Wolf

I kept thinking and noodling over the dice pool mechanics and have decided to just lean into simplicity. As much as I love the mechanical elegance of dice pools from Dogs in the Vineyard and how you can turn every interaction into a conflict with mechanical elements, there’s something clean and easy about just rolling a d20 to solve the situation.

It’s not as narratively rich or mechanically interesting, but it keeps complexity out of these things.

Which isn’t necessarily better but it’s the direction I’m heading. At least for now. Especially since I’m trying to get this ready for the game jam, which leaves me about 11 days to get this all sorted. And since there’s still a decent amount of writing to sort through and mechanics to define, I’m sticking with simplicity.

Or at least as much simplicity as comes with a d20 game where you also need a bunch of other types of dice. Though that’s something I’m considering too. What if you only needed one kind of die? I think there’s a real pleasantness to that. Rather than grabbing every kind of die you can handle, you just need one single die or perhaps just one type of die.

But, again, this is something I’ll sort out after the jam.

But all of these things can lead into the narrative design, the worldbuilding, and, obviously, the mechanics of the world and game. Simple decisions that have many, large ramifications.

That’s the beauty of thinking systemically though. If your choices are determined by a d20 or 3d6, how does that impact the world around the mechanics? How do mechanics tie into the worldbuilding itself?

I’ve been thinking about this because, right now, I have Usage Dice in the system, which is taken directly from the original Black Hack. There’s something nice about Usage Dice, especially with regard to the magic system. I like making magic very limited and difficult and costly, which all ties into the world and the mechanics. Usage Dice help manage this. The chance element appeals to me, but it does mean that there’s now an extra die to take care of, to manage. It also makes it impossible to get rid of the other types of dice unless I change how the Usage Die works.

It’s a tension within me right now. Do I lean more towards simplicity or maximalism? Both have their appeals, but I think the world itself leans towards deprivation, towards limitation, so I’ll likely end up moving more and more towards limitation.

A simple d6 system!

We’ll see.