The Dog Blog

Tony and Wil were talking about a game of TSOY they played a few nights ago, and something in the writeup reminded me of something I was fiddling with in 2002, before PTA surfaced in my brain. Here’s some snippets of it.

I’m thinking that it’s a combination of quick search/handling with how the abilities in question are displayed. Say the basic mechanic is pools of d6s, where you want the highest die showing, and additional 6s beyond the first add one to the total. But how you choose the pool of dice is in the storytelling. Say you’re trying to get past a guard. You might choose “brawny” plus “rank (lieutenant)” plus “booming voice” for three dice.

Then, to make it a little more fun, there’d be a pool of Sheer Luck dice, where you can spend them to add unusual traits to the pool, like adding your “brawny” trait to a roll to repair something. But you have to come up with a storytelling reason why it applied (There was a real heavy part that I had to struggle to lift).

Then to resolve this task, you compare the total vs. some other number, and the difference translates to successes. 1 success = “something marginally cool happened.” 2 successes = “something reasonably cool happened, or 2 marginal things.” And so on. The game will provide some examples, like 1 success might mean a discount off the price, or the guard will let you by if you give her $20, or you got the wind knocked out of you, etc .

Okay, what about in a crisis? Like I really need to get that jump drive fixed in a hurry? For this you can burn “exertion” dice, each adding one to your pool. Each ability can be exerted a number of times equal to its rating. After that, you’ve strained yourself, and you start taking penalties to all actions. But you can push yourself again, if you want, which only adds to the fatigue afterward.

What I like about it is that the concept of “damage” is tied into all activity, like the stress of a long negotiation. You put everything you had into a gruelling repair effort. And now you have to duke it out with some aliens? Better get some coffee.

If you get more successes than you need, save them as Plot Points and add them to another character’s roll later on, as long as the circumstances in which you got them can tie in somehow. You get XP for doing that. 

Four years later, I’m looking at that and thinking, huh, that sounds kinda cool. I also love that I needed to really rationalize the whole “you need a storytelling reason” stuff.

I wonder how I might resurrect some of this stuff. It’s kinda pulpy sounding. Hmm.