GET READY

The Imposition Dice System has been in development for a while now. One of the first things we nailed down was the dice resolution mechanic during personal play tests. It felt fun, interacted well with the other mechanics, and flowed. However, when presenting it to players and getting deeper into play tests I discovered it wasn't very intuitive and tripped up people for several rolls. Eventually folks grasped it, but that's not what I wanted.

So, with the help of Binary Star Game's input, we've landed on a slight tweak to the dice system that keeps things very close to the original concept but makes it far more intuitive.

THE DIFFERENCE

Originally you'd roll your character's Spell Die (typically a d6) along with their Path Die (for whatever spell they're casting). The Crypt Keeper would assign an Imposition Die to represent how difficult the task is, ranging from a d4 to a d12. The player's goal is to roll a 7 or higher when adding together their Spell and Path die to get a full success. A 4-6 is a partial success and 1-3 is a failure.  However, if the Imposition Die value is equal to or greater than the lowest die, that die is cancelled out leaving you with only one result. You should always be left with one result.

So assuming the array is always Spell Die, Path Die, Imposition Die: A result of 5,6,3 (for a total of 11) would be a full success. Whereas a 5,3,6 (for a total of 5) is a partial success. The 6 "eats" the 3. In the situation of a 4,4,4 you would pick one of the 4s to remove, leaving you with a final result of 4.

Ok, so that's the old way.

Here's the tweak.

No longer are we worried bout the final value of the dice. Only whether or not the Imposition Die is greater than or equal to ONE of the other two die. If this is is false you have a full success. If only greater than one it's a partial success. If it's greater than both it's a failure. So using our numbers from before: A result of 5,6,3 is still a full success though we're not worried about the final value. However, the 5,3,6 is a FAILURE! as the Imposition Die is greater than both the Spell and Path Die. And finally the 4,4,4 is a partial success.

It's just even easier to write! And so far in play tests it's also been fantastically easier for the players to pick up. So that's good news. 

We've also had an amazing friend, Penny LeScroche, create a script that allowed us to do A-B testing against the two methods. This has given us an amazing insight into the results after a thousand rolls. Plotting it out we see that the difficulty progression of the second method falls more inline with how we'd want a d12 to be verses a d4. So that's fantastic.

SRD UPDATE

So we'll begin updating the SRD to make this change official and put into the book. Though I believe going forward the updates (when they're this significant for sure) will be uploaded as plain text files. While I enjoy making the SRD's as cool as possible with lost of visual flavor, it makes putting in these kinds of updates very hard because it often changes the layout significant.  So expect that in the near future.

Have a good one!