Great resource for 5E DMs

So, a redditor going by fest- has created a really nifty tool for quickly threshing out monsters for 5th Edition, called CritterDB. It won instant points with me for using “critter” as a generic reference for what 5E calls “creatures”, since that’s one of my own habits.

Some caveats:

  • You cannot (yet) set an arbitrary size for the hit die; it will always use the default hit die size for the creature’s size class. You might have to hit “save and continue” after changing the critter size to update the hit dice.
  • It treats senses, vulnerabilities, etc., as individual items, not raw text, so you have to hit enter after typing, say, Darkvision 60′ in order to get it to save the value.
  • The “specific value” field for saving throw/skill bonuses is currently ignored if you try to set it to 0, since this registers the same as not having any value set.
  • It has no CR calculation/estimation capabilities, so you’ll still have to do that yourself according to the table on page 274 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

It does have some neat features, though. There’s a macro for quickly generating correctly formatted attacks, it auto-generates a stat block for the critter, will include the necessary traits if you specify a specific humanoid race, and you can copy a stat block you’ve already created. This latter feature is hugely useful for making variant monsters; just enter a generic critter from the SRD like “kobold” or “zombie” or “commoner” into your bestiary and then make and edit copies as needed and you can have fast zombies, strong zombies, legless zombies, etc. It also lets you create multiple bestiaries (folders) for organizational purposes.

While testing it out, I went ahead and made a stat block for the first custom monster I threw at my players in 5E, the Death Shrieker:

death shrieker

Magic Items (D&D 5E)

The following three magic items are intended for use in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. They are presented here as a preview of my upcoming supplement, Armoury of Enchantment, which will be added to my other titles currently available on the DMs Guild.

Footwear of the Windrunner

Wondrous item, very rare

These boots or sandals allow the wearer to run—not walk, not stand, but run—on thin air. They seem ordinary when worn, until the wearer takes the Dash action. Doing so gives the wearer the ability to run on thin air. Ascending by 1 foot requires an additional foot of movement, descending is treated as normal movement. The wearer falls if knocked prone, or at the start of their turn if they do not immediately take the Dash action again. If the wearer jumps while wearing these shoes, a DC 15 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check is required to avoid falling at the end of the jump.

Potion of Cosmic Revelation

Potion, rare

Also known as the elixir of the third eye or the potion of mind opening, this potion bestows upon any creature who drinks it the effects of the contact other plane spell, some 2d4 minutes after it is imbibed. The potion renders the drinker catatonic (unconscious, for all purposes except the spell) for the duration of the spell (1 minute). A creature who is not seated when the effect hits falls prone.

If the drinker does not have any 5th level spell slots, the saving throw called for by the spell is made with disadvantage, but even on a failed save the drinker can ask 1d4 questions before taking the damage and succumbing to the mind-shattering effects of the spell.

Sapphire Bird Ring

Ring, very rare

The first sapphire bird ring was created by a high elf wizard of an age long past. This wizard, whose name and identity have not been lost, was known for possessing an unusual reverence for the beautiful things of nature, even for an elf.

This ring bears a device that resembles a bird with two exquisitely cut sapphires for eyes. With a mental command and an action, one or both sapphires can be ejected from the ring, at which point they turn into a crystalline construct resembling a bluebird. Use the statistics for a raven, minus the mimicry ability, but the creature is a construct, not a beast, and has only 1 hp. The birds glow with an inner light, shedding bright light in a 10 foot radius and dim light for another 10 feet. If one of the birds takes any damage, it shatters into brittle blue glass immediately. If a bird is destroyed, its gem will reappear on the ring after 1d6+1 days. Until that time, it cannot be re-summoned.

While they exist, the bluebirds are bound to the ringbearer can communicate with, control, and see through the senses of either bird as if it were a familiar, (as described under the find familiar spell), though the birds cannot deliver spells or use the Help action. The wearer may also cast the animal messenger spell at-will, using one of the birds. The birds always return unerringly to the ring after delivering their message.

