Prak wrote:
The thread which would not die.
So, this is actually a really interesting idea that I'd take and run with but for not exactly being able to parse the system idea entirely. Or rather, I mostly get it, but I'm not entirely clear on the threat cancelling idea. Is it still a dicepool res. system, and you can use dice for successes on your action, or to cancel threat, or are all rolls made to try to cancel threat?
I had forgotten about this.
The idea was kind of nebulous at this point. The idea is that it's easy to buy successes towards your goal, but at any given point there is a growing/refreshing threat pool that represents the dangers of the scene/goal.
If I were to go back and work on this again, you'd start a scene by defining a goal:
* Forage for food.
Now we need to have a win condition. So 1 success equals 1/2 of a portion of food per person for a day. Feeding 5 people? 10 successes for a day. So let's say you want to scavenge for 3 days. Or you're just trying to pick up as much food before things go to shit. But you have a goal.
Mister Cavern assigns the scene a threat rating. You're in downtown Atlanta. Zed central. On a danger scale, you're probably talking about an 8 easy. You've wandered into an abandoned distribution warehouse but it looks pretty damaged. Let's throw 1 environmental die into the pool. But you're also going in the middle of a rainstorm, so sound and smell is deadened a little. So 8 dice for a threat pool.
4,5,6,2,2,1,3,3
So 1-2 is envrionmental dangers/stresses, 3-4 is zombies, so we're looking at a few zombies, and 5-6 destroys equipment carried by the party.
It's my turn, and I've got a mental stat of say 2, and I'm using a flashlight for 1 bonus die.
3,3,4
I have a choice. Any of those dice can be used for successes for the goal of foraging for food.
However, I do not have a 5-6 to spend on maintaining my flashlight. It goes dead in my search. Fuck. I can decide to concentrate on those zombies. I'll spend a 3 to pick up food and a 3 & 4 to cancel out the threat pool, leaving
5,6,2,2,1,3
Play continues. But let's imagine we quit after that. We evaluate the threat pool. First comes environmental stress. 2, 2, and 1 mean 3 points of environmental/stress damage. I think environmental damage makes more sense here so we have to divide 3 points of damage among the party. One 3 is left over, so someone has to get a zombie bite (or damage, depending on how hardcore you want to go), and the 5 and 6 means that the party loses two pieces of equipment in their retreat.
To continue, let's not end the scene. Now let's say that the next person rolls for shit and doesn't like what they get. They can blow their turn and all their dice to give ground. I would propose a penalty to add dice to the threat pool in this event but I dunno what that would be at this time so let's ignore it. All the dice get rolled again as we move out of the warehouse and into the shipping center. It's just too treacherous in that warehouse, especially without any lights.
3,1,6,2,6,5
It's safer here, and there's a couple zombies, but this is pretty technical terrain.
Person 3 goes. They have 3 in their mental stat for searching.
5,4,6
So here's a problem. They have a 4. Which is a zombie die. But they don't have a 3, which is the active zombie. There's a struggle. Noise. Yelling. The kind of thing that draws attention. So at the end of this round, the threat pool increases by the original threat rating. Which was 8. Fuck. So Player 3 spends 3 dice on successes. This isn't ideal. Let's say you grab good cache of food but in salvaging it you crash over a bunch of rubble and it's like ringing the dinner bell.
We're rolling 14 dice for the threat pool now.
3,1,6,2,6,5 for the existing scene.
1,5,4,3,1,5,5,4 for the added threat death-spiral.
3 or 4 dice worth of zombies push through the loading dock door which knocks a stack of equipment and it's a tricky area to work through now.
Player 4's turn. He pulls out his pump action shotgun and goes on the offensive. 3 dice plus his 3 stat dice.
4,4,3,6,5,3
BLAM! We're doing walking dead style zeds. He spends a 3 to avoid the zombies from popping from the gunshot. Spends 6 to keep his shotgun going. Spends a 4, 4, 3, on canceling out the zeds. Spends a 6 clearing a path to GTFO. No successes but he has done a lot this turn.
Threat pool is down to 10 dice:
1,2,6,5 1,5,3,1,5,5
4 successes for food.
Player 1's turn again.
That's an example of how I see the dice mechanics going for the game. Although it is admittedly in a rough state. It'd need playtesting and I can see already broken feedback loops and maybe too deadly of a death spiral. But it's a start that I think you would work with. You can adjust all kinds of things to make things easier or more or less lethal. But you want death spirals, and the thing I like about the system is that as things go from bad to worse, your incentive to GTFO actually kind of goes down, because of the massive ball of trauma your party has to deal with.