I've gone back and forth on names for various things. "Passion" has been called "Drive", "Will" has been called "Stability", "Fortitude" has been called "Faith", "Reason" has been "Logic", "Creativity" has been "Empathy" . . .
Basically, I'm playing with the number 3. That's all. I'm just seeing what falls out if I make a design system based around 3s and 9s, and see if I can't make something playable.
I haven't playtested any of this yet. But I did some number-crunching. If ties go to the defender, an Active and Passive number which are the same will go to the Active about 45% of the time. If Active is +1 over Passive, Active wins about 55%. +2, Active wins about 66%, +3, 76%, +4, 84%, +5, 90%, 94%, 97%, 98% . . .
This, of course, ignores the 2.8% chance of rolling a 2, and the open-ended rolling on 12s, but since each of those is less than 3%, I figured that I can mostly ignore it in figuring odds. It only starts making a real difference around the +4 or +5 level.
I'm reasonably happy with that kind of spread. Your "bell curve" is really based around 4d6, which gives a curve I'm comfortable with for gaming purposes.
The mental and social injury tables are, at this point, conceptual. I was imagining the social injury table to really only be used in Jane Austin-genre based games, or other societies with highly formalized social structures. I could see it used in a Norse game, for instance -- in some societies, I could see physical combat always including a social combat, as well. And the winner of one might not be the winner of the other.
I started thinking about that in a panel at Farthingcon about "Fantasy of Manners" -- a poorly-defined and developing subgenre of fantasy. One person came up with the suggestion that a fantasy was a "fantasy of manners" if you could use social tools to defeat the Big Bad, and if shaming the villian was a reasonable method of neutralizing him or her.
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Basically, I'm playing with the number 3. That's all. I'm just seeing what falls out if I make a design system based around 3s and 9s, and see if I can't make something playable.
I haven't playtested any of this yet. But I did some number-crunching. If ties go to the defender, an Active and Passive number which are the same will go to the Active about 45% of the time. If Active is +1 over Passive, Active wins about 55%. +2, Active wins about 66%, +3, 76%, +4, 84%, +5, 90%, 94%, 97%, 98% . . .
This, of course, ignores the 2.8% chance of rolling a 2, and the open-ended rolling on 12s, but since each of those is less than 3%, I figured that I can mostly ignore it in figuring odds. It only starts making a real difference around the +4 or +5 level.
I'm reasonably happy with that kind of spread. Your "bell curve" is really based around 4d6, which gives a curve I'm comfortable with for gaming purposes.
The mental and social injury tables are, at this point, conceptual. I was imagining the social injury table to really only be used in Jane Austin-genre based games, or other societies with highly formalized social structures. I could see it used in a Norse game, for instance -- in some societies, I could see physical combat always including a social combat, as well. And the winner of one might not be the winner of the other.
I started thinking about that in a panel at Farthingcon about "Fantasy of Manners" -- a poorly-defined and developing subgenre of fantasy. One person came up with the suggestion that a fantasy was a "fantasy of manners" if you could use social tools to defeat the Big Bad, and if shaming the villian was a reasonable method of neutralizing him or her.