Whats the view on the following mechanic. Anything similar already out there? Would you play a game using it? What do you perceive as it's strengths and weaknesses?

It's a d6 based mechanic. You could also use Fate dice as they result in the same odds. It uses a version of the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic made popular in D&D5ed.

Dice rolls are character facing. i.e. all modifiers etc are loaded into the players roll regardless of whether its a simple check to do something or attacking or defending against another. All the penalties/bonus are applied to the players die roll regardless. And that die roll results in Critical Success, Success, Partial, Failure and Critical Failure.

These define whether the task went your way, or failed, or if opposed by another went your opponents way, or whether you had a mixed result i.e. some success and some failure.


You have a pool of 1- 6 Normal Dice constructed by adding and subtracting bonus dice and penalty dice ( Character Assets and situation modifiers give Bonus dice and character Flaws, Situational modifiers and/or your oppositions assets give penalty dice) and a Single Critical Dice. Best for the single Critical Die to be a operate colour or easily distinguished from the Normal dice.

The Normal Dice Pool starts with 1 dice and is always at least 1 dice.

Characters have a number of assets that provide Bonus Dice to the Normal Pool. Flaws situational modifiers and opposition assets provide  Penalty dice to the normal Pool. Penalty dice cancel out bonus dice. So you are left either with an overall number of Bonus Dice, a number of Penalty dice or no Penalty/Bonus dice left at all.

If all the Bonuses cancel out Penalties equally so there are no remainder of Penalty or Bonus, you get no additional dice to the Normal pool. You roll just the single Normal Dice with the single Critical Dice.

If the Normal dice is a 1-2 It is a Failure. If you also rolled a 1-2 on the Critical Dice it is a Critical Failure.

If the Normal dice is a 3-4 its is a Partial. You get some success with some failure or you succeed but at a cost. Its a mixed result.

If the Normal dice is a 5-6 its a Success. However on a Success if the Critical Dice is also a 5-6 its stepped up to a Critical Success.



If the remaining dice left is a number of 1 or more Bonus dice add them to your pool of  Normal dice and roll the with the Critical Dice. Pick the highest Normal dice, results as per above.

If the remaining dice left are 1 or more penalty dice add them to your normal pool and roll with the Critical Dice. Pick the lowest Normal dice of the pool for your result. Results as per the above.



Penalty Dice and Bonus Dice should never be more than 5 once they calculation to cancel each other out is complete. If after calculating you have a result more than 5 penalty or bonus, it might be best to consider stating it's an automatic Failure or Success as appropriate.


For example:

Fred wants to hit Joe. He has 3 relevant Assets and a single Flaw. Joe has 4 Assets that apply in him defending himself from being hit by Fred.

So there is a total of 3 Bonus dies from Freds Assets and 5 Penalty Dice from Joes Assets and Freds Flaw. Penaltys and Bonuses cancel each other out. After cancelling out those that we can we are left 2 Penalty Dice left over.

Freds players adds the 2 Penalty dice to the Single Normal dice to make a pool of 3 Normal Dice. He rolls the 3 Normal Dice with a different colour Critical DIce to get 5,5,2 on the Normal Dice and a 1 on the Critical.

As it was an overall Penalty on the roll he must take the lowest valued Normal Dice for his result, which is a 2. Its a Failure. However he has also rolled a 1 on the Critical Dice which steps it down to a Critical Failure.

In this mechanic a single Bonus/Penalty counts for a lot. A single bonus die to your Normal pool brings up the odds of success or better quite significantly (up from 33% to 55% roughly) and drops failure or worse down quite a bit to around 11% - with a Partial result unchanged at 33%).

A character with no bonus or penalty has a 33% chance of failure or worse, a 33% chance of a Partial and a 33% chance or a Success or more.

See the full statistical breakdown here:

I quite like this, trained, motivated and skilled characters can still fail but get pretty good odds of a Success+ or at least a Partial.

Additional bonus die make the situation better but give less and less increase each time. Again this feels about right for the kind of game I like to play.

Penalty dice work the same way in reverse.

Anydice calculations can be found here: https://anydice.com/program/167c4

I'm testing it out with a few people and so far it feels quite quick to use. There is a little bit of complexity in explaining it, but once you grok the mechanic it's very simple. You could use Fate dice as well which makes taking in the result a little quicker I guess, however I've always preferred using regular dice, call me old fashioned!!

