Killing Stats #Poise

Background (Skippable)

The "Core Resolution System" in Poise was "Sum the following:

The result of a 1d20 roll;

The highest number in a dice pool of 1d4s, 1d6s, and 1d8s; and

Static Numbers <= 12."

The 1d20 was your luck, the static numbers were your stats, and the dice pool was called "Circumstance" and was taken from things like Cortex's Assets + Complications as well as Fate's Aspects.

After running a couple play tests of an implementation with this system, I found that (1) it was difficult to design abilities with a spread of 1 to 40 since most players ended up in a 5-25 range and it was unclear when they would have Circumstance, and (2) that some times you wanted debuffs on rolls. For instance you might want to give Sam Circumstance "1d6 Offbalance" and have the impact both Sam and Sam's enemies rolls.

What follows are threads I wrote in my Development Discord to the playtesters and advisors.

The Preamble

In light of our recent playtest I've decided to capitulate on the idea of having negatives in the resolution system. Here are the changes,

Acting With or Against:

Circumstance can be anything from a "Clear Mind" to an "Injured Foot" sometimes it helps and sometimes it hinders. Circumstance that helps your current action "Acts With" you. Circumstance that hinders your current action "Acts Against" you. You cannot have a Circumstance pool that has both types, so they cancel each other out. Any Circumstance which Acts Against you removes one Circumstance of your choice that Acts With you, and vice-versa.

For example: Jimmy wants to jump across the cliff. He has 1d8 Enchanted Legs, 1d4 Long-jump Training and 1d6 Sprained Ankle. The 1d8 Enchanted Legs, and the 1d4 Long-jump Training Act With Jimmy, while the 1d6 Sprained Ankle Acts Against him. Jimmy chooses to cancel the 1d6 Sprained Ankle with the 1d4 Long-jump Training and rolls his pool with only the 1d8 Enchanted Legs which adds to his role.

Addendum

It's worth noting that I'm very fearful of this mechanic. I think it will be confusing to deal with if you try to deal with it in your head, and dice heavy if you try to do it on the table. That said, I'm willing to try it because I think 9/10 times it will be simply a pool of things acting with or acting against.

👆 After going down the rabbit hole below I think the beauty of this change becomes apparent, but I do appreciate my hesitancy, and since this is untested I think I still have a heavy dose of it

Down the Rabbit Hole 🐇 (Follow me!)

Follow me for a minute as I kill my children

Part 1 - The failure of the stat.

One of the things that Stats provided that Circumstance didn't was a method for Negatives. Specifically Stats were written as

i∑1​Stati​≤12

So it was fine for Stats to be -10 if that made sense in your game.

The problem I was having is that basically every action you took had about a +5 to it at least—in order to avoid things feeling too swingy between your best actions and your worst actions.

This created a few annoying situations though. (1) As you leveled up old abilities became automatic successes as it became impossible for you to roll lower than an 8 or a 12. This lead to the design of moves which had frankly very high Difficulty Gates. This further lead to a problem dealt with when our scale was 10 to 80. Which was, how do you even begin to interpret these things.

👆 Yeah, the first system we designed in college was a scale of 10 to 80 which every 10 being a different level of mastery. You would declare what you wanted to do, the DM would say what level of mastery you needed to accomplish it and then you rolled. It was frustrating to DM, and confusing to play.

Part 2 - The Subtle Expansion of Circumstance.

As I was struggling against Stats, I found Circumstance wasn't doing its job. If my character was 1d6 Off Balance that should count against me when I try to jump. It shouldn't only make me easier to hit. This felt especially strange outside of combat.

I considered adding the 1d6 to the Difficulty Gate (DG), but ended up going with the Act With/Against system to avoid having two people required to participate in the roll every time.

This subtly doubled the size of Circumstance.

You now had seven types of die rather than three. 1d8-, 1d6-, 1d4-, Neut, 1d4+, 1d6+, 1d8+. Though obviously the original intention, it is also worth saying that this caused Circumstance to allow negative values.

Part 3 - Uh Oh! Parallelism...

👆 "Core" is the set of systems which all implementations of Poise will use. "The Core Resolution System" is one such system.

One of the tenants of core that I wrote about was orthogonality. That if two related features existed one should probably be removed and replaced by a more powerful version of the other.

