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The Power Roll (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-03 17:38:39
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

“It's not the DUMB thing YOU'RE thinking of. It's the COOL thing WE'RE thinking of."

Files

The Power Roll | Designing The Game

👹 Get yourself a Goblin Box | https://mcdm.gg/goblinbox 🎲 PreOrder the MCDM RPG | https://mcdm.gg/RPG 💝 Support us on the MCDM Patreon | https://mcdm.gg/patreon 📚 Enhance your game with MCDM products from our Shop! https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/ 🐦 Follow us on Twitter! MCDM - https://twitter.com/helloMCDM Matt - https://twitter.com/MattColville 💬 Join the conversation on the MCDM Discord! https://mcdm.gg/discord Background music for livestreams is provided by State Azure. https://stateazure.bandcamp.com/

Comments

Rebecca Lawrence

I could swear I saw this exact video before today but maybe it was just another instance of Matt gushing about Epic Spell Wars 😅

Nick Enquist

It really helps hearing the thoughts out when describing these things. I’m a slower reader so reading the Patreon posts don’t always click. Appreciate the video and very excited to try the new system.

Anthony Renaud

Am I the only one who hopes they borrow more from Epic Spell Wars and give a unique names for each tier of results for each power?

Davide D'Alessandro

Woah! For us patreons that read already about the power roll the biggest reveal of this video was the VTT clip at the beginning. Really looking forward to it, I have high hopes for something more user friendly than FGU.

jim_bahluu

This sounds great! Much better design levers here than just modifiers to add to a role, will make future classes/abilities/artifacts easier to design. I did also think, when you mentioned character sheets, that this would be well suited to cards instead of having a bunch of lines on a character sheet for the abilities. Whether those are cards that get sold in a deck or just printed as needed when characters level up. Might be nice to have a tool that a game master can select x cards and it'll put them on a sheet to be printed nicely and cut out. Getting cards with new abilities/items feels good, and allows players to spread them on the table rather than shuffling papers.

Trevor Chart

"The chart tells you what happens" Well yes, as the Director that was always what I was going to do! XD

Grim Bacon

I love the idea of a "bad fireball" where the lower you roll on the power roll, the MORE targets the fireball hits, or the bigger the radius the fireball hits, but it hits all creatures not just enemies in the area.

Kyman201

I have to say, even outside of the game details themselves, I appreciate these videos for providing under-the-hood insight into the design process

Kevin

Ah...cool. Similar to the damage chart in Troika!.

Carlfish

15-year old me loved looking at the attack charts in Rolemaster and thinking "won't it be cool if I chop someone's head off." So I'm glad I'm not the only person who immediately thought of them, but also not surprised it wasn't what you went with.

Ben W.

I love the Apoc inspiration, I *adore* that system

Derek Berdine

First thought after watching this is that maybe you could have magic items or kits that let you roll 2d8 instead of 2d6. Use the same chart, but the 2-12 result range is now 2-16 (giving you a higher chance of hitting the top tier) and keeps the bottom tier a likely result. Keep a critical hit as rolling two of the top die (16 instead of 12). Quite a difference from an arbitrary +4, which would ensure a 6+ roll and make Crits happen on a roll of 8+.

Daniel Lingeman

A d12 would achieve the same result if you just apportion the ranges of the chart unequally. Well, it would have one additional possible outcome, but the point is that once you add a chart, multiple dice become unnecessary to achieve a distribution of results shaped however you like. Since a 12 is a Highly Composite Number, you could have ranges of outcomes on the chart be as wide or narrow as any factor of 12 without restricting the size the other ranges can be too much. Anyway, you can just assign the role of creating a distribution to whoever is making the table of outcomes. So you could have roll a d12: 1-6 worst outcome 7-9 good 10-11 better 12 best. Or whatever. You can reshape it so it looks like a normal bell curve with the largest range (most likely outcome) in the middle, but that one I just made up where rolling higher is better works fine just for an example. Using the chart to create the distribution also does another thing two dice cannot: allow the distribution to change from chart to chart. Maybe some high level magic spell has a different distribution than the one above because we create a hazard category for what happens when you roll a one summoning the demon, or whatever. That way you can keep the idea that the fighter never misses and wastes their turn, but there’s something interesting that DOES happen when a one is rolled and some demon is loose on the battlefield under Director control. There are a lot of different reasons you would want different ranges for different charts, but if you use multiple dice, the distribution is kind of dictated mostly by that. Obviously a d20 has more potential outcomes from a roll, but the only factors of 20 are 1,2,5 and 10. Whereas 12 has 1,2,3,4 and 6 (which I used 1,2,3, and 6 in my example) so d12 actually is more flexible than d20 for creating unequal ranges on the outcome chart! TL;DR: one die creates randomness. Any additional non-randomness you want to add is easier to control by changing the table of outcomes than by adding dice, which brings the result of any roll closer to the mean no matter what. Edit: one last thing, Having the dice create a first distribution of outcomes and the table create a second will make it hard for players to estimate their chances of success in real time. Maybe that’s a design goal, but I just wanted to point it out. With a d12 and the ranges of outcomes being created on the chart, everything except 5,10 and 11 simplifies to be x/6, x/4, x/3, or x/2 which are fractions fourth graders learn. So it’s a low obstacle to learning the game

FoxTrick

Epic, fast, simple and scalable. Perfect!

Normann Patton

The thing I think I like about this from a director side is that this can allow all the rolls to be "in front of the screen" but the actual abilities are "behind the screen." This could add more fun instances, for example if you mirror one point Matt mentioned and have a heroic ability that could reduce a roll by 1, the players could see a roll of 8 and while not knowing fully what that attack might do, they could try to "soften the blow"

sidd

Hoping to throw my money at a deck of cards with these powers and outcomes, love the design

Kevin Garber

We just got to the playtest packet (session 1 of 2 it will take to get through) this week and it was very satisfying to see this being addressed. I love the concept of the chart. It fits neatly with the "ability cards" feel of things, and immediately the idea of everyone getting that visceral shared experience of the glee of a good roll or the angst of a poor roll being preserved was great. Actually it feels magnified as support abilities "powering up" or "powering down" something by A TIER sounds super cool. Like, it might just mean preventing 3 damage, but knowing my bodyguarding ability lowered the enemy attack by one whole tier sounds cool. I really appreciated how the game systems so far have incentivized my players to do cool fun stuff.

Austin

I like this idea a lot and will be using the same idea in the TTRPG I am designing. Though, since you are moving to this style of roll, you can actually just make it a d20 instead of 2d6. That is what I am going to do for mine. I love the d20 and using this resolving combat completely gets rid of my biggest issue with d20 which is the variance. Thanks to you I have the dice resolution mechanic I have been searching for since I started!

Ernge

The effect of a +1 is dependent on how good your existing result is when you use multiple dice. When you use a single N-sided die, adding a +1 always has a 1/N chance of moving the result from one tier to the next, but that doesn't hold for multiple dice.