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The Dual Action System

Started by Bloody Stupid Johnson, December 25, 2014, 07:02:49 PM

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Bloody Stupid Johnson

December 25, 2014, 07:02:49 PM
So this is just an idea I had today I thought I'd post and see if anyone had any thoughts on. As a fan of Savage Worlds I love its one-dice resolution for mass combats, and the relatively few modifiers, but I don't especially like how it handles attributes + skills. And going back to rolling Stat+Skill (like Cortex, or the recent Entropic System, the reading of which led my train of thought down this path) means you have to pair up dice and so slows everything down again.

So anyway the idea:


The core mechanic is to roll an attribute dice and a Skill die: take the highest instead of adding them together.
Often, this represents two attempts at solving a task: does a character have the knowledge, a trained reflex or an approach developed that will resolve a problem, if not can they improvise one, or guess a solution, using just raw ability?

For most tasks, the character can roll both dice together and take the highest.

For tasks where failure carries a penalty or setback, a character is restricted to using their highest die only - at least, unless they're willing to possibly suffer that penalty. They can roll both dice but if the lower one generates a 'failure' result, that will still apply. For example, if a climbing roll is used to go up a mountain and a critical failure on a climbing roll results from a '1', a skilled climber (d8) with poorer agility (d6) could opt to use both dice to proceed faster, but would have a lower chance of falling just using their d8 and inching along.
 
Combat
In the case of combat skills [Fight / Dexterity], or other tasks where time is critical, a characer can use each of their dice as a separate action, such as an attack.
In mass combat situations, this means that despite using two dice, there is no need to pair dice - its easy enough to roll dice for several figures at once.

A dice can also be spent to perform an Aid action, i.e. a character can drop one of their dice to add a bonus to the other roll. This is more useful by characters with lower attributes against especially hard (high defense TN) targets, cases using the die as just a second attack is unlikely to hit.  Aid can use an alternative attribute to Dex if a character tries a trick, such as a feint or a shove, and this can gain circumstance bonuses for clever ideas that take account of opponent weaknesses or combat circumstances (Note strange attributes are not used for attack rolls except in unusual circumstances - only Aid actions).
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