Ok, enough combat for now. We'll need to come back to it after other things have evolved a bit more, but I feel like we've got enough of a foundation to work with. That brings us to something that's potentially even stickier: Skills.

Broadly speaking, skills are going to be what distinguishes one dice pool from another. That may seem like a very pedestrian, gamey way to describe them, but in practice it's the purpose they ultimately serve outside of the game space. Inside the game, in the fiction, there's obviously a bit more to it than than, but to someoen watching your game, they're the reason you rolled 5 dice instead of 3.

There are a lot of different ways to handle skills lists. There's the traditional skill list, where you create an actual list of skills which - hopefully - covers everything a character might do and let players buy from it. There's the broadly descriptive model, where players simply take descriptors (like Cop, Soldier or Pastry Chef) and use those values for anything that fall under the auspices of that descriptor. There are hybrid models that use a short list of broad descriptors to be all encompassing. And we've only scratched the surface - we haven't yet considered, stats, pyramids, simple and advance skills, specialties, descriptive vs. narrative pricing, implicit skills and many many other things.

All of which is to say, there's no right way to build a skill system. Use what you're comfortable with and you'll be fine, but if you try to present it as somehow inherently superior to other models, you mostly reveal your own ignorance. I think the skill model I'm going to pursue is clever, and I like it because it does some novel (and some less novel) things, but it's no great apex of skill design.

The system starts from two datapoints: I like cultural skills and the system has been designed so a d6 is a valid value. For the unfamiliar, cultural skills are a bit of an idea riffed from Over the Edge, where you had a 2d6 in anything you should normally be able to do. It's a super practical rule, but when you try to move the OtE system to another setting, you find yourself asking what "normal" is when you start comparing elves and dwarves. With that in mind, I want the starting point of every character to be "[Culture] d6".

Now, it will probably be pretty easy to figure out what that means, and if that was the only skill then it wouldn't really be much of an issue, but obviously we're going to need to start slicing things thinner. And that's where things are going to get a little bit fiddly, since I'm not going to let skills improve.

That sounds draconian on the surface of it, so let me explain a bit. The character's [Culture] skill will never be higher than a d6, but he can learn more specific skills at a higher level. However, rather than making a fixed skill list and letting people buy up it (So one guy might be Swordsman 2d6 and another might be Swordsman 4d6), I'm going to make the scope of skills narrow as they go up. That is, 1d6 skills (of which [Culture] is the only example) are SUPER broad. Any skill at 2d6 is still going to be very broad, but not as broad as culture. As such, Merchant, Soldier, Noble and so on are all valid 2d6 skills.

Each tier narrows things further. At 3d6 might be Musketeer or Doctor. 4d6 might be Fencer and Neurologist. 5d6 narrows down to a specific specialty, like rapier or diseases of the brain.

Obviously, each of these must be built on a foundation. So you need to have Culture to get Soldier, Soldier to get Musketeer and so on. These higher level containers create natural limiters on the flow of skills, so you don't just get "Rapier 5d6" out of the blue.

Now, this is a good start, but there's one more twist to it that I haven't touched yet, and this is the really crazy bit, but it's going to have to wait until next week. :)

Ok, the remaining questions:

1. How many dice should it take to offset a status?
2. Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
3. What order do things happen in?
4. How big an advantage is 1 die?
5. How does this map over to multiple combatants?

These are some of the hard ones.

How many dice should it take to offset a status?
I touched on this earlier, and one commenter gave some useful breakdown, and the short form is that this is a surprisingly tricky question. If this number is fairly low (say, 1 die per) then it makes dice differences more potent because it makes it easier to smooth out any short term advantage that a smaller die pool might have achieved. Not sure if that's good or bad, but it's important to know.

This also plays interestingly into the question of how target numbers are rolled for, because there is some question as to whether and how players can -try- to recover. This is not totally black and white, since I think it might not be unreasonable to say that if you really want to focus on recovering, pick something other than attacking (with a target of 4) and do that.

Lastly, we get some interesting effects if the pricing is inconsistent. Damage could become "stickier" if it becomes more costly to remove (or reduce) a status.

But in that, I think we might have our answer - reduction. If the "cost" is 1 die per 1 step reduction (rather than total removal) then it has two interesting effects. First, it makes it harder to clear the board - totally removing a severe effect - so the more severe the effect, the more implicitly costly it has become. Second, it means that even with mitigation, the accumulation of statuses is dangerous. That is, if you are already inconveniences and harmed (or whatever) then you can't just bump a taken out result down 1 to save yourself - you need to remove it entirely.

