Miss/Hit/Over: Great RPG Mechanics

#RPGMechanics: Week Four

I’ve lived through a lot of resolution systems. Original D&D’s roll over THAC0, Basic Role Playing’s roll under percentages, Tunnels & Trolls’ roll high with a bunch of dice & adds. Either you wanted to roll high/low over a set number or you wanted to beat an opponent’s total. Dice Pools would change that– allowing for new calculation and manipulation tricks. But basically more dice was usually better since you checked each die to see if it gave you a success or not. Then you compared total successes.

Sometimes these have offered additional calculations like botches canceling successes, certain results having additional effects, building a pool, or checking for a wild die. Fading Suns has its Victory Point system where you want to roll under a set value, but you want to roll the highest possible number under. That’s a system, no matter how many times I play it, which doesn’t click with my brain. It brings me up short every time.

One of the revolutionary elements of PbtA which doesn’t get talked enough about is the simple, closed set dice rolling. You have relatively low stats (usually -2 to +3) added to a 2d6 roll. It’s quick, easy math. And with that, at a glance, you can see which band your result falls into. It’s a constant which has a huge impact on play– the base simplicity means checking what a move means or doing things like support actions after a roll doesn’t feel onerous. 

Apocalypse Keys takes that set of bands for success and tweaks them in a super interesting way, one which completely changes the feel of play. You have a miss band, 7 or less, which has a fail which is usually out of your control— the GM Hard Move. Then there’s a sweet spot, 8-10, where you get everything you want. But then there’s the 11+, which has you going overboard, doing more in a dangerous way, or giving yourself into temptation and darkness. It’s the ‘Monkey’s Paw’ result. It works so well for powerful characters and those figures constantly tested by the world. 

That works, in part, because you don’t have fixed stats. Instead you spend X Darkness Tokens and roll with that number. You can push your luck, spending a lot of tokens and likely overdoing things. But the secondary economy comes from creating those tokens for yourself as that process can cause drama and demonstrate character. But if you end up with too many tokens, your character’s problems deepen. 

That loops creates interesting choices— but simple ones which don’t bog down flow. It’s dynamite at the table for me– I love the calculations and the ability to really gamble with what you’re doing. I’ve been thinking about an Exalted-like PbtA hack, where some moves have a base version and a heightened version, the latter using AK’s bands.