Lately I’ve been tinkering around with games. I’ve been playing for as long as I remember, first messing around with G.I.Joes and “hacking” them with duct tape and toothpicks, then with a variety of video-games and lately with role-playing games. And there’s an itch somewhere I need to scratch about not only playing but also making games, exploring how they work and what they can achieve.
This above is just a silly idea for an approach to characters in games like Dungeons and dragons and Dungeon World. Instead of always rolling a d20 and add or subtract bonuses, you assign a specific die to each stat and always use that. The result is a very unbalanced character that needs to pick between steady results (a d20 will be a success in 50% of the cases, a critical success and a critical failure on 5%) or crazy chances (a d20 will never be a success but has a 25% chance of being a critical success) for their primary stats. The number necessary to hit a success feels a bit high (a 8 may be better so d10, d12 and d20 all have chanches of at least hitting it) and could be balanced with a range for a partial success, like in Dungeon World.
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