There's also some asymmetry to deal with. The steps for inflicting a status are big, so leftover dice are going to be more common than statuses, and that's a problem, since it invites fights that never end except at the very high and very low skill ranges. Some of that will hopefully be mitigated by other things you want to spend overage dice on, but that's a weak prop.

So with all that in mind, I think the right answer is to make the price consistent, but slightly higher - Allow 2 overage dice to reduce (but not remove) a status.

Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
Touched on this yesterday, and for the moment, I'll stick with the target defining things (with the possible optional rule of allowing the attacker to define things with a higher roll).

What order do things happen in?
Ah, now there's a bit of a bear. Initiative.

I cannot think of an initiative system I've ever actually liked. Round robin works ok, so it's all the way up to tolerable. Speedy action based ones (Shadowrun, Deadlands) make me crazily stabby. Shot Clock ones (Feng Shui, Exalted 2nd) always seem promising in theory but always prove more work than they're worth in practice. I could totally cheat the whole issue and go for scene based resolution or some other abstraction to escape the question entirely, but I don't actually enjoy things like that (with the exception of how The Shadow of Yesterday handles it, which I'll probably steal).

The reality is that I'm probably going to be forced to go with some sort of round robin/turn taking model out of brutal necessity, but I don't have to like it, and I can work to avoid things like "Declare up, resolve down" because part of what I'm trying to avoid is the big pow-wow between each round of combat. If action isn't fluid then it's less fun for everyone.

Honestly, initiative is one of those areas where I really prefer GM instinct and dicelessness. That is to say, while numeric initiative totally makes sense when everyone is part of the big picture (as in the case of, say, a tactical minis skirmish) that's not how fights work in fiction or perception. They are lots of miniature stages within the large picture, and we (as audience) move from one to another according to the cadence of the fight. A good GM can use "initiative" as that audience, moving from place to place according to the logic of the fights, not according to some numeric counter. Doing so covers a multitude of sins, allows for characters with different levels of combat focus to get different levels of attention while still keeping the spotlight from lingering too long in one place.

But that's not something you can really write a rule for. That's a problem.

So, honestly, my take on it is to make the official rule very simple - literally just go around the table rather than do any weird rolling or anything - but provide guidelines for initiative as cameraman. Mechanically, we might allow some rules for speed tricks using unused dice or the like, but those are for exceptions - character for whom speed is a schtick. In the absence of that the role of initiative is to keep everyone playing and engaged, not to reward the guy who found the best mechanical abuse of the system.

How big an advantage is 1 die?
Pretty big. In the end, if a 1d advantage means an 80% chance of success, I'll be happy. Obviously, there's a sliding scale to this - 3d should beat 2d more reliably than 5d will beat 4d, but that's my ballpark starting point, with a roughly 10% margin of error. However, I expect abilities (ways to spend dice) will throw this off when I get to them, which is fine.


How does this map over to multiple combatants?
This is the most important question to apply to any combat system. It is not hard to come up with a brilliant, clever, intricate system for handling 1-on-1 fights which utterly fails to account for multiple actors. Some of them try to apply duct tape solutions, like trying to make everything into chained sets of duels or aggregating opposition, but you can see the seams when that happens.

There's also an important genre consideration to how numbers work. I hate to invoke realism, but I'll do so in this very broad context - being outnumbered sucks. One man can absolutely fight a larger number of opponents, but doing so is dependent on a lot of factors, most of them involving finding a way to keep them all from coming at him at the same time. This is important, not because of how you model tactics, but because it's very important to _society_. It's what makes armies and police and many other things work. It also matters to style. The number of people one guy can fight speaks directly to the genre of things. In a gritty setting, even badass will run from groups of lesser adversaries, but in very cinematic settings, those adversaries are probably mooks, and can be easily dispensed with.

I'm definitely looking to avoid mook rules, though that's a whole other discussion of it's own. They're easy to add if a specific genre demands it, but I don't want them as a baseline. I like ganging up to be dangerous because of the aforementioned social element (and, in fact, this sentiment is all over the Fate 2 combat rules) but I think I may have implicitly handled that already. Since status mitigation depends on excess dice, the simple reality is that multiple opponents are going to burn through your dice in no time at all, even if they're not hugely dangerous individually. That's just a gut answer for now, but I think it will do.

