Working On Motewright

This, but more typing.

I've been brainstorming the mechanics for Motewright lately. It's been an interesting journey so far, and I've got a ways to go. If you want to read some thoughts on mechanics, read on.

The One Roll Engine (ORE)

I started looking at the One Roll Engine, the system behind Godlike. It involves rolling a variable-sized pool of d10s and counting your best set of matching results. I really like the idea of this system, where a single roll gives you two distinct bits of information: Width (how many dice in the set) and Height (the number showing on all dice in the set). You can use these in a variety of ways: Width is usually how effective your attempted action is. Height can handle initiative order within similar-Width sets, and it can control something specific about the action such as hit location for combat rolls.

Pools of dice fit with how I initially wanted to do stats and skills/abilities: a 1-5 range for a stat and a related skill added together to get the number of d10s in your pool for a single roll. Sets feel really good to me as successes, and the option for more than one success in a single roll appeals to me, if someone wants to go all heroic. And I've always wanted to get my hands dirty with this system.

I want success to be an option with a pool of 1 die, so I added a (PbtA-based) partial success on a single 5 or 6 if you get no pairs. It will cost something to get a success with that roll, usually something making the character's situation worse. Leaving that decision in the hand of the player feels like the right move here, so if you want to choose to fail the roll without consequences, that's cool by me. Alternatively, you could pay whatever resource happens on a failure to get something positive out of the challenge. Guess I should think about economies involving the consequences of failure.

And then the whole thing suddenly felt too cumbersome to me somehow. Ten dice feels like a lot, so how do we cut that down to a more manageable handful?

Hacking d6 Pools

I spent some time scribbling notes modifying the pool idea to use d6s instead. So stats would still go to 5, but skills would add an extra die to bring the pool up to a max of 6 dice. The skill die could get upgraded from Proficient (the basic die) through Skilled (the die is set to 4, 5, or 6 after the roll), and then to Master (set the die to anything after the roll).

What's the downside? Why would a Skilled character want to fail a roll? Skill upgrades enjoy an XP discount if the character fails on a skill roll 6 (maybe?) times. If you want a discount, you'll want to fail on a skill roll fairly often. Mastery in a skill will give you successes all the time, guaranteeing a pair and making triples fairly often. Unless something actively opposes a Master, they should succeed all the time.

And then I wondered what consequences should happen on a failed roll. I don't have hit points, nor do I want to wade through a pile of generic resources to get to something juicy involving story. Characters should contain slightly more than an ever-growing pile of resources to endure and overcome larger and larger threats. I flailed around for a while on this question.

Mini Moxie

Then I saw a post about "what's the universal system du jour?", and I clicked through. I found Mini Moxie, and I think I'll be grabbing a pile of ideas from that. It's a d6 pool system at its heart. As written, roll your pool and look at the highest value. On a 6, it's Perfect Success, 4-5 is Messy (success with trouble), and 1-3 is Grim (fail with trouble). I should be able to swap in pairs for Perfect Successes and keep a single 5 or 6 as a Messy Success. So far so good.

Harm causes marked stats which give you Thorn dice, a d8 to roll with your pool. On a 7 or 8, they downgrade your success and then clear the harm. A character going unconscious requires harm on all 4 of their stats. If I'm using 6 stats, what if that becomes Harm on 3 stats? That's workable, I think. That opens up "Unstoppable" abilities that will let a character stay up until 4 or 5 stats are harmed.
Thorn dice are useful as situational disadvantage on a roll as well. And I can modify them to remove a die of Width from a success, possibly turning the roll instantly Messy. I like the potential swinginess of that.

Thorn dice shouldn't be able to contribute to a success, I think. So we'll keep them separate for now and maybe bend that rule for some sort of Lucky ability. Gotta put something to paper so we can test how it works.

Hero Points or Spark as written can add a die to a pool (meh). So what if they Bump a die instead, adding or subtracting 1 from its result. That opens up possibilities where a Spark can add Width (and effectiveness) directly, or make a 2nd set to keep a success despite a Thorn's downgrade. Yeah, I like that a lot.

I really like Mini Moxie's idea of Pools as clocks. Trigger a Pool as a Trouble result, and roll them, discarding all the 1-3 results. When the Pool empties, The Thing it tracks happens. I'm currently ruminating on keeping that as written, removing sets as they do something to the situation, and/or clearing the whole pool if no sets appear in the roll (so a 4d6 pool is about 50/50 to empty immediately). Yeah, I'll need to test some scenarios around this.

What's Next?

I'm working on a generic system to debug these mechanical ideas. The plan right now is to get that finished for Minimalist TTRPG Jam 5 by 11/1, and then play with it and expand it into the full system I'll use for Motewright.

We'll see how my new day job will impact my timeline. I start on Monday (Woo!).

Is anyone interested in playtesting? Keep an eye out and I'll broadcast when there's something to work with, hopefully in the next couple of months.

I just thought I'd document my process in hacking together a system, in case anyone else wants a look behind the curtain. Yes, it's heavy on the thievery and hacking. So goeth game design.