A bird created by the ring cannot be banished as a familiar would be. If touched with the ring, as an action a bluebird can be turned back into a gemstone, which rejoins with the ring.

Feats, marketing strategy, and more.

So, my first D&D supplements have been doing pretty well. In the ten days or so since the first one came out, I’ve had over $100 gross sales (of which I net half). Not gangbusters, but nothing to sneeze at. Considering that they’re each aimed at players of a single class, and neither one is exactly the class most starved for options, and that I’m an unknown to most players who is charging $5 for ~20 pages of options, I think it’s respectable.

I’m not willing to compromise on the price as I know what my products are worth, but I figured I need an “entry level” purchase to establish my bona fides and pique people’s interest. Thus, I took a loose collection of homebrew feats I’ve been working on (including the few in my warlock and cleric books) and put them together into a collection of 36 new feats called “Feats of Heroism“, which I’m selling for a crisp electronic dollar.

The number’s not an accident. Pretty much since the DMs Guild opened, there’s been a set of 18 feats for a dollar in the top 5 products. I’ve read them. They’re not bad, but they’re not great. They just have the virtue of being something everybody has wanted more of (feats), being cheap, and having been released ahead of most of the pack.

I humbly believe that my feat collection is the better value, and would be at twice the price. I don’t know what kind of numbers it would have to pull to knock the 18 feats off the front page, or if the steady release of more flavorful and well-thought out material is just going to see packets of feats fall in the rankings. But I’m sure it’ll sell more easily to more strangers than my cleric or warlock books will, and that it represents my game design work well enough that I’ll get more people looking at my more expensive offerings.

This is technically my published thing for the week, as I am charging money for it, but I’m going to continue working on another D&D-related release for the end of the week, which will be free (or rather, pay what you will): Heroic Houserules, a pamphlet that contains my house rules for creating emphasizing the heroic, larger-than-life aspects of the game (and incidentally pumping up some of the less effectual “ribbon” abilities, like the paladin’s Divine Sense and the ranger’s Primeval Awareness). This will serve a similar purpose to the feat manual of acting as an introduction to players unfamiliar with my work.

After that, I think I’m going to give the D&D game design stuff a rest for a bit. Part of the reason I’ve had so much material to release in those ares is it’s been building up for longer than there’s been an official outlet for it.

Warlocks of Other Patrons (D&D 5E)

Available now through the DMs Guild, Warlocks of Other Patrons is a brilliant resource for taking the warlock class to new and exciting places. Including new patrons, new pact boons, new cantrips to make melee-focused “bladelocks” more viable, and new invocations and backgrounds to add a dash of creature comfort and worldly riches to your warlock’s existence, this is a devil of a deal at $4.99.

New patrons include the Balance, the Living Dead, the Primal Spirits, and the Stars. The latter two in particular are designed to bring options and flavor from 4E explicitly into the realm of 5E. New pact boons include a divination-focused the Pact of the Eye, an immortality-oriented Pact of the Soul Keeper, and a second familiar/companion pact, Pact of the Guiding Spirit.

One of the meta goals for this release is to broaden the space occupied by the warlock in the same way that Clerics of Lesser Domains did for that class. Hence, there are more options for melee warlocks, summoning warlocks, even healing warlocks, and more non-combat/roleplay oriented options. You can use the backgrounds Astrologer, Diabolist, or Spirit Medium to represent the means by which you made your pact, or backgrounds like Cursed, Fortune’s Favorite, and Well-Kept to represent the results.

Get it today!

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/174328/Warlocks-of-Other-Patrons

Clerics of Lesser Domains (D&D 5E)

Now available through the DMs Guild, Clerics of Lesser Domains is a brand-new 23-page manual of material for players of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Six new domains (Beauty, Illumination, Language, Twilight, Winter, and Youth), four new backgrounds (Beggar, Prophet, Templar, and Zealot), and five new feats (Anointer, Divine Channel, Guiding Spirit, Oracle, and Slayer) allow you to create a functional cleric who serves a less “adventurer-conventional” deity or add a little sacred or supernatural flair to any character. Play a haughty and hauntingly pretty priest of a goddess of love and beauty, a gentle twilit harvester of souls, the mischievous favorite child of a deity of youth, or many other character concepts.

