Quick idea for a damage system: what about locking out die results? As in, if you have one “wound” that’d hamper what you’re doing, your 6s count as 5s. If you have two “wounds”, 6s and 5s count as 4s and so forth.
Quick idea for a damage system: what about locking out die results?
Quick idea for a damage system: what about locking out die results?
Are you thinking of it from a “here’s a thing I can do with dice perspective” or a “what does this mechanic accomplish in the game” perspective?
From the latter:
1) You create a tighter death spiral. This wouldn’t be exactly the same as a -x ongoing, but it would approximate that effect.
2) Misses cause complications; the fiction will be everything going to shit, not just PCs dying. That’s even
Worse. It will limit player agency by creating cascading misses, effectively neutering them before it kills them. Yuck.
3) More bookkeeping at the table.
4) What fun does this add? I see the drawbacks, but I don’t see what the play experience gains from it.
5) What’s the underlying rationale? Most games with death spirals inherit them from simulationist games – the intuition that as people get hurt they suck more. PBTA aims for cinematic, not simulationist; what’s the rationale for reintroducing a death spiral?
5. Tragedy. Some genres call for it. If you aren’t going for it, then any sort of death spiral is something to avoid.
The concern I have with locking out die results in a PbtA game is that makes the players less able to affect the story the way they want (through 7+ totals, so successes), which could get in the way of their fun (it could turn the rules meets story experience into a reactive, not proactive one for them, I would worry). I think PbtA avoids negative modifiers in most circumstances as much for that reason as any other. After all, this isn’t just a roll to act system, it’s a roll to affect the story system.
Had you considered adding a custom move like?
“When rolling for an action when you are wounded pick one of the following per wound as well as the results of the action:
* bad thing 1
* bad thing 2″
etc…
(edited for tone, as I typed it quickly and I think it might have come out terse – and sooo bad at spelling)
You could lock out results on one die only. This would avoid the death spiral, and is similar enough to -x ongoing, but actually a little more forgiving: whereas -x ongoing will always apply, locking out results on one die will only sometimes apply. Which also has the nice knock-on effect of only requiring more math sometimes too. Not bad, actually. Likely unnecessary though.