I'm making something real quick because of the new JP show. Turns out there are not a lot of public domain images of Dinosaurs and this game is being made on a budget of $0.
Required disclaimer: the thing is 7k words long which means it /definitely/ needs to be edited.
However, it took me more than a full work-day to make this thing and I just don't have the motivation (financial or otherwise ;) ) to bother right now.
So, 🙇♀️ I'd like to apologize in advance for rambling bits & sentences that should have been cleaned up, and images that could have been cropped more, and all the other stuff that editing would have fixed.
FATE continues to be something of a Holy Guide for me in developing my game. There are SO many aspects‡ of it I love.
BUT every time i think of playing it I think about this graph, & the implication that the dice are only barely introducing any variance. 60% of the time you will roll whatever your stat is. 80% of the time you'll roll your skill +/- 1.
I think they're both ultimately just a collection of common levers that you choose from to create a new one & then flavor it as you see fit.
Scrolling through SWADE i'm seeing stuff like: targets get a -2 penalty, raise / lower a skill by 1, add +2 to a roll, you get to do a minor thing no-one else can do (divination), etc.
🧵4/8
BUT it feels cool. It's not nearly as flexible as FATE, because everything's predefined, but because there are more levers to pull & pre-defining things lets you present each one in a cool way, it FEELS cool, AND it doesn't feel like regardless of what stunt/power you have it's ultimately just the same 3 things.
🧵5/8
Divination is a great example of this. In FATE you'd probably say something like "once per day you can spend 1 Fate point & roll <skill here> to contact the spirit world" and that TOTALLY works, but that doesn't sound NEARLY a cool as this.
I think the takeaway is that the more generic your system is the more levers you need to provide for use when defining the things that make characters special.
This means that players wouldn't be able to easily & quickly create their own stunts, but maybe that's ok. There are ways to compensate & balance that out.
🧵7/8
You can also see that how you present a thing to a user makes a huge difference. My FATE "divination" ability above is boring. SWADE's is cool, but the real difference is presentation not mechanics.
Deflection's like this too. It SOUNDS cool, but folks are unlikely to write something that cool sounding during FATE character creation.
Also, it's easy to choose from a list of cool things. Creating an ability & deciding the levers it pulls at teh table with friends? Not so much.
🧵8/8
If you just reset your 🧠's perspective such that it expects to roll whatever your skill is minus one, then 80% of the time you'll be correct, or better than correct.
Kind-of like how the Ubiquity system uses d2s and allows you to always just take 1/2 of whatever your score is instead of rolling.
Rolling feels pointless / predetermined.
To me it makes more sense to just throw away the dice in those situations & use something like No Dice No Masters.