A glaring oversight there. Somebody ought to do something about that.

So anyways. What does the d20 roll represent?

We don’t know.

Like the hit point, it is one of those things most people would rather not discuss. Rolling the dice is just something you do in a game. The best guess is that the d20 roll represents random chance and all the unseen influences at work which could sway an outcome one way or another. If true then it has a problem because not everything your characters will do in a game will come with the same amount of random elements.


D20 DOESN’T ARM WRESTLE VERY WELL
I have two dwarven characters, Ralph Cabbagehammer and Grudge Orcslayer, who have been arm wrestling each other to test out dice mechanics since the late 1990’s. Don’t tell them, but they both have the equivalent of Strength 14 making them evenly matched in the muscle department. They kind of suspect this to be true, but characters can't see their own stats and so they keep arm wrestling each other.

The thing about arm-wrestling is that unlike normal combat there are few to no random elements involved. How do we test it with a d20 roll? The correct answer is - we don’t - not with arm wrestling. You compare strength scores and whoever has the greater score wins it (yawn). In the case of Ralph vs Grudge every match ends with a tie. They could arm wrestle for hours on end and never get close to slamming a fist to the table. Use the d20 to settle the matter the exact opposite happens. Ties become rare and the outcomes wildly unpredictable.

Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world, but what if our two characters were not so evenly matched? What if Ralph’s strength suddenly dropped to 3 and Grudge’s strength amped up to 18. There should be no contest. Grudge should beat Ralph every time. Yet, according to standard d20 rules, Grudge with his 18 would gain a +4 to his roll while Ralph with his 3 would suffer a -4. Grudge would still win most of the matches but not all of them.

Ralph rolls 16 and Grudge rolls 6? Ralph wins!
Ralph rolls 18 and Grudge rolls 9? Ralph wins!
Ralph rolls 20 and Grudge rolls 11? Ralph wins!

(Probably not how Over The Top was meant to end.)

This is what people mean when they talk about the d20 being swingy. That randomness makes it untrustworthy and hard to plan around. A case could be made that random is random. D&D is a fantasy game. It shouldn’t be realistic. Yes, but RPGs are powered by the imagination and despite its penchant for unicorns and rainbows the imagination did not evolve to keep us amused while waiting in check-out lines. The imagination exists to help keep us alive against all the terrible possibilities of reality. That is its primary concern. That is the reason why so much of entertainment is centered around characters experiencing the absolute worst that could possibly happen.

The imagination is only interested in fantasy insofar as fantasy can challenge us with a more intense reality than everyday reality. A fantastic reality still needs a foundation of real reality to stand on. Without it a game will become plagued by doubt, leaving people thinking, “Yeah, that’s what the rules say, but if it were real that's not how it would play out.” And nothing sucks the interest out of an RPG quite like that.


GRATIFICATION NEEDS TO BE INSTANT AND PHYSICAL
This is part of being human. Physical actions are rife with importance. If you look at a role playing game with the sound turned off, what do you see? A bunch of people sitting around a table, chatting it up, occasionally scribbling notes on paper, maybe moving some minis. The one notable physical action involved is a roll of the dice.

This could be why diceless role-playing never caught on. On the lower end of the brain stem, rolling the dice is that thing that you do, that material assertion of your mojo into the unfolding story. Yet the d20 roll does not happen at the culmination of an action. It happens at the beginning. You do not roll the dice, look at what it gives you and instantly know how well you did. Instead, the die is rolled and a lot of jibber-jabber follows. You add modifiers to the roll, compare it to another number, modify that number, remember some other modifier which should have been added in but weren’t (can’t we add it in? Pleeeese?). If we ever get to the end of this, the totals are judged and then we figure out what actually happened.

I think this is why people like rolling for damage as much as they do. While it does slow a game down a bit, rolling for damage gives players something physical and immediate to end their action on. It helps bookend the action, giving us two solid points to know where it all begins and ends. Of course, you are not always rolling for damage every time you roll the dice, and there is nothing more disappointing that a terrific hit roll that ends with a roll of 1 on the damage die.

Not to beat a dead horse to bursting, but this could also be the reason why people love the idea of critical rolls happening on a 20 or 1. It pushes all the math aside and as soon as you see one of these numbers turn up the dice tell you that something interesting and unexpected is about to happen. Wouldn’t it be great if all the numbers on the dice worked that way?
Hmmm….


D20 ONLY ROLLS ONE DIE
This last one is more subjective if not downright superstitious than the rest, yet it is no less daunting a force to consider.