Ok, getting into some of the nitty gritty here, so let's review.

The idea so far is that combatants will have die pools of D6's. When they go after someone in a fight, they are trying to hit a fixed target number, with a result as follows:

4 - Inconvenienced
7 - Harmed (possibly handicapped. Maybe another term)
13 - Taken Out

These are statuses which map to in-fiction effects, and they also accumulate, so an inconvenienced character who is inconvenienced again becomes harmed.

Statuses can be changed by spending unused dice. Unused dice are dice which have been rolled, but which were not necessary to hit the target number. If, for example, you rolled 4,3,3 then you can hit a 7 with 1 unused die (or a 4 with 2 unused dice) which you can use for stuff. Much of the stuff is currently undefined (and is expected to be a place for mechanical hooks) but specifically, they can be spent to "downgrade" statuses.

With that in mind, I'm looking down the barrel of the following questions:

1. Does the attacker choose the target number he's going for, or does he simply take the result?
2. When a status "rolls up" does the previous status remain? That is, if a second inconvenience becomes harm, is the target now inconvenienced and harmed, or just harmed?
3. Is there an option to respond to a Taken Out result?
4. Are statuses the only possible outcome, or are they simply the non-specific outcome? That is, is a disarm a _form_ of harm, or something with a difficulty equivalent to harm (because it has a similar impact but with player-directed outcome)
5. Are 3 statuses enough? Do we need 4?
6. How many dice should it take to offset a status?
7. Who gets to say what form the status/result takes in the fiction?
8. What order to things happen in?
9. How big an advantage is 1 die?
10. How does this map over to multiple combatants?

That's a lot. Enough to tempt me to just accept a standard injury model and move on, but I'm kind of dumb that way, so let's press on and work through these, though it may take a while.

1. Does the attacker choose the target number he's going for, or does he simply take the result?

Ok, two options: decide before you roll (declare intent) or declare after you roll ( describe outcome). The argument for post-roll is that the assumption is that every attack is an attempt to finish the fight. It also opens up an interesting decision-point of allowing the attack to choose to get a lesser outcome in order to keep more unused dice. That is, if you rolled 4,1,1,1 then you might feel better off taking the 4 and three unused dice (which probably need a cool name) than taking the 7 with no remaining budget.

The argument for a pre-roll decision is that it adds a little more strategy to the mix. It makes risk-taking a bit more of a calculated gamble, and it does _not_ require any post-roll decisionmaking. That's kind of a big deal, since post-roll decisions are a big source of friction - you totally don't want a player sitting there deciding if he really wants that 7 or those unused dice on a borderline case.

So, there's a clear priority conflict here with no clear answer. I think either option could work well, so it's really a matter of taste, style and (of course) subsequent testing to see which works. It's one of those situatiosn where you make a decision, but put a pin in it to come back to. With that in mind, I'm going to go with decision before the roll because I think it will be easier to test whether that feels frustrating than it will be to test if it's what people want.




2. When a status "rolls up" does the previous status remain? That is, if a second inconvenience becomes harm, is the target now inconvenienced and harmed, or just harmed?
The default assumption in most systems would be that the effects stack - that is, that you would now be inconvenienced and harmed. I'm inclined to buck that trend, at least while we have such a short list of statues, because it effectively lengthens the "damage track". This might prove to be too much bookkeeping in the end, but it's what I want to try for now.


3. Is there an option to respond to a Taken Out result?
I feel like there should be, but the real answer to this can be found in the question of sequencing. If all action is simultaneous, then this is easy to implement - just let overage dice be used immediately to mitigate an effect. Unfortunately, simultaneous action has its own drawbacks, so this question needs to be set aside until we answer the question of order of events.

4. Are statuses the only possible outcome, or are they simply the non-specific outcome? That is, is a disarm a _form_ of harm, or something with a difficulty equivalent to harm (because it has a similar impact but with player-directed outcome)
I'm strongly inclined to the latter, and as I think about it, I think the rubric may be simple. Outcomes are defined by the attacker, harm by the defender. That means that the fiction of being taken out stays firmly in the hands of the player, which is a plus. It also works nicely with the idea of hitting set difficulties, and it also supports players who are very descriptive as well as those who are not.

