Very interesting. A ‘Savage Worlds’ stepped dice mechanic used to power a narrative system. My experience of RPGs is, one might say, deep but narrow and I am very far from having anything like the grasp of mechanics and their implications that many people in the hobby possess (including, clearly, yourself). So take the following rambling observations in that spirit of amateurishness bordering on ineptitude.
I think something very like this could work for a supers game (although I am by now almost convinced that only a truly systemless narrative game can work in a genre where any mechanical approach has to grapple with an enormous array of potentially vastly different effects of dizzyingly various magnitude).
Personally, I’d do away with the d10 ‘fighting’ mechanic, as it seems to run counter to the ethos of a game where characters can adopt a number of approaches to problem solving. Saying ‘all characters can fight with equal competence’ presumes that all players want to play characters that can fight stuff when, surely, the point of such a system is to allow for other solutions than “I hit it with my axe”? If that’s the only meaningful option, who cares if you do it ‘quickly’ or ‘precisely’? I accept that this is offset somewhat by preserving the d12 as a ‘non combat’ dice, but I chafe against any game that prioritises hitting something with a lump of metal. It’s the old problem of things starting to look like nails when the most readily available tool is a hammer. In this context (unless I missed it) there seems to no ‘spirit’ or adverb that deals with social challenges or encounters. This seems a peculiar omission.
On the suggestion of pairing adjectives with adverbs I am in two minds. On the one hand, I agree that it is mechanically elegant. But I also think I’d be chary of a system that required adverb A to be chosen in order to have any meaningful impact on an encounter where the opposition possesses adjective Z (although I’m not suggesting that this is what you are implying). This could end up feeling too contrived or schematised, which is not necessarily the ideal mechanical tone one is aiming for in a narrative game. My concern would be that the tighter the correlation between adverb and adjective, the greater the possibility that players set about collecting a series of formal matching terms as a meta game of ‘snap’.
One solution might be to increase the variables by expanding the number of available adverbs - assigning each ‘Spirit’ it’s own list of appropriate but varied words, and to allow that a given suite of adverbs drawn from any ‘Spirit’ list is more or less effective against an opponent possessed of some collection of particular adjectives. Necessarily this will lead to some ‘fuzzy edges’ where player ingenuity bumps up against GM interpretation, but it was ever thus in rules lite narrative systems. This could be offset somewhat by limiting the number of possible adjectives under the bonnet but refraining from using them as mechanical terms of art in play. Thus an opponent might be ‘slow’ and so additionally susceptible to any adverbial action that indicates speed and agility, with actions taken using those adverbs having a greater impact (whether in terms of damage inflicted or avoided), but the GM never employs the word ‘slow’ as a rules term, only using synonymous language to allow the players to infer the requisite tactical approach.
I’ve spent so long typing this on a footling iPad virtual keyboard and editing as I go that I’ve now clean forgotten what the system has to say about determining success beyond the implication that the number of adverbs sort of determines the scale of achievement as well as the manner of it. So I hope you’ll forgive me if what follows is stunningly irrelevant. I’m all for narrative systems that adopt a presumption of character success but, from memory, this seems to be an area where the rules are a little too lite. Once you introduce maths rocks, the inevitable pull is towards metrics and measurement. The most obvious change would be to require X successes to achieve objective Y, with the employment of appropriate adverbs adding more successes to the total as already indicated by the dice. This is potentially useful because, in combat, successes can be a measure of damage but, in social encounters, it can serve as a metric for performance or plausibility or what have you, while a magic (or superpowers) system could be devised by which a number of successes convert to the magnitude of the effect created.
I think if one set out to create a system that seeks to obviate the potential for GMs to be dicks, one would drive oneself mad and I wouldn’t waste a minute trying to create anything using that criteria.
Very interesting. A ‘Savage Worlds’ stepped dice mechanic used to power a narrative system. My experience of RPGs is, one might say, deep but narrow and I am very far from having anything like the grasp of mechanics and their implications that many people in the hobby possess (including, clearly, yourself). So take the following rambling observations in that spirit of amateurishness bordering on ineptitude.
I think something very like this could work for a supers game (although I am by now almost convinced that only a truly systemless narrative game can work in a genre where any mechanical approach has to grapple with an enormous array of potentially vastly different effects of dizzyingly various magnitude).
Personally, I’d do away with the d10 ‘fighting’ mechanic, as it seems to run counter to the ethos of a game where characters can adopt a number of approaches to problem solving. Saying ‘all characters can fight with equal competence’ presumes that all players want to play characters that can fight stuff when, surely, the point of such a system is to allow for other solutions than “I hit it with my axe”? If that’s the only meaningful option, who cares if you do it ‘quickly’ or ‘precisely’? I accept that this is offset somewhat by preserving the d12 as a ‘non combat’ dice, but I chafe against any game that prioritises hitting something with a lump of metal. It’s the old problem of things starting to look like nails when the most readily available tool is a hammer. In this context (unless I missed it) there seems to no ‘spirit’ or adverb that deals with social challenges or encounters. This seems a peculiar omission.
On the suggestion of pairing adjectives with adverbs I am in two minds. On the one hand, I agree that it is mechanically elegant. But I also think I’d be chary of a system that required adverb A to be chosen in order to have any meaningful impact on an encounter where the opposition possesses adjective Z (although I’m not suggesting that this is what you are implying). This could end up feeling too contrived or schematised, which is not necessarily the ideal mechanical tone one is aiming for in a narrative game. My concern would be that the tighter the correlation between adverb and adjective, the greater the possibility that players set about collecting a series of formal matching terms as a meta game of ‘snap’.
One solution might be to increase the variables by expanding the number of available adverbs - assigning each ‘Spirit’ it’s own list of appropriate but varied words, and to allow that a given suite of adverbs drawn from any ‘Spirit’ list is more or less effective against an opponent possessed of some collection of particular adjectives. Necessarily this will lead to some ‘fuzzy edges’ where player ingenuity bumps up against GM interpretation, but it was ever thus in rules lite narrative systems. This could be offset somewhat by limiting the number of possible adjectives under the bonnet but refraining from using them as mechanical terms of art in play. Thus an opponent might be ‘slow’ and so additionally susceptible to any adverbial action that indicates speed and agility, with actions taken using those adverbs having a greater impact (whether in terms of damage inflicted or avoided), but the GM never employs the word ‘slow’ as a rules term, only using synonymous language to allow the players to infer the requisite tactical approach.
I’ve spent so long typing this on a footling iPad virtual keyboard and editing as I go that I’ve now clean forgotten what the system has to say about determining success beyond the implication that the number of adverbs sort of determines the scale of achievement as well as the manner of it. So I hope you’ll forgive me if what follows is stunningly irrelevant. I’m all for narrative systems that adopt a presumption of character success but, from memory, this seems to be an area where the rules are a little too lite. Once you introduce maths rocks, the inevitable pull is towards metrics and measurement. The most obvious change would be to require X successes to achieve objective Y, with the employment of appropriate adverbs adding more successes to the total as already indicated by the dice. This is potentially useful because, in combat, successes can be a measure of damage but, in social encounters, it can serve as a metric for performance or plausibility or what have you, while a magic (or superpowers) system could be devised by which a number of successes convert to the magnitude of the effect created.
I think if one set out to create a system that seeks to obviate the potential for GMs to be dicks, one would drive oneself mad and I wouldn’t waste a minute trying to create anything using that criteria.