Read on Twitter
I should be in bed, time to uncork a big bottle of game design thoughts:
this is probably a personal hangup but few things take the wind out of a system's sails for me more than 2d6+whatever, fixed-curve, check-against-a-TN task resolution
this is probably a personal hangup but few things take the wind out of a system's sails for me more than 2d6+whatever, fixed-curve, check-against-a-TN task resolution
Think I picked this up from Barbarians of Lemuria. Solid game! Strong grasp of its genre! Never held up for more than 1-3 sessions for me, because all the dice rolls started to blur together. Which is fine if you want a brief game! But—BoL also has *advancement rules*...
Like, this is a game that on some level also wants you to be cycling back around to it or running sustained campaigns, and it just doesn't have the armature to fully support it.
I knew with Crisis Complex that I wanted a game where you could run something with room to really squeeze as much as you can out of the tables and travel rules and really drive home the sense of entropy. So I had to get in the guts of Tunnel Goons' core resolution.
TGoons' dice mechanic is elegant—margin of failure or victory cutting into HP or TN, folding consequence into the dice already on the table—and I wanted to preserve and amplify that. Hence cutting direct modifiers, subbing in bonus dice, rerolls, and "pushing."
Every time you're calling on a game mechanic in Crisis Complex to modify a roll, it's going to directly, materially alter the dice in your hand, the dice on the table, or the information on your sheet. Less math in your head and more in your hands.
And, as I was hoping, it means it takes some work to end up with two dice rolls in Crisis Complex that feel alike, and since there are no fixed numerical bonuses to rolls, character advancement usually involves a "broadening" of ability instead of flattening the difficulty curve.
That said, 2d6+whatever has a fairly natural appeal! It's quick n' easy, the bell curve's easy to map, you can break down a range of difficulties with minimal headache. It makes sense that it's so prevalent, especially in hyperlight systems.
You just have to account for the fact that you only have so much wiggle room to create texture in the challenges you pose your players that call for dice.
And with twenty minutes left in #FreeRPGDay, let me close out this thread with one last shill for Crisis Complex, which will remain PWYW until tomorrow eve: https://ohybridity.itch.io/crisis-complex
