Suffering Mechanic
Thursday, December 06, 2007
I came up with a mechanic that I think is pretty nifty. It's a mashup of "Bringing Down the Pain" and Keys from TSOY, plus a touch of the Trollbabe re-roll system.Conflicts are one-roll affairs. You roll your dice, I roll mine: the highest die wins. But then...
Suffering
If you don't like the outcome of the dice roll, you can choose to Suffer. Add another die to your pool, then both sides re-roll.
When you Suffer, say how your opponent stomps on you, and check off one of your Sufferings. You have one of each, and each one, when checked, imposes a taboo on you. It also has a buyoff condition that lets you uncheck it.
For example:
Humiliation
Taboo: You may not intimidate, frighten, or otherwise impress anyone with word or deed.
Buyoff: Pick a fight with a mate who doesn't deserve it.
This is for a game project (codename: VALVE) that I've been working on lately. I'll probably post some bits and pieces like this as I go.
Labels: rpg, valve, work in progress
9 Comments:
For extra flaginess, have the Taboos printed on cards. Hand one to the player and another to the scene framer to make sure that the taboos get pushed.
Every project should have a code name! My current project is code named Oforfraksakewillieverfinish.
Brutal. I like it.
Should not your foe get to describe how you suffer though? That makes it a little transcendent across different levels of play. Your character suffers IC, and you suffer someone else ganking your guy.
-Ben
Yeah, that sounds right, Ben.
Hey, it's like Conditions in Afriad or Geiger Counter, except BETTER!
Do you mind if I totally yoink this? Just the buyoff things?
Go ahead!
Nice. That's a really awesome way of setting up "wounding" style mechanics.
I liked this so much, I'm seriously considering swiping a version of it for The Beast, the Angel, and Me, as seen here.
What I'm thinking is this would become the fallout for "but" results in the YES/AND, YES, NO scheme. You can add a "BUT" or an "AND" post-roll, but doing so makes you Suffer. It lets you pull something useful from a failure, and hopefully, makes failure more inherently interesting.
-Ben
Cool. Swipe away...
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