Costing less than $1 per new sub-class, this booklet is a steal at $4.99 even before you get to the optional system of story-rich and flavorful blessings for clerics to give, with three unique blessings for every officially published domain plus the six in this book. After all, what’s the good of being a cleric of beauty if you can’t bless a child with good looks?

Get it today, get it here: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/173314/Clerics-of-Lesser-Domains

AWW: More About Magic

So, in a previous post I described the use of magic as having three parts: raise the energy, directing it, and dismissing it.

One thing about the three part process is that I’ve had it in my mind—especially since realizing yesterday that there’s no reason not to let quality levels stack—that different things would give bonuses to different parts of the process. So you could be someone who can raise magic at the drop of a hat but isn’t so good at directing it, or someone who’s a pro at directing it but can’t always get it to go.

Today, as I was writing out the description for the personal quality of Fury and the things that fall within its scope, it occurred to me that it could be applied to raising certain types of magic, such as Pyromancy. I started to think about how to quantify exactly what falls under Fury, and whether other qualities should have similar notes, like Tranquility for Hydromancy.

And then I realized that I had an opportunity here both for another way of customizing characters and a way of making the three-step magic system more interesting.

To wit: make it so that instead of raising magic having anything to do with how powerful/skilled you are at magic, and instead tie it to a personal quality, of your choice.

Do you raise magic through sheer force of Presence or Willpower? Elaborate hand gestures (Dexterity)? Is it connected to your Faith? Your Knowledge of lost arts? Your Intuition of other realms? Your Perception of the natural world?

Some people reading along at home but not reading and digesting every game design post I make are going, “Well, everyone will just pick their best stat.”

And sure they will. But that misses the point that these aren’t stats, they’re qualities a character either has in heroic proportion or doesn’t. A newly created character has usually one or at best two of them, and if you’re also wielding magic, it’s going to be one. Since your magic-raising attribute is always going to be at the same level no matter what you pick, you have no reason not to pick something that makes a pleasing combination for you or fits your character concept: Fury and Pyromancy. Tranquility and Hydromancy. Intimidation and Necromancy. Charm or Deception and Summoning. Dexterity and Conjuring. Or whatever fits your character concept.

People who followed the circa 2013 development version (which had a true attribute system) might remember that I toyed with the idea of substituting other specific attributes for the Magic attribute in a similar fashion, though that was tying specific attributes to specific forms of magic.

The best part of this is it can be used to inform the next step in magic use, by helping inform what exactly happens if you badly botch the control: your rage runs uncheck, your calm is disturbed, the spirits you’ve coerced rebel, et cetera. It could also have other wrinkles, as a character who uses Dexterity would have to have their hands free to raise magic effectively

I’m not 100% sure how dismissal will work, in terms of whether it will be a function of your magic-raising quality, the magic quality you’re using itself, or both. Actually, both might be the way to go, as that would make dismissal by default the easiest part to do (because an improvement to either of the preceding steps would improve it)… which, I don’t know if I’d call that realistic, inasmuch as the concept applies, but in terms of magic remaining a viable game option, I feel like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice scenario has got to be one of the rarer failure states. Even allowing that the guidelines as written call for un-dismissed magic to lash out once before dispersing into the environment most of the time, if every time you used magic to do something, something bad happened immediately afterwards, how often would you do magic? There’s “magic always a price” and then there’s “the universe clearly doesn’t want you to do this thing”.

Actually, now that I’ve thought about it, I think the raising quality—which I will now call the control quality—will be part of the whole process.

To raise magic, you use the control quality; e.g., Dexterity.

Once the magic is present, you use the power quality (e.g., Aeromancy) to make it do things.

Note that “control” refers to control over the magic itself, not the precision with which the magic performs the duties you direct it to. That’s still a function of power. Power is your ability to accomplish your will through magic; control is your ability to keep the magic from doing anything else.