Curiously, this also suggests an interesting extension of the outcome ladder, which might be a little meta, but kind of resonates with me. To inflict harm AND describe it, you must hit the next target up. That is, the target for taking someone out in the way YOU want is 19. It means the "one shot kill" still exists as a possibility when dealing with very skilled opponents, but it's rare. That has some weird interplay with things when the target is already hurt, so I'll need ot think about it some more, but if nothing else it feels like a good optional rule.


5. Are 3 statuses enough? Do we need 4?
Dunno yet. But the answer to that previous question may prove a suitable compromise.



Ok, enough for today. We'll run through 6-10 tomorrow.

OK, so the basic non-fight component of a conflict is this: take a swing, beat a 4, if successful, the other guy is taken out.

(I like “taken out” as a euphemism because it underscores that all ways of taking someone out of a fight are roughly equal – unconsciousness, death, getting tossed overboard and the like all fall into the same bucket, and it leaves the exact color and fiction flexible. It also leaves a hook in place later to allow players to offer their own taken out outcomes if you want to avoid death in interesting ways, but that’s a matter to think about later.)

Once we’re in an actual fight, we don’t want things to be quite so quick as all that, but we still want to respect the 4+ success rule. We could go for a numeric system (hit points or the like) but let’s think of this in terms of statuses – we have this idea that a good enough roll can result in being taken out, what else might happen as a result of a roll?

Suppose that there are two other results – inconvenienced and harmed. Inconvenienced means that the other side has gotten some transitory advantage - they’ve knocked you back, rung your bell, seized the high ground or whatever. Harm is more palpable – it’s a disarm, an injury or some other major setback. And, of course, the third result (taken out) has already been recovered.

So, at their baseline, let’s map these as follows:

4 – Inconvenience
7 – Harm
13 – Taken Out

Now, that maps to our difficulties, but it raises some immediate questions. Does it mean that you need at least a 3d pool to be able to win a fight? And what happens when two people of high skill go at each other? Do they both just die? Obviously, we need to address these issues.

Now, the first is pretty straightforward, and we’ll do something that has been done in many other systems and just have damage “roll up”. That is to say, if you inconvenience someone who is already inconvenienced, they are now harmed. If you inconvenience someone who is already harmed and inconvenienced, then they’re taken out. Pretty simple. It allows high skills to get decisive results while allowing unskilled combatants to have sloppy, ugly fights that end badly.

Still brutal, though, especially since there’s no idea of defense. Skill won’t keep you standing any longer, and that’s problematic.

The fix for this is tied into how I view the statuses. Note that it would be normal to put a checkbox next to each status an fill them in over the course of a fight, but that’s more static than I like. I actually don’t want them to be static, I want them to come and go – not just inconveniences (which are already often tenuous in games like Fate) but harm and maybe even taken out. This means that, at a high level, I want people to be able to improve their status as they play, so that’s another axis of action. Sometimes it will be a dull axis (shrugging off an injury) and sometimes it’ll be flashy (getting out of a tight corner) but the bottom line is that status can fluctuate over the course of a fight.

(Saying that, my gut is suggesting we need a 4th status, just so there’s more room for things to slide. That may be true, but I’ll sideline that concern for now. If I figure out a good mechanic for this, then one good test for it will be expanding the status list).

So how should we implement this? My first thought is to make it something you can spend extra dice on (that is, for those who don’t recall, dice that weren’t needed to hit the target number). This has an interesting upshot because it provides a double incentive to go for inconveniences and harm rather than KO’s, because you’re more likely to have extra dice left, at least in theory. Of course, the fact that hitting three “4s” may be easier than hitting one 13 may also play into that. This also provides an interesting tool for NPC behavior, since the target number an NPC aims for speaks directly to their tactics, and can be a solid part of an NPC writeup.

Anyway, at the simplest you could just say that 1 extra die can reduce things by one “step”, so a hurt can become an inconvenience for 1 die, or go away entirely for 2 dice. That’s a good baseline, but it might be too easy. This is something to test, but I’d absolutely want to fiddle with different costs, including a higher base (say, 2 dice per step), or a sliding scale (1 for inconvenience, 2 for harm, 3 for taken out if apt – or perhaps the reverse!) but the idea is solid. It just leaves two real questions – how it interacts with a taken out result, and how it sequences. Those are pretty fiddly bits, so they’re best left for tomorrow.