The roll of a single die feels weak.

We have a long history of divining the will of the gods through random things: drawing Tarot cards, reading tea leaves, cutting the head off a chicken and looking at the blood it splatters as it does its final dance (not recommended for RPG’s btw), but presumably no divination technique has been with us longer than the rolling of bones, the casting of lots, the reading of runes. Call it what you want but cleromancy - divination by way of dice - has been with us longer than civilization itself. Some of its superstitions are so deeply ingrained in the collective psyche that we naturally heed them without even realizing that we know them.

Blame it on the cajones, but a perfect roll of the dice is a two die roll. Three dice is acceptable. Four dice is passable. Five or more is just a mess. But a single die roll is unforgivable. Dice need to make a sound when they roll. We need to hear them clatter in our hands before they hit the table. This wakes them up to our presence. We also need to roll our own dice for ourselves. In Original D&D only the DM was supposed to roll the dice. The DM was essentially a game console you fed commands to and it returned the results of. All number juggling was hidden under the hood / behind the screen. This method was quickly dropped and never explained, but I believe it had something to do with people being irked by an inability to roll their dice for themselves. As if we actually have some kind of control over the numbers that turn up.

Maybe we do. Out loud we have to admit that chance is purely random. The dice produce numbers with utter indifference to our needs, just like the random number generation machines that they are.

And yet….

In the quiet of our minds, slithering down around that brain stem we know that there exists a greater truth. The dice are an extension of our bodies. It’s our touch which causes them to roll more often in our favor than not. It is God or the Gods working through us which causes the dice to roll what they roll.

(But he does love to mess with those who do.)

Look at the game of Craps sometime. The amount of superstition which surrounds it is astounding. An RPG is not a game of craps with characters, but it does primarily use dice and dice come with rules of their own which might as well be etched in stone. One of the biggest being that you never roll just one die by itself.


AND THAT’S IT
I’m sure I could dig up more, but the point wasn’t to condemn the d20 roll but to figure out what needs fixing. In short…

• Limit the number of number ranges the game uses, and make sure their patterns do not conflict with each other.
• Make action resolution better resemble reality, even though we are dealing with fantasy.
• Turn the die roll into the dramatic end point of an action, or at least do a better job book-ending the action between two related die rolls.
• Roll more than just one die.

And that is what is coming up next with a look at the Risk Roll. My first attempt at creating something better than the d20, crafted so many years ago.

A Tale of Way Too Many Dice Mechanics, Pt 1

Normally I make New Years Resolutions and drop them by February just like everyone else. This year I’ve decided to do something different. I have made a resolution I want to finish before New Years instead of after it. By Jan 1st 2020 I will have finished the rules of the Agama, and released a working prototype of the game.

What is the Agama?

Funny you should ask…

The Agama is the latest and hopefully - last - incarnation of something I have been tinkering with since the day I came back from Gencon ‘93. I had just graduated college and spent most of the summer sending out job applications. Thanks to a recession I was also getting nothing in reply. Some old friends from high school had decided to go to Gencon. They said they thought about inviting me but knew I was also busy looking for work and probably wouldn't be interested. Then someone dropped out at the last minute, a seat in the car opened up and (possibly even more importantly) they needed another person to help split the hotel room bill. After chewing them out for not giving me any time to register for any events, I said what the hell. I needed a break and a road trip did qualify.

Despite going to Gencon and not playing a single game, it did prove to be  a fun trip. I wandered the convention hall. I made friends with a cute girl who was stuck waiting in the hall while her boyfriend played games. We went to the Milwaukee Museum of Modern Art and made fun of the exhibits.

(A bit like this but with less punk, less rock and more Milwaukee.)

I also looked at the state of gaming. DOOM had just recently exploded onto the scene and the wargamers among us were going nuts over first-person shooters. Meanwhile, the drama majors had abandoned the tabletop for LARPing and were going gaga over White Wolf games. What did D&D have? TSR was trying way too hard to build up scant interest in DragonStrike a VHS powered fantasy adventure game that people were stopping by the booth to laugh at, not with. There is a difference.

(Or is it a crime against humanity?)

TSR had finally and irrevocably lost touch with one the best things about the tabletop RPG and that is the ability of its players to imagine the game as they wanted to see it. With Dragonstrike it felt as if someone in the corporate board room had read the latest spreadsheet, looked at what they were producing and decided that D&D was suffering from a failure of imagination on the part of its players. Their problems had nothing to do with the game itself. THAC0 was a perfectly fine concept that anyone could grasp. It had to be the players not seeing things correctly.