Each time that you do something significant with the magic or suffer an attack or something that might disrupt your concentration, you use the control quality to keep a rein on the magic. Failure doesn’t mean the magic runs rampant, just that it does something you didn’t count on.

 

With this added complication, I think I’m going to do away with the idea of a dismissal roll in general cases… it’ll only be a thing if you’ve 1) previously lost control of your magic and 2) didn’t let the magic go immediately after the loss of control. The difficulty of the dismissal roll will be based on the number of control slips you had, which will also be the number of rampaging “things” the magic will do on its way out of the world.

In addition to making magic interesting and counteracting its basic “do anything” nature with added danger of complications, this also prevents any character from being *just* a wizard of any description. They’ll all have some other defining trait that is integral to their character concept. It also distinguishes between power and control (an important distinction to me) without having to monopolize a magic-using character’s resources by taking up two-thirds of the initial slots, insofar as any personal quality stands on its own as a useful adventuring asset apart from magic. If your control comes from Willpower, you’ll have all the other benefits of willpower. If your control comes from Knowledge, you’ll still have approximate knowledge of many things.

Perhaps most interesting is the ability to instantly “flavor” magic as divine rather than arcane by attaching it to a personal quality like honor, faith, or sanctity.

AWW: The KISS of Death

If there’s any design goal I have a hard time sticking to, it’s the desire to keep things simple. I’m too much in love with intricacy as an ideal, and I have such a good head for complex systems that I have a hard time realizing when I’ve crossed the line from “elegant simplicity” to “Wile E. Coyote style schematics”.

The current core mechanic of AWW in a nutshell is: when you try to do something that requires a roll, you figure out which of your qualities covers it and roll a number of additional dice equal to its level. Simple, right? Higher level equals appreciably higher chance of success without changing the range of target numbers/difficulties you can interact with.

But in the interest of keeping things on an even keel, I’ve been working with the idea that you can only have one quality applied to a problem at a time. If you have similar/overlapping qualities (like the profession/skill set quality Expert Treasure Hunter and the personal attribute quality Dexterity), you pick the one that has the higher level.

My thinking was that this would help encourage players to diversify their abilities more (in the sense of not always looking for the qualities that could cover the same thing) and also keep the failure rate at a level where it still has some significance, by cutting down on mammoth dice pools.

But at the same time I have kept thinking, “But surely you should have some advantage to being a more dexterous-than-usual thief treasure hunter,” and so, accordingly, I have been working out different mechanisms for synergy bonuses and things, all of which have the common feature of changing the core mechanic away from “one fairly simple rule for just about everything with very little to remember”.

So then I started thinking about things from a different angle.

First, I considered what the system I’m designing is supposed to do, vs. what it would reward.

If you can only apply your *best* quality for a certain action, this actually motivates you to *not* diversify your abilities… every time you have a choice between adding another quality or taking a level of an existing one, the mechanically superior choice is to take a level of the existing one.

More, only allowing you to use a single quality the idea that your qualities are not just discrete special abilities but integral components that blend together to create your character. If you have Dexterity, Expert Treasure Hunter, and Perception as your three starting qualities, the “pick your best one” leaves being dexterous and perceptive off to the side of being good at collecting valuable things that don’t belong to you.

Allowing you to combine Perception and ETH when you’re searching for traps or hidden compartments and Dexterity and ETH when you’re trying to disarm said traps or open said compartments allows them to all work together. You’re better at spotting non-treasure-hunting related things than the average person, but noticeably better than that at spotting the stuff you’re trained to spot. This makes your Perception different in focus than someone with, say, Ranger and Perception.

But what about the game balance concern? Doesn’t adding more dice to the pool quickly make failure negligible even at the maximum possible difficulty of 6 (1/6 success rate with 1 die)?

I actually sat down and did the math. If you have a pool of 4 dice (1 by default, plus 1 for each of 3 qualities), you’ll still fail just under 50% of the time at maximum difficulty. Since average difficulty (4) has a 50% failure rate for a character of no particular ability, that works out pretty slick.