I like that it is bounded quite nicely, I like to keep the numbers used low, so bonuses are rarely more than 5 in value and penalties rarely more than 5, which keeps it an a range which I can map to normal humanity.

I have a scaling system I can use for ranges which go beyond the norm (which I won't discuss yet) which can be used for powers, large scale creatures/ vehicles or abilities that are beyond the norm and for taking the power level up without using extra dice.

I'm not usually fond of dice pool mechanics but I quite like this, It keeps the number of dice manageable while providing the results I want and once you get past the initial explanation of how it works its pretty quick, there are no weird edge cases in terms of the statistics and it's easy to see what the result is once rolled at a glance.

It kind of started as a modification of the PBTA mechanics. I quite liked the Moves concept, but didn't like the execution it seemed too fiddly and arbitrary and hate the term 'Move'. I'm wasn't that fond of the narrative bent in most execution of PBTA either. I also didn't like the quantity of multiple unique Moves for each character type/class, that felt like unnecessary complication. So I started with creating a system that uses a single Move and then this gradually developed out of that to the point now where it has little resemblance...

I liked the idea of a murky middle ground, that wan't the usual binary result of Success/Failure, where you achieve something but at a cost or with your opponent also achieving something. It makes results less binary and more interesting and this was the result...

What do you think?

Last Unicorn Games 'Icon' system [e.g. Star Trek] was a bit similar to this, perhaps - from what I remember you took the highest from a pool of dice equal to attribute, and there was a 'drama die' that fumbled on a 1 or on a 6 let you add your second-highest die as well. Skill added on separately to the roll.
It didn't extend into negative numbers as far as I can recall.
Probably the major problem I could imagine with this is that the size of each bonus is quite large, which will constrain your choices as to advancement schemes for characters. Instead of a level (or whatever) giving +1 to everything you have to pick a couple of things [skills? feats?] to get a large boost to. I guess the question is how high its possible to have a 'skill' or 'attribute' be before its entirely broken [3? 5?].

QuoteLast Unicorn Games 'Icon' system [e.g. Star Trek] was a bit similar to this, perhaps - from what I remember you took the highest from a pool of dice equal to attribute, and there was a 'drama die' that fumbled on a 1 or on a 6 let you add your second-highest die as well. Skill added on separately to the roll.

I have that game somewhere, I'd totally forgotten about it. Must dig it out and have a look... I vaguely remember it but it must be years since I looked at it... Thanks for the tip!

QuoteProbably the major problem I could imagine with this is that the size of each bonus is quite large, which will constrain your choices as to advancement schemes for characters. Instead of a level (or whatever) giving +1 to everything you have to pick a couple of things [skills? feats?] to get a large boost to. I guess the question is how high its possible to have a 'skill' or 'attribute' be before its entirely broken [3? 5?].

Yep it is quite coarse, a single bonus die imparts a big degree of competence. I'm trying to interpret that as a benefit not a flaw at the moment.

From a math point of view, about 5 bonus die / 5 penalty die is the break point. Beyond that and extra dice in the pool provide increasingly diminishing returns. So I've capped the Normal Dice pool at 1 + 5 bonus dice (or Penalty dice) in total. The amount of character assets that provide bonus dice reflects that. It's not really possible to gain more than 5 bonus dice unless the tasks is significantly easier than normal. At which point I think you may as well rule it's an automatic success, as the odds of a Failure or less are so low. The same with penalty dice. If you had a check that ended up with more than 5 penalty dice I'd probably rule it's an automatic failure as the chance for a Success is so very tiny.

At the moment I have a system that provides from 0 to 5 bonus die in total from character assets to a check/dice roll. No more than that.

These come from the following three types of stats:

Goals - Goals are single sentence statements such as 'Bring Justice to the Murderer of my sister', 'Defend the Kingdom of Essolia', 'Defend the People of New York' or 'Become Grand Master of the Order of the Flying Fist'. They only ever providing 1x bonus die even if more than one Goal is applicable and only if this check specifically is in line with a Goal or is moving you towards the completion of a Goal.