Anyways. The weekend ended. We all returned home. I went to the bookshelf in my room, noticed how my gaming books had been collecting dust and had to wonder - why was it failing? - why was something which once held our rapt attention now just barely grabbing us?

The obvious answer was that times had changed. Computer games had grown too good. The internet was spreading across the world and blowing people’s minds with its infinite (albeit dial-up speed) possibilities. But that was nothing I could do anything about. I started to wonder about the game systems. AD&D in particular was a game we loved but almost hated to play because of how often the game would melt down over some dispute over the rules. I started to wonder what could be done differently. What could be changed to make things better. Because of my group’s many problems with the rules, house-rules had come to be abhorred, yet since we had also moved on to other things I figured no one would care if I dissected the games we loved and cobbled together something made from their best parts. The tabletop rpg was dead wasn't it? Nobody would be playing these things in a world with DOOM in it. Come on. Who are you kidding....

Without even knowing a word for it existed, my first game was a Frankensteiner based on Gamma World and set in our home town a few hundred years after the fact. It wasn’t bad. It almost even got played, but that’s a story for another time.

Although my game design failed, through it I caught the design bug. By the mid-90’s I had created a stand-alone system called Theater of the Absurd. It was essentially a way of playing Pacesetter CHILL but with better mechanics. Or at least, what I had hoped would be better mechanics, the name partially referred to just how weird and wonky everything turned out to be. This would later be shortened to the ToAd, because it was kind of ugly and covered in warts, but it could take you to amazing places if you dared lick it. What no takers? The ToAd was also more of a universal GURPS-like system that could be used with anything. Just as soon as I brought one of those anythings into existence.

(Not our actual mascot but you get the idea)

Around 2000 the ToAd was re-invented yet again to become Tales of Adventure. I had learned website programming and for a while hosted a fairly popular website where you could create and store characters and equipment and pretty much everything including your own worlds. Suck it D&D Beyond! The ToAd was there first. Unfortunately the web technology of the day was a pretty crude affair and using the site proved to be far more work than it was worth. A few years later I demolished it and rebuilt both the game and the website from scratch to create the Model Reality Kit or MRK.

Then 2008 hit. Things got crazy and I pulled the plug on the MRK. I also came to the realization that trying to build a support website for a game that was still in development was like trying to frost a cake before baking it. The website idea was chucked and the next few games would all be on paper starting with an OSR inspired return to fantasy adventure called the Komodo. Because it’s a dragon. A real dragon.

(Get it? Get it?)

Well. It doesn’t matter. The Komodo morphed into the Komo Dosr and I simply didn’t like it. It wasn’t just a return to the games of the past but also a return of all their problems. I pushed it aside to work on something totally different, something light and fast called the Red EFT. It was fun but it was so outside of what I knew, I wasn't sure if I trusted it as the foundation I was looking for. I returned to the Komo Dosr, broke it down and rebuilt it from scratch to create the Agama. Which is where I’m at now.

(Have you noticed a pattern yet? A borderline fetish?)

So what took so long?

Game design, I learned, is a lot like playing Jenga. It’s not enough to stack up a bird’s nest of rules. You also need to carefully remove as much from it as possible without knocking the whole thing over. To some degree it is harder than Jenga, because once you have reached that point of perfect lightness you need to start stacking books of stuff on top of it - representing the imaginary world itself - and hope that it all holds together. The perfect game system is like a geodesic dome. The concept is simple and it can be built using ordinary items, but by a trick of geometry the dome is also strong enough to withstand a hurricane.

I just could never get the foundation right. Every time I poured the concrete it would crack as I discovered something new that would work better or faster or more imaginatively. Eventually that innovation would push me to the point of ditching everything and starting over from scratch.

And here I am again. The Agama is mostly written. What is keeping it from being completed is an inability to decide on its die mechanic, that all-important kernel of any RPG system. Currently, I have too many choices and no desire to throw it away and start over from scratch. Like Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies I’m getting too old for this shit.

So with this series I’ve decided to do an in-depth analysis of the primary contenders, pick one and try to be happy with it. Who knows, maybe by New Years the conundrum will be solved and I will have actually finished something. Which ironically is what most people would consider the starting line of game design.

(YEEEEEE-HA!)

So consider this the start of a bunch of related blog posts looking back on my favorite die mechanics from the last few years. Not all of them, just the good ones.

What’s up next? First a look at the venerable d20 roll and whether or not it actually needs to be replaced. Stay tuned....