Dice and other thoughts

We need to figure out what we should be rolling. If we assume a Fate of 5 and a Type of 3-5, that gives us...10 points. Since we want the Awesome score to be equalish to this, that means a starting character (if they are awesome enough) could be rolling against a 20 target, with no difficulty modifier. This seems high.

I really like the idea of using d6's. They are everywhere, you can steal them from any of dozens of board games, and you can buy them in packs of a million for a few bucks. Of course, to even make it a challenge, you're already rolling like 4d6.

That leaves us with bigger dice. If you want, say, a 75% chance of success on a "normal" roll with no modifier, given a target of 20, that's a top roll of 27ish . That gives us...1d30? 2d14? Not exactly common dice, even among the niche roleplaying dice. If we were releasing a shiny boxed set, maybe. If Game Science or Koplow were slipping me freebies, maybe. 3d10 could do, but I really don't like exceeding 2 dice, unless the more dice you have the better you are. 2d12? d12s are...I don't know. I have a million of them, but I have a problem when it comes to dice.

The other option is to reduce the scores. 2 for a fate. 2 for a primary type, 1 for a secondary type. That gives us a default of 10, when the Awesomeness is included. 2d8 is a nice throw, here. Difficulty modifiers are probably going to be commonly thrown in by Directors, which might slide us down to regular targets of 7 or so in the beginning, which would give us about a 50% shot with 2d8, so that's a real possibility. This also assumes we figure out how to make players actually be Awesome, without becoming Boring.

This is probably going to have to come out of playtesting, methinks.

I've been looking over how we calculate health. Fate + 2(Primary + Second). That's...math. Depending on where our final stats fall in, maybe just stick with Scene Health being Primary + Secondary, and Adventure Heath being Fate. Straight up.

Once we get a few more things ironed out, I REALLY need to get working on some of the settings and adventures. This is the important part of the game. The whole idea behind our rules is that we don't want them to be in the way of what makes the game fun, the story. Roleplaying is, after all, collaborative storytelling. I have a lot of ideas, just need to make them cohesive and get them together.

Thoughts on some potential fixes/changes, etc etc

The amount of adding in combat still bugs me. We can make it simpler, cleaner. I think that I'd like to just abstract away anything to do with the baddies. Joe Mook has a 1 modifier in combat. Bill Commander has a 5 modifier. Period. Equipment and fate are rolled in. Rules for creating "new" bad guys can go into how to figure this out, but we want a clean, single number.

For that matter, I'm thinking some sort of stat to add to the sheet that is the sum of Fate and Type, for commonly used ones. Kill skill (or whatever) - Bad Guy Mod - Difficulty + Awesomeness. Cleaner than before, but might be muddied under actual game play.

About the awesomeness.

I think we've covered something like this, before, but this is basically just a bonus you get for doing something awesome. Whether it's a mundane task described awesomely, an awesome task described mundanely, or (best yet) an awesome thing described awesomely, it all applies.

This game is about light rules and cinematics. It behooves us to pump up the cinematics. I'd like to weigh the Awesomeness mod heavily against the Fate + Type part. Since we still don't actually know what dice we're rolling, it shouldn't be too hard to wedge this in. Say you have a Fate + Type of...eh, 8. The thing you are trying to do pulls 4 off of that, so you have a target of 4 to roll. If we're on a d10, that means that you only have a 40% chance. I want a lot of Awesomeness bonus points handed out. We'll have to have a chapter (or section..or something) dedicated to this. Examples of things that are awesome, how to decide how many points to hand out, etc. I'd love it if the target was 4 on a d10, roll under, and the person knocked the target up to an 8 because of something. Some games out there will give minor bonuses for this, I want big bonuses.

Bonuses could be given for coming up with a solution that the Director did NOT see coming at all, bonuses for describing it in a particularly cinematic way, bonuses for the act itself being awesome. Bonuses should not be given for doing the same cool thing over and over until it becomes mundane. Creativity should be rewarded.

There were questions in previous posts about including a setting in the core book. I'm now leaning towards no. Better to put out a lean book of rules, and let the players cherry pick the setting(s) they want.

I keep coming back to this game...it's just fun. Hopefully I'll get it put together and out there so that other people can have fun, too.