The revised task resolution system for the RPG I'm working on
Ron Edwards:
Hi John,
For this thread to continue, please set up and link to some external document that we can reference. It doesn't have to be your complete work, or even really anything more than what you have here. But it does need to be off-Forge. See the forum sticky thread for more about this policy.
Also, "general impressions" aren't really what Forge threads are for. I recommend giving a little more focus for continued discussion.
Best, Ron
johnthedm7000:
A few examples of when a negative survival instinct is positive:
As you said, when you're doing something for fun, or creating something nonessential (such as art, music, a book etc.). While this will have limited applicability in most games, it is something to consider.
When you attempt something that ignores your basic survival in favor of other factors. So, if you're fighting off a rival group of survivors and choose to stay behind and "fight them off" so your friends can escape, negative survival instinct would apply as a bonus. While this does overlap with connection, it applies to the situation for a different reason. A high connectedness would apply to rolls to fight them off because you are fighting to defend people you care about (your friends), while a negative survival instinct would apply because you care less than most for self-preservation.
It might even apply to rolls to resist penalties from lack of food and water. A dedicated mechanic who needs to keep a water purification system active to save his friends might go without food and water himself in order to work all night and all day. He has a connection of +2, a sanity of 0, a survival instinct of -2, and an Intelligence of 3. He rolls 2d10+7 for his Repair roll, to see how much progress he makes.
A low survival instinct can also easily apply as a bonus in the case of cooperation or negotiation. Survival instinct really measures how much your basic needs and "animal brain" influence your actions. A person with a low survival instinct might be described as "civilized", "cultured", "soft", "brave" or other similar terms, but the key thing to remember is that a character with a negative survival instinct is someone who doesn't place as high a priority as most people do on aquiring the basic necessities of life.
As far as terminology goes, what I was thinking is "Flip" to describe how to apply a score as it's opposite. For example, a piece or rules text might say "if you are making a roll to cast a spell, Flip your Sanity score to determine if it applies a bonus or penalty"
Just to clarify, Mental priorities will only be a part of the stats which define a character. A character will be built out of the following traits:
Abilities (Brawn, Quickness, Brains, Toughness, Intelligence, Sense, Charisma, Luck. These determine a characters "base" traits, like speed, health, and defenses, range from 1-5 and add to relevant die rolls)
Mental Priorities (Connection, Survival Instinct, Sanity. These might apply as either a bonus or a penalty to die rolls in certain circumstances, and they stack with one another).
Gifts: (Little perks that grant additional talents, such as new uses for skills. These do not add or subtract from dice pools)
Flaws: (Negative traits that give characters complications when certain events occur. These do not add or subtract from dice pools.)
Skills: These allow you more breadth of ability in tasks, and help you avoid catastrophic failures.They range from 1-5, and are NOT applied to die rolls. They are always paired with a given attribute (such as Quickness being paired with Athletics to do a backflip and then sprint away. The ability a skill is paired with depends on the overall situation, and how the skill is being used. )
Circumstantial modifiers will be put into two parts:
Personal: Things that are under one's control, such as equipment, wearing your lady's favorite animal musk before attempting to woo her etc. These range from -3 to +3. They do not stack with each other, but stack with external mods.
External: These are things that are out of your control, such as how dark it is outside, the amount of Aether in the environment that's available for you to draw on etc. These range from -3 to +3. These don't stack with one another either, but do stack with personal mods.
So generally speaking, players have just 1-4 mods to look out for. They declare a skill+ability pair they're going to use, roll the Ability, apply any Mental Priority mods (if the table agrees that they're relevant), and any personal mods and roll. The GM applies external mods, and then the player either allocates successes or suffers the consequences of failure.
Thus the total modifiers to a roll might go as low as -14 (-3 personal, -3 external, -9 mental priority, +1 ability) to as high as +20 (+3 personal, +3 external, +9 mental priority, +5 ability). Now modifiers this extreme are probably going to be pretty rare, as these situations represent either everything working against a character (situation, equipment, psychological makeup, and talent) or everything clicking into place all at once and aiding the character. These sorts of situations enable truly remarkable results, given the large effect of any +1 or -1 penalty on a roll of 2d10 and that's as it should be. The game world I envision is a world gone mad and torn asunder by apocalypse and as such it should be possible for characters to either fail horrendously or achieve incredible things based on circumstance. A common TN for "Average" tasks would likely be 10-12, as most people will have most Abilities at 2, and few extreme scores in Mental Priorities, with TNs going as low as 0 (for truly easy tasks) to 40 (for tasks that literally have 1 in a million odds).
johnthedm7000:
So to satisfy the Gods of the Mod, here is a link to my initial attempt at the task resolution system for my game, as posted by me on Facebook. Feel free to comment on it there as well as herehttp://www.facebook.com/?sk=2347471856#!/home.php?sk=mynotes .
As for adding more focus to this discussion, I essentially want to know if you guys feel if the system that I've designed fulfills the following design goals:
*A compromise between granular task resolution and easy of play.
*A system which lives up to my designation of this game as a Narrativist/Simulationist Hybrid in that it allows a fair amount of simulation of post-apocalyptic life while encouraging people to tell interesting stories about unique characters.
*A system that makes your character's priorities in life important on both a thematic and mechanical level.
*A system which is consistent throughout all areas of it's execution (few "fiddly bits" or exceptions)
*A system which enables gritty and intense combat that captures the desperation of a post-apocalyptic existence.
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