You’d have to get a grand total of 17 dice for the failure rate to fall below 5%, which is what “automatic fail on 1” establishes as the lowest possible failure chance in d20-type systems.

And if too-low failure rates were a problem at higher levels, it wouldn’t really matter if players were getting their dice from one outrageously high quality or from multitudes. Any dice cap rule could easily apply regardless of the source.

Plus, no matter how low the failure rate gets, the whole point of the fate system is to add a random element of “wildness” that is not affected by skill or level. The idea of “even if you do everything right, things can still go against you” is present by the fate system, which makes even automatic success not that big a deal.

The other area where I’ve been having to fight my tendency towards feature creep/system bloat is the definition of the qualities. Again, the idea is that qualities, rather than being special abilities or collections of special abilities, are just a description of the quality’s “scope”, the “this is what this is about, these are the kinds of things it’s good for, you might use it for this”, with actual rules being very thin on the ground.

The problem I run into is I think about “extra stuff” that might be useful to a character with that quality and being tempted to put it in as a special ability. For a while I was trying to put one limited-use special ability on each quality, because some of them seemed to be super crying out for such a thing and so the balanced thing to do would be to give all of them one.

This actually steps on more than one of my design guidelines, though.

First, limited use special abilities should be an optional layer of complexity. No character has them if the player doesn’t want them, and you never have more than you want. Tying every quality to a limited use ability means you have a minimum of three of them at chargen, and they just accumulate from there irrespective of whether you want them.

Second, it means that unless you’ve got a mind for rules, you absolutely need to have more on your character sheet than the name of the Quality. Don’t get me wrong, I expect people to put some shorthand on some of them, particularly if the name is unfamiliar or used in an unfamiliar context, but an actual special ability? With mechanics to remember, even fairly abstract ones? And a limited number of uses to keep track of?

(The actual limited use ability mechanic the game uses is called Gimmicks, and they are equivalent in character resource terms to a character piece that gives a smaller static benefit. If you like resource management and having “big guns” to pull out when the going gets tough, you can use them. But you don’t have to.)

AWW: Second Nature

So, previous Largely Finished But Unworkable Iteration of A Wilder World represented the concept usually referred to as race in fantasy RPGs by the use of Folk Qualities, which were the same as any other character-defining Character Quality (the basic building block of character concept in AWW) in complexity and impact, just with some special rules regarding things like prerequisites. The basic rule was that you had to take one Folk Quality, but you could take more than one.

There were a few problems with this.

First, there was the exceptions. Some Character Qualities weren’t quite folk types, but could take the place of one: Automaton, Undead, etc. You could have those alongside a Folk Quality to be something a zombie elf or a steam-driven dwarf, but you could also *just* be an Automaton or an Undead. The reason they weren’t just Folk Qualities was one part that they didn’t have all the same external pieces to hook into, and one part that there’s a connotation to “Folk Quality” that doesn’t apply if you don’t have a folk.

Second, making folk type occupy the same level of character resource as any other quality and making every character have one means either you reduce the amount of component pieces you have to build your character or you increase the power and complexity of all characters at chargen by the magnitude of one major piece.

Third, this system forced all the myriad different types of people/beings you could play as to be defined at not just the same power level but the same approximate complexity and level. Do you know how hard it is to describe humans and halflings in terms of special abilities that look like a parity choice alongside semi-humanoid snakes and arachnids? It means making the simplest (from a human’s point of view) character types more complicated than they need to be, and trying to make the more complicated (ditto) ones simpler.

The current AWW build has you picking three qualities at level one, with a bit more of a structured approach. The recommendation is you pick one outstanding personal attribute (from a long list… we’re not talking STR/DEX/CON/INT/WIS/CHA but more like Charm, Honor, Fury, Strength, Tranquility, Valor, Perception, Intuition, Valor, Cowardice, Dexterity, Empathy, Presence, Willpower, Ingenuity, Knowledge, and many more) to represent your character’s heroic potential, one character type/skillset quality (with things like Alchemist, Fool, and Scholar alongside the more traditional choices like Bard, Druid, Expert Treasure Hunter, and Warrior) to represent your heroic archetype, and one from any category including those ones, signature gear, magical ability, etc. to represent your heroic edge.