Gifts - Broad areas of capability, including: Traits - mundane advantages such as 'Strength of an Ox', 'Fleet footed', 'Really Tough' or 'Intimidating visage';  Power Traits - mundane Traits which are beyond the human norm via supernatural means or superscience/tech for example 'Strength of Hercules', 'Artificial Muscle Enhancement', 'Scanning Optical Implants' or 'Fortitude of the gods'; Powers - unique abilities which are beyond normal human capability and give supernatural (or superscience) capabilities such as 'Sorcerous bloodline', 'Psionic Mind Powers', 'Teleportation', 'Mastery of Electricity'; Afflilations - membership of an organisation that give access to mundane Abilities and resources you wouldn't normally have access to, for example 'The black Hands - Thieves Guild', 'The Knightly Order of the Garter' 'Brotherhood of Elmsingham Forest'; Power Affiliations - An Affiliation that gives access to a Power through knowledge for example 'The Red Mages Order' giving access to magical powers through mystical esoteric knowledge, or 'The Order of the Flying Fist' giving Qi powers through study of mystical physical and meditative practices, or the 'Preisthood of Makesh', giving Theurgic powers through secret rites, practices and devotion to their god.

Gifts provide 1x bonus die if applicable to the check. Only one Gift can apply to a check. Some Gift, Power Traits, Powers and Power Affiliations give extra benefits with a scaling mechanic which I won't detail here for the moment.

Abilities - These are learnt skills and aptitudes. These can be mundane Abilities anyone could pick up. Specialised Abilities that only those with an Affiliation can learn or Abilities associated with the use of a Power or Power affiliaton, again only those with that Power or Power Affiliation could learn these Abilities. Abilities are ranked from 1-3 and this is the amount of bonus die they contribute to a check. A rank of 1 is regarded as Trained and provides 1x bonus die, 2 is Competent and provides 2x bonus dice, and 3 is Expert providing 3x bonus dice. I envisage that Abilities would be quite narrow, they represent discreet skills and also discreet expressions of a power for example, individual spells for an Initiate of the 'Order the Red Mages', or the use of individual Psionic powers such as 'Read Mind', 'Move object' or 'Mind Blast'  for a character with the 'Psionic Mind Powers' Gift.


So on the one hand there is limited advancement of individual Abilities which are coarsely ranked 1-3. However a character will advance by gaining many discreet mundane Abilities representing discreet skills, and in Abilities representing discreet manifestations of their Power Traits, Powers and Power Affiliations. They can also gain new Gifts. At least that's the plan at the moment.

Would that be enough for you to feel you had enough areas in which your character could advance in with experience? My big concern at the moment is that the coarse granularity of Ability ranks (driven by the core mechanic itself) could be off putting to many no matter how I present it...

I guess I'm beginning to doubt the mechanic a little, which is my reason for getting some feedback...

Hmm well, a big jump between 0 and 1 for skills being trained is a plus (the trained/untrained divide) but ideally I prefer less coarse, and proliferation of lots of +1 die abilities may be messy. The coarsest I've played with any regularity myself would be Savage Worlds, which has lots of 'Edges' I suppose as a result of needing that sort of horizontal rather than vertical advancement to work.

I can think of one system that's less granular which would be this one, which might be interesting?: it literally only has two possible values for stats (high or low)...probably more of a one-shot system than long-term.
http://dreamsanddragons.blogspot.com/p/hilo-heroes.html

I guess you could also try to extend it by adding pluses to rolls as well (same as Icons), or you might find the idea would work for some niche use (attribute checks or damage rolls or etc.) rather than as a core mechanic. The weird thing perhaps is that 1-3 could actually work for say just a raw Strength check if you're arm-wrestling or something, but then you'd probably want to reduce it when applying it to a roll where Str is less importance (like where a skill also applies).

Thanks Bloody Stupid Johnson for your feedback.

It's reinforced my gut instinct this is a little too fiddly and too course for what I want it to achieve, it was almost there.... It was working in play, but the lack of granularity when it came to the values for skills, traits etc. was going to cause too many issues I think.

I was a little despondent at first however it got me thinking about how I could create something a little simpler but with the same or similar statistical outcomes, but with more variation for attributes / skills etc. and I've come up with something. It comes up with the same 5x outcomes that I wanted so I can simply rip out the old mechanic and replace with the new. I'll need to refactor the ranges for Goals, Gifts and Abilities but it shouldn't be a huge issue. SO I'm going to give it a test out with the rest of the existing system and see how it goes.

Thanks for your help. I'll probably post a new thread (in the not too distant future hopefully!), with the whole system for feedback once I've furthered development a little more.

You're welcome! Good luck with.