Definitely worth waiting for, Gonz!

I’m actually reminded of the TORG skill system, or at least a variation on it that I was toying with back in the day. With TORG, there are a set of cards which are earned as part of the XP bundle, but each player also has a minimum number at the start of an adventure. At that time, you can also discard and replace unwanted ones. Part of these cards is an alphabetic sequence – it might be DACB, for example. Skill use is divided into two tranches – trivial and significant. Trivial uses color the narrative but don’t impact the plot; with significant uses, all bets are off. Four successful skill rolls by the focal PC are required to achieve a significant skill use – but not all successes count; they have to be accompanied by one player giving up a card with an “A” on it in first place in the alphabetic sequence, or two cards with an “A” in the second place, or three with an “A” in the third place, or – well, you get the idea. Any player can contribute these cards, or even a group of players can contribute one each. If there’s no valid combination, a success just holds the situation at its current point. Any failure regresses progress by a point – so, if you were trying for the “C” (third skill check) and failed, you are back to needing a “B” – but now you have to start using the second alphabetic character in the code.

This makes significant skill use incredibly strategic. Depending on the cards the party have available, they may need to fail twice to get into a position to succeed overall – and that in turn means that they need to succeed six times, and that’s if everything goes according to plan! Unexpected failures at the wrong time can really upset the apple-cart!

On top of that, the GM can rule any stage of the process a success or failure regardless of the die roll if the PCs say or do a pre-defined right (or wrong) thing at that point. And NPCs get +1 per prior skill check to their rolls – so it gets progressively harder to advance.

1/2 of the cards have an A in the first digit, 1/2 have B in the second, and so on. 1/2 of the cards that don’t have an A in the first digit have a B; 1/2 of what’s left have a C, and the rest have a D. “AAAA” is a perfectly valid combination. That means that A cards are most common, and D cards are the most rare.

What’s more, if the position in the sequence ever drops below “A”, the skill use has failed outright – so if you need two strategic failures, you need two successes before that to keep hope of success alive.

Don’t know if there is anything you can use in the above, but it puts the focus on strategic play, and on trying to figure out what the “right thing to say/do” might be, all of which creates intense engagement with the in-game situation.

Thanks for contributing :)

http://codexanathema.com/2020/08/24/what-a-dm-needs-more/

Tom’s entry is great! I never imagined he was handling so much at once!

Sometimes those are the best ones, Tom – thanks for contributing!

What struck me most as I was reading it was how analogous your situation was to the way many GMs approach game prep in general – trying to work on everything at once rather than adopting some sort of planned approach using priorities. There are times when we all need more Focus!

https://expandingfrontier.com/2020/08/august-rpg-blog-carnival-what-we-need-is-more-focus/

Was it a typo, or not? I’ll never tell, hee hee hee! Looking forward to your post, Gonz :)