Friday, September 19, 2008

Adding Dice into a Diceless System?

I hate to admit it, but I may have jumped the gun by naming the system d0. After a long and thoughtful discussion over on the Forge (see the last post), it seems like I might have to include dice after all.

Here's the short of it: The auction system needs testing thoroughly, and until I do that I won't try redesigning it. However, the refresh system has one nasty little shortcoming: too much book-keeping. When you bid a handful of traits on each auction, and you have one or more auctions each round (like, say, combat), then you have to keep track of the refresh info for each trait individually. For a game with at least 8 traits in your primary pool and 10 others in other pools, all with different refresh rates and bidding occurrences, you have an awful lot of tedious book keeping to muck with. My solution: replace the manual tracking with probabilistic tracking which approximates the same behavior. In short: at the end of each round, instead of decrementing check marks, you just roll a d100, and check to see if it's less than a certain number. That way you need only keep track of whether the trait is available for bidding or not. The "certain number" by the way is not variable, it's fixed for each column, and written at the top for reference. So, that trims off 2 of the 3 things that people need to worry about with Refresh Rates.

Any opinions or feedback?

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