30th
Nov09
By Sebastian Hickey
Way of the Agent just got richer.
After reading Rob Donoghue’s inspiring piece on a 3d6 Rich Dice solution, and with all this fancy WFRP 3E ‘Rich Dice’ banter flying about, I started considering a change in my design vector, and in the sticky, thudding cogwork of my brain, I saw an opportunity.
How do Rich Dice work in Way of the Agent (WotA)? I’m toying with a single roll solution that measures Rhythm (white dice), Intensity (red dice) and Duration (no dice, see below). Think of Duration as the length of time it takes to complete an action. Think of Intensity as the measurement of success, like how much damage you do, or the consequences of narration. That leaves Rhythm, which measures accuracy[1].
Example
Let’s say you’re using the Art of Fighting (which is 5) and you’re trying to throw a punch. You may throw up to 5d6. Before you roll, you must choose how many of those 5d6 will be for Rhythm, and how many for Intensity.
Duration
Let’s say you choose to take 4d6 for Rhythm and 1d6 for Intensity. According to the colours above, you would now have 4 white dice and 1 red die. Rolling these together, you count the number of dice that score a 4 or more. This determines Duration. Let’s say you roll 2, 3, 4 & 5 on the white Rhythm dice, and a 4 on the red Intensity die. The Duration would be 3 (there are 3 dice scoring a 4 or more – a 4 and a 5 from the white dice, and a 4 from the red die).
Success
To determine success, see if the total of the white dice exceed 8. In this example, the white dice add up to 14. That’s a success.
Intensity
Intensity measures the damage inflicted from a social or physical attack, or the degree of failure/success in an uncontested action. In this example, the red die shows a 4, which means that the punch scores 4 damage.
Difficulty
The GM can modify difficulty by adding or removing dice, and targets in contested actions (such as brawls or arguments) can evade, dodge and manoeuvre. The effect of these evasions is that the targets get to “shift” your dice pool slightly, making it less accurate than you intended and more powerful, or less powerful and more accurate[2].
In one roll, success is determined, along with the intensity of that success, how long it has taken, and the kind of action that has taken place. That’s a rich pot of information. Yummy.
1 Why “Rhythm?” In my limited experience of Krav Maga, I noticed that the ability to throw a punch was tempered in effect by the ability of knowing When to punch. Similarly, when you shoot from a pistol, your accuracy is determined by your training or aptitude (number of dice thrown), but it is essentially a matter of waiting (even for a mere half-second) until the moment that your bullet’s projected trajectory will intersect with your target (how much priority you give to Rhythm dice). Rhythm as accuracy extends to communication, also, though there is some difficulty in applying it as an umbrella term for intellectual feats. More thinking must be done on the subject. Furthermore, I admit the choice of word is annoying. Maybe Timing or Accuracy would be better. We’ll see.
2 There’s more going on underneath the hood, to be explored on another day.
[...] from the last Way of the Agent (WotA) post, you’ll be aware of the Rich Dice concept. If not, click here. To clean things up things, I’d like to smother the current WotA rule-set with the last [...]