One of the reasons Stats were added to The Core Resolution System was because Circumstance only dealt in Dice, and some times we'd want stats that were fixed values to interact with The Core Resolution System.

Consider the following function, which maps seven stat points to Circumstantial Bonuses.

f(stat)=⎩ ⎨ ⎧​1d8−1d6−1d4−Neut1d4+1d6+1d8+​if stat=1if stat=2if stat=3if stat=4if stat=5if stat=6if stat=7​

Uh-oh. That looks expressive enough to deal with fixed values turning into dice. Do I smell Orthogonality?

Part 4 - It works pretty well.

The most immediate and striking benefit is the collapse of the range of outputs. We go from [-7, 40] to [-7, 28]. Which changes move making philosophy entirely. We can restructure our gates to be "squished" with the following intervals:

[-7,4]U[5,8]U[9-12]U[13-16]U[17-20]U[21-28]

This yields a pretty consistent spread, with <8 becoming a natural stopping point for failure (60% chance of failure at 1d8-, 17.5% chance of failure at 1d8+) and 17+ becoming a natural stopping point for complete success. You can basically write any move with this in mind and everyone will have a mostly fair shot at doing it. (I think)

The old stat system had a problem which was that you needed to give out new versions of moves to keep them viable. After a certain point a spell became certain and so it made more sense to spam it, so you'd want to give a more risky spell+ with more Risk Reward. This mostly eliminates that problem, and instead means that you can give more interesting moves at higher levels.

Part 5 - Take a *step* toward greatness.

When implementing Tact Poise I really liked having two stat lines which combined to create combos. The solution is stepping!

Stepping Up: 1d8-➡️1d6-➡️1d4-➡️Neut➡️1d4+➡️1d6+➡️1d8+

Stepping Down: 1d8+➡️1d6+➡️1d4+➡️Neut➡️1d4-➡️1d6-➡️1d8-

So consider a {Mind, Body, Spirit} Primary stat line and a {Force, Finesse, Fortitude} Secondary stat line defined as:

P(MBS)=⎩ ⎨ ⎧​1d6−1d4−NeutNeut1d4+1d6+​if MBS=1if MBS=2if MBS=3if MBS=4if MBS=5if MBS=6​S(FFF)=⎩ ⎨ ⎧​StepDownHoldStepUp​if FFF=1if FFF=2if FFF=3​

If I have Fortitude 3, Force 2, and Body 5 then my Fortitude Body roll is a 1d6, and my Force Body roll is a 1d4.

Part 6 - Okay, but does it **actually** work?

About as well as Stats + Circumstance did, which is good enough for me. There are two primary issues. (1) The jump from Neut to 1d4 is very impactful. This is because we're skipping the 1d2, so we jump from a +0 on the average to a +2.5 on the average. Additionally subsequent upgrades are less impactful. Going from 1d4 to 1d6 only provides a +1 to the average.

The other biting issue is one with the Act With/Against system. (2) If you gain one Circumstance which acts against you you lose out on the entirety of your positive stat. Meaning that a single 1d4- can have the impact of taking you from a 1d8+ Wizard down to a Neut Wizard. This is a known issue, and I'm comfortable with it. We'll see if it ends up being frustrating and I get overruled.

Extra 1 - Knowable Odds & Excitement

One of the reasons that a 1d20 + N was chosen was because if you know the odds on a tense roll then it can feel great to be like "I need a 10" and roll it. This change breaks that rule. I'm making that choice for a couple reasons.

I think it's worth following the orthogonality here.

We already break this rule every time you have Circumstance, we're just making it so that it's consistent.

You can smell a tense roll from a mile away.

So long as you roll the die one at a time you can still get this intensity, and in fact it can sometimes feel even greater to roll the 1d20 first and know that you need "a 6, 7, or 8" to succeed.

Extra 2 - Are stats core?

I think the simple answer now is no. I can completely see a game where you're meant to be caught up in the world not giving your character stats. Instead you can give a player the ability to change fate slightly in their favor.

Addendum

This addendum was not included in the original discord threads.

As I've mentioned previously Lancer by Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan has a very similar core resolution system. It only uses 1d6s, not 1d4s or 1d8s, and it also allows static values to be added. It also has a similar dichotomy of valuing the Mech Combat and the PC Interactions. I haven't played it yet, but I read the book just days after I decided to make this change. Wouldn't have had to justify it as much if I had done it a bit earlier.