Hey thanks! It means a lot. It was some of the most laborious fun I've ever had lol.
Viewing post in No Ivory No Rose jam comments
Tell me about it, I bit off more than I could chew with my game.
So I wanted to leave some feedback. I like your dice mechanism a lot! It's just so intuitive that your odds increase with better dice, even if the probabilities are extremely inscrutable if you don't know shortcuts for doing binomial distributions. But you don't have to, the odds just feel right on a gut level, and getting to choose your own target number reinforces that gambling mentality. I also really love that you can exert yourself and roll more dice by paying life. That was one of my favorite mechanisms from the Conan board game and I'm happy to see it used in a horror context.
My only complaint is needing up to 6 of each die. I'd need a randomizer app to play this but it's still preferable to the d20 algebra of 5e. What inspired your design?
The game is definitely heavy on dice and that's something we talked about when we were building the mechanics but decided we liked the idea enough to roll with it even if it lost a bit of accessibility. One of the reasons we chose 6 as the max dice cap is so that the game could play reasonably smoothly with only 3 sets of dice as you'd never have to roll more than twice, which, while not ideal, shouldn't hurt pacing too much.
As for the numbers that's something we had to watch carefully. This was a pretty big project to tackle in 48 hours, plus we all had our actual jobs cutting in to some of our time so we didn't really have time for a playtest. I sat down and calculated the odds of success for every potential roll and charted everything out and we decided that we were happy with how it looked and went forward with it.
As far as inspirations are concerned I'm not sure there's any single thing to point to really. We're all fans of narrative systems like Powered by the Appocolypse but our mechanics ended up being a combination of a bunch of different systems we brainstormed. Specifically two of the systems we talked about were a 6 skill system where each skill was assigned a die and your goal was to roll under a set number, as well as a d6 system where you called a number and the more that number came up the more successful you'd be. This ended up kind of being a love child between these two systems with some added twists coming later on down the line.