Game in the Brain

I have many unfinished projects related to gaming but despite that I consider them a part of a learning process *cough *bull$#! +*cough*

Anyway they helped me slowly identify several key concepts over the years. Each iteration refining a good idea and ever time I see away and come back the idea becomes more refined. A different perspective is incredibly helpful for these kinds of puzzles but in the end only we can afford our own attention to look over these works and assess their value.

Hacking Current Systems to Use these Design Philosophies

The thing about these design philosophies they are not exactly System biased, but allow you to tweak systems to your Design Philosophy. Particularly the Design philosophy that tries to crunch less but still capture the key information that you are looking for in a roll. Re-organizing a system so that it makes more symmetric or mnemonic sense!

No Counter-Rolls or Interrupt Rolls

Give a static difficulty value when opposing another PC/NPC drawn from ther  PC/NPC’s relevant abilities. This applies abilities that Interrupt the Player on his turn, only a Static Value is presented during their Course of Action.

Example 1. In 2d6 roll on/below score. A character with an effective skill (after all relevant modifiers) of 9 (83% success) attacks a character with a Score of 10. Defender’s defense (skill/2)-1 is a penalty to the Attacker’s skill: 9-4 is at 5 (28% success). This does not need to statistically be a mirror (83%*8%= 0.07%) because it depends in your design philosophy the value of attack versus defense. In this case its easier to successfully attack vs defense.

Example 1.1. The attacker is targeted by Dazzle Spell or a body guard defending his charge, at skill 6 set to interrupt/disrupt his attack. Instead of the Interruptor rolling, the attacker rolls his regular Attack with the Dazzle spell skill as his penalty. So the same attacker in Example 1 at 5 rolls against -3 which is effectively 2 skill.

The most the target PC/NPC may get is the ability to call a reroll.
Rerolls can be at a bonus to the one doing the reroll, only slightly skewing his odds of failure instead of drastically altering it.

Example 2. In 2d6 roll on/below score. A character who has exceptional skills with complimentary abilities may have a synergistic advantage to cause a Reroll where the PC rerolls at +4 representing a small handicap at success. taking the example 1


Eliminating the Counter Roll or Interrupt Rolls means a lot of time saving and allows players to interrupt each other a lot more without eating up a lot of time as the GM moves back and forth between players. The idea is that during YOUR TURN you are the only one rolling dice/or playing a hand.

GM’s and players attention moving between Targets and Stimuli have a poor cycle rate, but Interruptions are what makes Timing a crucial factor in a game and I want to incentive’s careful timing. Such an incentive also incentives preparation and presence of mind and being mentally present during another players turn, despite not being able to roll.

Increasing the Consequences and Conditions Density per Roll

As much I’m aware of correlation and causation BUT I don’t want to have many wasted rolls. My pet peeve in GURPS is how many the rolls are compartmentalized.

Example is Rolling Defense, then Rolling HT for Stun/Major Wound/Knockback etc…. there are so many separate rolls that I wish it it used Save & Status/Condition based system for damage and fatigue tracking. Details I don’t need is damage or HP exactly. I really liked it when they had Wound Saves in one of the D20 systems.

The problem is that Save&Condition Based system is rewriting all the weapons in GURPS. those are a lot of weapons. When there is an innovation and inpiration, I realize that I might as well implement it in my Homebrew Tinkering System.

So I adopted the Save&Condition based system for this 2d6 system I’m working on. When you roll to attack, Margin of Success modifies your next roll: the Wounding Roll. The wounding roll is where you try to defeat the armor and the toughness of the character and try to inflict a Condition – from scratch to killing blow. Its basically the Symmetrical Opposite of the a Toughness Save.

Example. attack 8, damage 8, defense 8, toughness 6.  The attacker attacks with a 0 margin of success (rolling 4). He then rolls damage 8-3 = 5. lets assume he makes it. His margin of success in damage determines what kind of condition he leaves the defender at. Because of how certain stats affect each condition and rolls, there is a Narrative Causality that informs the GM or Player what factors played a key roll in the circumstance.