Design Update #6- Dice bring Theme to the Table

In lieu of a new episode, I'm breaking down the new dice system for the Halloween Game, and how feedback is such an essential part of the game design process!

Welcome back to Wait, Roll That Again!

I’ve had to push back the release of the latest episode of Wait, Roll That Again! to next week. The design discoveries I had in last week’s design update have meant I’ve restructured a lot of the remainder of the season, and I needed a bit of time to actually do a big chunk of redesigning.

That means the next episode will come out Thursday, 21st September!

The New Direction

As I described in the last design update, I was stuck! It felt like the system I was putting together was becoming more convoluted and drifting further away from the core of the game I set out to make.

I sat on those discussions I’d had, and eventually I reworked a large chunk of the game. I’ve got a new dice system I’m excited about which we’ll be putting to the test in next week’s episode.

It’s a system that deals with the central tension a lot better conceptually, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays in-game. Essentially, players roll pools of dice, but dice shift between two opposed pools to represent how their character is changing or feeling in the moment.

Additional changes are:

• No skills or moves, instead the GM will help decide how the players intended actions fit into one of their two statistics, currently called HEART and HEROISM.

• Archetypes and costume genres have been simplified, but the character creation steps as heard on Episode 5 remain largely the same.

• The combat system has also been dismantled, and I’m figuring out combat play factors into this new version.

These changes were dramatic, as in a lot of what I’d previously done was thrown out, but the new direction of the game has got me really excited to keep working on it.

Sharing is Caring

I shared a draft of the rules to the KiwiRPG discord server, trying to test the waters and see how these designers responded to the choices I’d made in my new design.

The first thing that was pointed out was that my dice system actually didn’t work!

The system as written had players using a total of six 6-sided dice (d6), spread across their dice pools, where a result of a 1-3 was a failure, a 4-6 was a success. It’s possible for one statistic to have all six dice at once! When the players rolled their dice pools, they counted the number of successes vs the number of failures, and if you had more of one than the other, that determined the outcome of the move.

However, as was pointed out by a member — who’d run a number of statistical tests — that actually the probabilities weren’t working as I’d intended! Something tricky about the system is that actually the chances for success were getting worse as they got more dice in their pool, but this was based on the way I was counting successes vs failures. I’d also failed to account for a tie between success and failures.

A simple fix was to change the deciding factor to selecting the highest value that was rolled, and add in a ‘Forged In The Dark’ Failure(1-3)—Mixed Success(4-5)—Success(1-3) system to introduce some narrative complexity. This made the probabilities look a lot healthier to me, but it still needs testing at the table.

I got more feedback that was really productive, and those items of feedback can essentially be categorised as follows:

• The rules for shifting dice need more clarification

• The document is missing the abilities of the GM

• Some of the naming conventions could be changed to be more diegetic (related to the narrative world of the game)

• The positioning of HEROISM versus HEART could use more juice to make the connection more dramatically relevant

Those pieces of feedback, along with the maths work that helped me change the dice system for the better and have given me a solid direction to continue working on the system.

Thank you so much to everyone who gave such great feedback on my draft work! It’s helped clarify my own thoughts and tease out the right pathways to explore over the next few stages of my game design.

Next Time

Next week, the next episode will come out, and we’ll be putting this system under the microscope!

In case you missed last week’s episode, you can find it here:

Listen to it now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts, or wherever you get your podcasts today. Subscribe to the show in your favourite app!

I’ll see you next time, happy gaming!