As previously described, those qualities are all less a collection of concrete special abilities and more a descriptive rundown of “So here’s what this makes you good at.”/”Here’s what this lets you do.”

The “Folk Quality” concept does not exist. Instead, separately from your three foundational heroic qualities, you pick one Nature. This includes the standard fantasy folk types and the unique ones created for the A Wilder World setting (including the aforementioned reptilian and arachnid folks), but also the fundamentally different natures, like the undead and mechanical ones.

The only really mechanical list is a list of things that every Nature shares is a list of areas they have advantage and disadvantage in, here meaning a simple +1 or -1 bonus to result checks. Like a Quality’s scope, they may be defined rather loosely.

For instance, Humans have a -1 on perception-and-intuition related tasks compared to others, but a +1 when it comes to adapting to or withstanding environments and enduring pain or physical deprivation. That’s Humanity: a bit dull of senses compared to most beings with similar sensory organs, but can overcome anything and thrive anywhere.

And that’s really all the game needs to say about Humans, because since it’s being written for a presumed audience of human beings, there’s no need to modify your assumptions. With Dwarves, Gnomes, and Pixies, though, there has to be some discussion about stature. For characters of a non-biological and/or non-living nature, the lack of a metabolism and what it means for things like fatigue, hunger, and natural healing must be addressed.

And so on.

We could represent these things in mechanical terms, with statistics and rules that govern the statistics and then special abilities that modify them, but A Wilder World is at its core a storytelling game, even while it eschews a lot of typical narrativist components. Changing your character’s Nature doesn’t change the rules of the game, but the rules of the story.

AWW: The Hand of Fate

Having played around with a bunch of different chart concepts for cross-referencing the player’s result dice vs. the Storyweaver’s fate dice to find out what happens with your attempt, I’ve decided to go with a slightly simpler concept and one that produces a bit more even results.

The fate dice are a 3d6 roll that exists more or less irrespectively of the result dice for the check. They’re cross-referenced to a table that has two parts, Wild Fates and Normal Fates

Wild Fates happen when the fate roll comes up triples. Each possible wild result has only a ~0.46% chance of happening, so collectively they occur ~2.76% of the time. Triple 1 and Triple 2 are extremely negative, similar to a critical failure. Triple 3 and Triple 4 are neutral/mixed. Triple 5 and Triple 6 are positive, similar to a critical success.

Wild Fates supersede normal ones, which means the odds of most given normal fate are slightly lower than normal probability analysis would otherwise indicate.

The specifics of the Wild Fates are still something I’m pondering, but I believe the Normal Fate portion of the table will look something like this:

5 or less: Injury! Succeed or faile, you hurt yourself or the person you were trying to help doing it. You gain a Wound or Injury or lose an asset, as the Storyweaver deems appropriate for the situation.

6: Embarrassment! Oops! Through sheer random chance or a moment’s inattention, you managed to make a complete fool of yourself. If you succeeded, your success stands… unless your goal was to impress someone or avoid attention. But still, you’ve hurt your pride. If you failed, you likely landed flat on your face, literally or metaphorically.

7-8: Complication! Oops, there’s a hitch. If you succeeded, then your success has an unexpected downside. If you failed, then something went wrong beyond just failing.

9-12: Situation Normal. You succeed or you don’t.

13-15: Cool! If you succeeded, this means you looked cool doing it, making it look effortless. If you failed, this means you kept your cool doing it, possibly making it seem intentional. A cool result can mitigate some of the results of failure beyond simply not succeeding; trap doesn’t go off, you don’t fall, the target you missed from hiding is still unaware you’re there, et cetera. A cool result on a success is roughly the positive version of an embarrassment: interesting flourish, might help you impress people.

