I love rolling large dice pools. Hearing all those shiny math rocks clink, eagerly hoping for a good roll and dreading those pesky 1s is way too satisfying. Sure, rolling lots of dice can be unwieldy and lead to dice clog, but years of playing Vampire: The Masquerade have conditioned me to enjoy the simple pleasures offered by dice pools.
Here's a quick V.V. fact: I write when I'm stressed, and I've had a pretty stressful couple of days. Stressful enough for me to write a pretty solid foundation for a dice pool-based system. Right now, this is just an exercise in game design, but I could definitely see myself using this for a game someday. You can check it out below!
CHARACTER CREATION
One of your Attributes is great (d10), one is good (d8), one is average (d6) and one is poor (d4). Roll four d20s, then assign each result to a different Attribute, forming your Attribute Pools. If no result is higher than 10, discard all results and roll again.
TASK RESOLUTION
Every Attribute has a dice pool, and you can choose how many dice to invest in any given Attribute Check. After investing your dice, roll them. You always keep any dice that rolls at or above 4. When you're out of dice, you can't succeed with that Attribute anymore.
Degrees of success are determined by how many dice were invested in the check.
• 1 die: you succeed at a cost, such as spending resources or facing
complications
• 2 dice: you succeed by doing the bare minimum
• 3 dice: you solve the matter at hand cleanly and competently
• 4+ dice: you go above and beyond, succeeding with gusto. For each die
above 3, add a flourish to your success: elegance, quickness, subtlety,
precision, substance, surprise
COMBAT: VITALITY
When entering a fight, invest as many dice from your Attribute Pools as you want, forming your Vitality Pool for the combat.
Every enemy attack has a matching Condition with a Resistance Cost. To avoid suffering a Condition, roll a number of Vitality dice equal to the Resistance Cost. Keep any dice that rolls at 4 or higher, and discard the rest.
If you can't or don't want to match the Condition's Resistance Cost, you suffer its effects.
When combat ends, any remaining Vitality dice can be freely reassigned
to your Attribute Pools.
COMBAT: ATTACKING
To deal damage in combat, you need to spend <melee attribute> dice
for melee attacks, <ranged attribute> dice for ranged attacks,
and <magic attribute> for offensive spellcasting. Roll them normally,
and keep any dice resulting in a number equal to 4 or above.
Any dice spent this way can be used to assign Conditions to an enemy.
Once you reach an enemy's Condition Threshold, you decide whether
they're dead or simply defeated.
CONDITIONS
Optimally, a game using these rules would have a full list of interesting conditions, each with a matching Resistance Cost (or, in the case of PC attacks, Damage Costs) and some interesting mechanical flair to differentiate them. As is, this is just the skeleton of a system, and not a game at all. No harm in giving some examples, though!
• Vulnerable (5): -1 Damage Cost to all Conditions
• Weakened (4): Can't cause any Conditions above RC 3
• Wounded (3): Can be inflicted multiple times
• Dizzy (2): Can't attack for a turn (doesn't stack)
POTENTIAL SHENANIGANS
Designing powers for this system would be a blast, as there's so much room to play with dice pools and degrees of success. Hell, I almost bolted a skill system to this thing just for fun, but it felt like too much (skill points would allow rerolls on relevant Attribute Checks, furthering the system's dice clog problem).
At the present time, though, I have no plans on expanding this any further, as I'm already working on way too many games. Still, I'm curious to know whether this is as interesting as my stress-addled brain thinks it is, or just an excuse to roll a lot of dice at once.
Lemme know what you think!
