forge-main
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[Forge-main] The Ideal Mechanic


From: Ricardo Gladwell
Subject: [Forge-main] The Ideal Mechanic
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 11:54:07 +0000
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031008

Hi All,

I've been thinking a lot about task resolution systems and I've had some ideas about what would make the perfect mechanic. The key to a good mechanic is simplicity, flexibility and intuitiveness. A mechanic should be simple enough that all outcomes can be resolved in at most one roll per participant. It must be flexible enough to allow for a whole variety of situations, from combat to social rolls. And, it must be intuitively easy to understand.

Therefore, the following bullet points define my ideal concept of the perfect task resolution mechanic:

* All elements of the mechanic must share a common numerical range (e.g. 0-10).

* The common range must be easy to understand (i.e. 0-10, rather than 5-16, for example).

* Only roll only one dice per action participant to determine the outcome.

* Set difficulty and roll-over mechanic should be used.

* The outcome itself must be variable, not simply success or failure, but degree of success or failure.

So, my perfect mechanic for FRINGE would be:

All roll modifiers (Ability + Skill) should be in the 0-10 range. You then determine a difficulty 0-10 and roll a 1d10 over the difficulty to determine the outcome, giving result points in the 0-10 range.

This may well be an impossible mechanic!

--
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
address@hidden





reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]