Riffing on a diceless system constructive criticism welcomed

[WildKnight]

(For the time being, these are just thoughts, based on experience with a number of diceless systems. Largely I'm directly stealing from an old system I found online ages ago called the +/- System, but I can't find any evidence of that system having ever existed anywhere anymore, so I'm working from memory, and throwing in some ideas I learned from actually using +/- back in the day as well.

For now, I'm working on games that revolve largely around humans doing mostly human stuff for PCs, not on superpowered beings. I hope to make the system expandable to include superhumans and non-humans eventually, but I'm "starting small" as it were)

CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM APPRECIATED

At the core of the system are four attributes and a (potentially) infinite number of skills, each ranked from zero to four. A zero in an attribute is "slightly less than average" for humans, while a zero in a skill either means no training whatsoever, or (sometimes), that you cannot perform that skill at all (anybody can throw a punch even if they've got zero combat skills, but not everyone can hack into a government database).

Any action is checked against a pairing of Attribute and Skill, with the two numbers added together to equal or beat a difficulty ranging from 1 to 10. Easy actions have a difficulty of 1 to 3, Difficult actions have a difficulty of 4 to 6, Heroic actions have a difficulty of 7 to 9, and Legendary actions have a difficulty of 10. Difficulties can theoretically go higher than 10, but only through application of modifiers (i.e. sometimes the difficulty of an action is modified by circumstances).

Each player also has a pool of points that they may use to modify actions (typically 5, but players can "underspend" at character creation to have a larger pool to spend during games). These refresh at the end of a story (or chapter for really long stories, GMs are going to have to be smart about this). Basically, a player who is confident that his attribute & skill will beat the difficulty number can gamble by taking a "-" (not to exceed their governing attribute), and adding that much to their pool, but if they think they need some help, they can spend "+" from the pool to boost their total.

A character is made up of the following four attributes;
Physicality (governs strength, dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and the like)
Psychology (governs intelligence, mundane willpower, perceptiveness related to the physical environment, etc)
Socialization (governs appearance, charisma, likability, social awareness, etc)
Spirituality (governs the ability to perceive, resist, and tap into unnatural reserves, whether they be supernatural martial arts techniques, psychic powers, or some form of magic)

Additionally, when creating a character, a player must select a weakness and a strength for each of their attributes. Whenever the GM rules that a weakness applies to a specific check, that check is at -1, and whenever a strength applies, that check is at +1. These should be stated as adjectives such as Clumsy, Indecisive, Deadeye, or Quick Witted.

Attributes begin at 1 each, though a player may reduce a starting attribute to 0 to add 1 point to their creation pool (which in turn may be rolled over to the play pool, as above). Players may increase attributes from their creation pool on a one-for-one basis.

Skills represent a near infinite number of possible traits (not all of which would actually qualify as learned skills). Players can choose to broad in naming a skill (i.e. "medicine") or very specific (i.e. "pediatric surgery"). Broad application skills can work in more instances, but specific skills gain a +2 bonus in situations where they are directly applicable, and a -1 penalty in related areas (using the example above, the character with pediatric surgery can perform every task that the character with medicine can, but will perform most with a -1 penalty. However, should they ever need to do surgery on a child...). When purchasing skills, a player should indicate whether they intend the skill to be broad or specific.

Skills begin at 0, and can be purchased with points from the creation pool on a one-for-one basis.

Characters for most games receive 10 points in their pool at character creation, though this may be modified up or down depending on the scenario.

Combat, injury, and death
This game takes a very loose, very abstract stance on combat. A successful attack causes a character one or two wounds (see below), and a character can withstand a number of wounds equal to their Physicality before falling unconscious. Any successful attack after that can be a killing blow, or put the target into a coma, at the discretion of the attacker. Some types of creatures have more or less Wounds than their Physicality (a house cat might have 2 Physicality to represent its agility, but would likely only be able to sustain 1 Wound before succumbing.)

Generally speaking, a successful attack does 1 Wound to the target, but an attack with a weapon designed to kill (a firearm, a knife or sword, etc) does 2 unless the target is wearing some kind of armor (bullet proof vest, plate mail, whatever), in which case they do only 1. Some weapons may have traits that increase the amount of damage they do, and some armor may have traits that further reduce damage from specific kinds of attacks. Its possible that armor can make someone immune to a certain type of damage (i.e. a person standing behind bulletproof glass has little to fear from handgun fire).

A wounded character can benefit from a Medicine (or similar) check to recover 1 wound, but may not benefit from another such check until they've been wounded again. The GM will determine how much time the Medicine check requires based on the type of wounding (i.e. removing a bullet takes a bit longer and is more involved than applying a band-aid)

Characters recover their entire Wound pool at the beginning of a new story (or chapter)

Sanity and the supernatural
Characters have a number of Sanity points equal to their Psychology, Socialization, and Spirituality attributes combined. These can be diminished in a number of ways; from mundane trauma (PTSD), encounters with the supernatural, violating one's basic humanity, etc. As Trauma accrues, characters slip into the grip of various maladies, acquiring symptoms as determined by the GM, which in addition to role-play, may be applied as penalties against future actions where applicable. A character receives a new malady when they lose one-third of their Sanity (rounded up), and another when they've lost two-thirds (rounded up). A character who loses all of their Sanity loses their mind, with results as determined by the GM (but is effectively out of the story as a player character).

