Day 2 - Mechanics update!
I spent the day thinking about how I wanted this game to run. I still don't have an exact idea of what the game is, but after contemplating a while I decided I wanted to use the basic 7-dice RPG set (instead of playing cards, or a tarot deck, etc). I also love games that have players try to roll low on the die, instead of high.
I've come up with a basic idea of how I want the die-rolling to work. In the game, the players will have some sort of resource, which they try to collect during gameplay and which they can spend to improve die-rolling chances (sort of how the Cypher System uses XP, which players can spend either to level up or decrease action difficulty). When the player must make a die roll, they can either do a normal check and roll a d20, or spend 1 resource to move down to a d12, or 2 to a d10, etc. The goal with the die roll is to roll below a certain number (perhaps an ability score chosen in character creation - a 1 for an ability that's practically impossible up to a 10 for an ability you rarely fail at).
I still need to calculate the probabilities of different die rolls - jumping from a d20 to d12 is a larger leap than d12 to d10, I don't want to make a d12 roll almost always succeed anymore than I want a d20 roll to feel impossible. I also need to figure out why the player is rolling dice - I could go the D&D route ("any time an action's results are in doubt") or the PBTA route (with a specific list of 'moves') but that'll partially be determined by the theme of the game.
Initially I thought of setting a story in Antarctica somehow, but without playing very fast and loose with reality (or having the player characters be wild animals) I'm not sure how to make that make sense. Another thought was a thievery game - I love thief stories, and this would allow the collectible resource to be something concrete like money (which the player then spends when they need to make a roll to buy/have bought gear that'll be useful for that roll).
Lastly, I decided I want the game to be one others could contribute and write their own 'campaigns' for. In other words, I will develop a story engine and a starter story type, leaving the mechanics free enough from that story to be applied to other stories (like how people use the D&D rules to play games set in their favorite books, or like how Apocalypse World spawned a whole game system used to run games in all different narrative genres - or how if you just change the two stat names in Lasers and Feelings you can make a game about practically anything).
Things to work on tomorrow:
- decide a general theme for the game (what type of story is being told, who the player character can be, etc)
- decide what causes the player to roll a die to begin with
- get some ideas for possible stats or abilities which the 1-10 scores can be applies to, as well as how those scores might be chosen (point buy? pre-set for backgrounds/'class'/etc?)