No Fate…
(originally posted 4/12/24 on Facebook)
Y'all:
I spend a lot of time thinking about game mechanics. I mean, I've created an entirely new TTRPG with its own game mechanics, so of course I ruminate over them more than a little bit. Today, I want to talk about Fate, a game mechanic that has undergone numerous design changes (and that I recently altered again).
In its earliest incarnation (and this is me drawing upon my leaky memory), I had Action and Reaction rolls, followed by Luck and Fate rolls. It went like this: if I want to swing my axe at a goblin, I roll my Action roll for my axe, and the goblin rolls its Reaction roll for its armor. If my roll was higher, I would then make a Luck roll (opposed by the goblin's Fate roll) to determine damage. And all of this involved multiple dice.
If that sounds like a pain in the booty, it was! Part of that was because I was still clinging to the industry convention of using a D20 as the control die, which I realized didn't make sense for the game I was trying to create. I got rid of Luck and Fate rolls entirely.
The Fate roll returned shortly as a contextual modifier die that could be applied to Action and Reaction rolls. I made the decision that Fate dice were always D6s, so a +3F meant you'd add +3D6 to your roll. Combining this with the way attack actions worked (using a minimum of six dice for an Action roll!), it made for a glorious fistful of dice. Glorious, mind you, if you can add dice rolls up quickly.
I streamlined weapons, armor, and spells so that they required fewer dice (a typical weapon attack uses three dice instead of six), and I altered how Fate dice worked again. In this recent incarnation of the rules, any Fate dice are rolled only AFTER a roll has been determined to be a success or failure. In this way, the fickle finger of fate could cause a successful attack to miss (if it had negative Fate), or a near-miss to hit (if it had positive fate). This still required rolling multiple D6s and adding or subtracting them to the initial roll.
Having decided to scale back and streamline my "fistful of dice" design mentality, I recently altered Fate dice again. They still are rolled after the action's outcome has been decided, but now instead rolling multiple dice, you roll one Fate die. This die increases in size in the same way other modifier dice do: D2, D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20. So now a +3F bonus is really +1D6 not +3D6. A -5F penalty is -1D10 instead of -5D6.
Those of you who are mathematically inclined might point out that there is a huge difference between -1D10 and -5D6: the former roll gives a result between 1 and 10 inclusive, while the latter's results range from 5 to 30. A +1F under the old system (+1D6) is a bit more exciting than the current +1F (+1D2). The fact that all Fate dice are affected helps to balance this out, but further playtesting is needed to see if larger adjustments need to be made.
So today's group finished up a combat with a group of bandits, and it became a bit of a slog as the bandits were rolling well (they took less damage). Fate dice came into play multiple times, sometimes causing an attack that hit to miss, other times reducing a lethal blow into a more manageable one. Hopefully I can gather more data from the second playtest group soon. In the meantime I'll be over here drinking tea and fleshing out the campaign setting.
Thank you for following this project. Your support for my labor of love means a lot to me!
