FAR - Dice Pools, Buying, Upgrading and Selecting abilities

[Judging__Eagle]

Right now, I want to

-cap FAR's dice pools at 10

-allow creatures to combine a mix of dice pools to max out their pool for an action (your weapon, and your skill go together when you attack with it; but you could also have "form"/species/innate abilities and ability pools added up; Superman adds his [Heroic] Heat Vision pool to his Supernatural [Alien; Kpyrtonian; Powered by Yellow Sunlight] when using eye beams)

-Dice grant successes on 5+, at every tier.

-Abilities grant "more"/"better"/"bullshit" as you go higher up, but the 5+ rule always stays in effect for your most recent powers

-Having Dice in a previous Tier, for the same ability, means that overlapping dice get a +1 to their roll; Having 6 Mortal Dice, and 3 Heroic means you roll 3 at 4+, and 3 at 5+
--I might seriously have people roll their -whole- pool, and be able to take the dice that granted them a success, if it could grant them a success; so in the above example, you roll 6 dice, always; and if you have 6 5+'s, that's awesome, but you can only ever take 3 4+'s as successes.

-Players have a "budget" or "unspent" pool of dice at creation; these dice can be spent to buy an ability during game play (if explained); buy dice pools during downtime; or left unspent

-Unspent dice are part of an "Luck" pool; dice you can add to a check, after you've rolled your pool for any specific action. Thinking of these as "re-rolls" is a good idea. You can only "re-roll" up to the affected dice pools current total value of dice (in the above example, you could re-roll up to 6 dice)

-Dice spent on "Luck" refresh at the end of the adventure, session, or w/e seems appropriate (havent' hammered this down yet)

-I'm considering some sort of exchange rate between different tiers of dice; probably a x10 per tier up. So, 10 mortal dice = 1 heroic dice. The cost isn't "even", but it's a potential idea.

Using a "Hits" system, where more successes grant more impressive results, as seein in Warp Cult and AWoD, are what I'm thinking about.

Instead of having dice pools go up, and up, and up; I want to have dice within the pools increase their chance of success. An Epic character who has

Active:
Continual:
Combat: Physique 6 [M] 6 [H] 6 [L] 6 [E]*

*(where M, H, L and E are Mortal, Heroic, Legendary and Epic)

rolls 6 dice, and takes 2+'s when performing Mortal tier actions (Min: attack 1 target, Mod: use abilites on 1 target, Maj: deal double damage on one hit).

Their next Epic dice earned could go into increasing the 6 [E] to a 7 [E], but that dice acts like a standard 5+ dice for lower tier abilities.


The idea being that a character at any level can pick up level appropriate powers in any type of power. If you buy Heroic Glyphomancy, you shoot your mind-letter bullets "faster" than a Mortal Glyphomancer; but you don't have the "training" to do it as consistent as someone who also put in the effort to pick up the basic training.

However, characters focused in one type of power will generate successes more consistently.

I also want to seperate the idea of "ability" trees from "getting better as a character". A character just buys Tier appropriate powers for their current tier. They aren't locked into buying Dumb Melee Fighter powers if they don't want to for their next Tier. If they do however, their prevous tier abilities will be more effective if/when used. Sometimes you only have to fight one target, sometimes you need to fight more.

You can buy Crafting abilities in one tier; magic ablities in an other, and armour wearing in an other; and you never had to worry about getting "pre-requisite" abilities for any of them.

The pre-requisites are things like "have enough power to buy this type of ability", not "you needed the previous rank in TWF to get this rank in TWF".

One way of describing it would be that if you are a level 5 Fighter, and take a level in Wizard, you get leve 6 wizard abilities; but you didn't get any of the level 1-5 Wizard abilities. Since staying level appropriate at all stages of the game is the key; and the best way to do that is separate powers by "level appropriatness", and let character learn or grow the ones that fit their story.