System Sunday - Describe a cool part of a system you love.
I did think about starting with the revelation that a structured task system was when it was introduced in Traveller, but that's kind of boring as the concepts were broadly adopted across the RPG industry. Instead, let me talk about some of the mechanics from the TRIPOD (aka Wordplay) storytelling roleplaying game that delight me.
TRIPOD uses a dice pool system, where you gain build a hand of dice from your character's attributes and traits, from other character's traits when they help, and from traits related to the environment or equipment, some of which you may have previously created. There's a satisfying gaming buzz that happens from collecting a hand of dice, with cute touches like the player's whose characters help you physically passing you a dice to use.
The pool mechanic itself is fun. Each die has a 50% chance of creating at least one success (a roll of one to three is a miss; four and five, a single success; with a six giving two successes). You'll have gut feel for the level of success that you can expect, but the swingy nature of dice pool systems means there's always a chance of catastrophe or an amazing performance. There's also a nudge mechanism that allows players to push their success up in a small but meaningful way.
Overall, I love this system. It's light, fun and engages both my gamer and narrativist instincts.
7 August 2022
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