Characters who begin play with supernatural actions such as magic, psychic abilities, and the like, permanently /i] reduce their Sanity Pool by 1 for each rank they have in such a skill. Delving into the world of the supernatural has a way of opening one's mind to unpleasant influences.

Characters can recover Sanity between stories/chapters through extensive therapy, but the player must choose which effect (if any) they'd like. They can opt out of any therapy at all and retain full memory of their previous adventure, and recover no Sanity, or they can recover one-half of their lost Sanity and retain some hazy memories of the traumatic event(s). Finally, they can have full psychotherapy and regain all but 1 point of lost Sanity (which is a permanent loss, their Sanity Pool becomes 1 lower for all purposes, including future losses), but they become convinced that the traumatic events never occurred, or occurred in such a way as to completely remove any sense of trauma from them (for example; a character who was driven mad by being possessed by a ghost and having their body used to kill a friend could recover all but 1 point of Sanity, but they wouldn't be able to recall the ghost at all, and their friend's death would be something they remembered as peaceful and cathartic, no matter how far from reality that memory might be).

Characters who go fully insane CAN benefit from therapy and return for future adventures, using the rules above, but they lose 2 points from their Sanity Pool permanently.

[Neros]

Looks nice and clean.

But how does the players affect the game? So fare it seems a little boring since all the stats are constant and unchanging. Like with combat, you attack with the same number every turn, so the out come seems the same. Or with healing someone, if the difficulty is 4 and the players had a combined... Effect? Of 6, they would beat the difficulty every turn.

Is this suppose to be done with situational modifiers? Like the players explain where/how they want to do the action?

[WildKnight]

Jun 7, 2019 15:11:11 GMT -5 Neros said:

Looks nice and clean.

But how does the players affect the game? So fare it seems a little boring since all the stats are constant and unchanging. Like with combat, you attack with the same number every turn, so the out come seems the same. Or with healing someone, if the difficulty is 4 and the players had a combined... Effect? Of 6, they would beat the difficulty every turn.

Is this suppose to be done with situational modifiers? Like the players explain where/how they want to do the action?

Situational modifiers are mentioned in there (though not by that name specifically), as well as the concept of the "pool", points which the players can use to modify checks if they don't think they've got enough to succeed, and to which they can add by reducing a check if they're reasonably certain they've got more than enough to succeed.

Just like MURPG, the key is that the player doesn't know the difficulty of the actions they're attempting, so they have to choose whether to invest a resource or not, the big difference is that whereas MURPG is meant to be based around spent resources with small flat modifications here and there (which is not in fact that way most people actually play the system here on the board, but that's a separate discussion), this system is based on the assumption that the flat benefit makes up the bulk of most attempts at an action, and the spent resource pool is spent in smaller amounts and recharges much more slowly.

In either case, the core concept is choosing when to spend resources and hoping you've got enough to spend when they really count.

[WildKnight]

(I should say that situational modifiers do work a bit differently, modifying the difficulty instead of modifying the action total, but that's effectively the same thing, its a semantic difference)

[Neros]

Ah, did not notice that. I get easily blinded when I see allot of text that is formatted the same way.

Is there a limit on how much the player game "gamble" their resource and is it possible to work this resource up by say, doing a recreational activity which the player is very good at?

Like all other systems, there should be some examples for the players on what counts as a easy, difficult, heroic and legendary actions, so they will have a general idea of what a situation requires.

[WildKnight]

Jun 9, 2019 8:16:57 GMT -5 Neros said:

Ah, did not notice that. I get easily blinded when I see allot of text that is formatted the same way.

Is there a limit on how much the player game "gamble" their resource and is it possible to work this resource up by say, doing a recreational activity which the player is very good at?

Like all other systems, there should be some examples for the players on what counts as a easy, difficult, heroic and legendary actions, so they will have a general idea of what a situation requires.

There's no limit to what you can spend (or reduce), but you only get to check for consequential things, so no, you can't game the system by insisting on making checks for trivial things and dumping points into your pool that way. Basically, "GM discretion" (the greatest two words in the history of gaming).

I actually disagree completely on your notion of examples. I think "blind systems" are built on the idea that the players are, well, blind, to the difficulty of actions. If you know within one or two points how much you need to succeed, you'll never really be risking much of anything. In this case, subjectivity IS the mechanic

[Neros]

I am afraid that there might be very little for the player to actually to do during the game, especially with someone whom have high skills since most things would automatically succeeded and players are proberbly gonna hoard their resource since there are so few and they are hard to come by.

The character has the experience, not the player, so there are things he would know how "hard" it might be compared to earlier experience. But if there are no examples, then it is the GM's job to describe how hard the current task seems compared to what the character has tried before.

But I do think that it could be worth looking into, even in its current state since much of what I have been thinking is just theories and thoughts.