16 or more: Bonus! There’s an unexpected upside, a silver lining to your failure or an unintended but positive outcome to your success. This is effectively a complication in your favor.

A few notes:

  • Situation Normal will occur a bit less than half of the time. When it doesn’t, the results are split evenly between positive and negative. On the whole positive outcomes are likely to hold an edge in frequency because of player abilities that focus on improving fate rolls.
  • While “Embarrassment” is mechanically weaker a result than “Complication” in most situations, it is ranked as being far less likely because occasional pratfalls are interesting, but frequent ones are annoying. The game is heavily geared towards larger-than-life heroes doing legendary things, so making embarrassment a more frequent outcome of trying to do things is probably not a good design decision.
  • Because I love Fool archetypes, you can make a character who is more prone to embarrassments and less prone to injuries and complications as a special ability. As long as you stay away from anything that requires subtlety and don’t care about looking cool, this is an advantage.
  • The Wound/Injury distinction: an injury puts one of your character-defining qualities into an impaired state, while a wound puts you one step closer to being out of commission. Which is worse depends on your character’s status. If you’re healthy and completely unharmed, a couple of wounds do nothing. If you’re badly wounded already, having a quality injured lowers your effectiveness but lets you keep going.

AWW: “Cards are hard, you guys.”

In case you can’t tell, today I’m taking all the positive creative energy I have and threshing out my game design ideas. So, as much as I like the DORC (Deck of Results Card) system I have previously described, I see several obstacles.

  1. Producing a deck of cards takes greater resources than a set of game rules playable with common dice does.
  2. Purchasing a deck of cards takes greater resources than purchasing a set of game rules.
  3. Playing over the internet is more complicated.
  4. Managing a ~50 deck of cards that’s used for the resolution of every action could also get cumbersome.
  5. Shuffling cards well is a specialized skill requiring greater dexterity than rolling dice.

With that in mind… I’m going to proceed with the development of AWW using a dice model, but with the same basic ideas I liked behind the result cards. This does mean–in the absence of specialty dice, which are still easier to produce than a specialty deck of cards–that there’s going to be a die roll chart. But so long as all the results can fit in one easy access reference thing and there’s no need to dive through books, I think this is an acceptable compromise given that it better fits my goals re: accessibility, affordability, and online portability, with developing a “Deck of Result Cards” as an optional replacement/supplement for the dice as a future goal if the demand develops.

So, here are the things to be kept from the card idea:

  • The player is the one making the roll for any interaction their character has a stake in: players make stealth rolls to sneak past NPCs; perception rolls when they’re on guard against NPCs sneaking past them. Players roll to see if their spells affect another; roll to see if they resist being affected by another’s spells.
  • The results are not just success/fail, but have a chance of being “wild” in some fashion.
  • The player produces a number of “extra” results based on the combination of their ability level in the area and the difficulty of the task. If the player has a net advantage, they pick their favorite result. If they have a net penalty, the Storyweaver picks.

What I’m leaning towards is a result chart that has a 6×6 grid of results, with the rows being numbered according to the player’s result die (chosen from the dice rolled, as described above) and the columns being numbered according to a separately rolled (perhaps by the Storyweaver) “wild” or “fate” die. So you’d look at the wild die, find its column, look at the results you have available and take the best one. Generally, “best” would mean “highest numbered” for the player and “lowest numbered” for the Storyweaver, but there will be the odd edge cases.

It would be very generally the case that a result die of 1-3 fails and a result die of 4-6 succeeds, though the whole point of the wilding system is to make things more interesting than success or failure. For both sets of numbers, higher is better, so 1×1 would be critical failure, 6×6 would be critical success; each would require one more die roll on a separate table/line to determine the nature/magnitude, but other that, the table would give you everything you need to figure out what happened without a subsequent die roll.

I think this would be a reasonably quick playing alternative to cards, and easy enough to translate into a more flexible card system later on. The same element of greater ability level = more ability to control the outcome is still there.