It's been a while, apologies, life happened.
Now, let's take a look at something that I mentioned as my very first post, and let's go ahead and expand on it a little more, because I've had time to think on it and some other things have been mentioned to me throughout, so there's some new things that really need to get written down about it. The idea of Story Dice will probably be one that I revisit constantly throughout the game design process, and so get used to me tinkering with the idea every couple months or so until completion.
First and foremost, we have seen two major issues come to light when using the story dice system.
1. We need to have a cap on how many players the game can support.
2. Players CANNOT use their story dice to give themselves or any other party member powers.
The first is something that is true of RPGs in general, you get too many people crowded around the table and it's going to be a mess. Everyone is going to want to play their character "in-character" and they aren't all going to mesh, groups are going form within the group, the party will split, pace of game will slow down to a crawl, attention will be at an all time low, etc. This is true with every RPG. Even the DMG from D&D requests that there be no more than 6 players (not including the DM) for a good balanced game. When you get much larger than that, you really start stretching what the system can support, as well as what your attention span and the DM's patience can support.
This becomes especially apparent with the story dice system. This is because not only do you have a large amount playing the game, but you also have just as many controlling the game, instead of the one DM doing it. The problem of "too many cooks in the kitchen" starts taking shape, and frankly, it's not pretty. This is responsible for making the first "official' playtest of the game to fiery death in the bottom of some godforsaken canyon.
However, in playtests with 3-4 people, the story dice system worked exactly as it was meant to. It was fun, gave everyone plenty of control, and overall just felt ... good. I was honestly really happy with it with groups of this size.
The question remains, where is the cap on players where the game is still fun?
Good question, and I'll need to do more testing to figure that out, but as of right now, my guess is 6. Our game that crashed and burned had 8 players and that was clearly far too many. However, another reason it crashed and burned was because of the second reason.
People were granted power through the story dice and it made one person in the group (who it must be noted was playing a troll character [as in douchebag, not actual magical beast] as well) having an overabundance of power, and also allowing him to force a player to do things against their will. Overall it was just not a good experience for anyone. How do we fix this?
Well frankly, we can't fix every case, because someone is going to skim the rules and give himself powers or whatever. However, we can make sure to put the rule in bold, repeat it multiple times, and hope beyond hope that it gets beaten into their heads. Unfortunately, that's the best I think we can do.
Now onward to adding new mechanics!! (Whoooo!!)
It was brought to my attention that with the story dice system as it stands right now, we're giving the players all the control, and although the player side of me doesn't have a problem with that, the gamist part of me does. It has a big problem with it. Take for instance, the majority of games that people play, except for a small list (such as Checkers and Chess), many games are centered around some sort of luck mechanic, be it dice rolling, card drawing, etc. We already do have the dice rolling mechanic to kind of switch things up on the players. However, I think that we need to add something to make it a little more random on the story dice. Something that they can't completely control.
The idea put forth, was to subtract a die from the usual amount of story dice, and then give them two "Gamble" dice. They would roll these and then take the result off a table. The table would consist of general suggestions, nothing too specific, that they would have to do such as "A trap engages on the party" the person can then decide what trap, etc. It would still give them a certain amount of control, but would also add a solid amount of randomness to it.
Actually now that I'm thinking about it ... why would we need to to use dice and charts? That takes time and takes the character out of the game completely. Let's use cards for the story dice mechanic completely! Seriously, we could come up with a pattern for the "story dice" cards, now referred to as "story cards", each player gets 4, when they use one, they discard it. There's a "Gamble Deck" that two times per day they can draw from, the cards sit next to their character sheet (to show how many times they've already drawn). We have several cards and each lists a different situation that they have to incorporate into their game. It would be like a much more interesting version of the chart idea.
And on top of that it's more modular than a chart.
Any time we want to add more ideas to the gamble cards, we release an expansion, they shuffle the new cards in, no muss, no fuss, instead of getting a whole new book and trying to decide which chart they want. I'm excited now.
Also, if we want to kind of pull a Risk Legacy idea in there, Gamble Cards aren't a thing until later in the game, say after they get 2 "power cards" or whatever I called them for leveling up, then they get to open a pack and add Gamble Cards to the game. That way they'll get to adjust to the game and its mechanics, and then after they get used to it, the Gamble Cards can help add a nice switch up.
Wow. That idea changed a lot.
Let's review:
- Story dice are now Story Cards
- You get 4 instead of 5
- Gamble Cards are added
- You can draw 2 and take their effect immediately
I really like that idea. A lot.
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