I’ve been wondering a lot, while working on my VDS-base hack (one that actually stemmed from What You Fight For, my first complete VDS hack), about how in most games resolution for different actions is the same.
For discussion purposes, I’ll take ICRPG as a base, but the same is true for VDS and a bunch of other games. I will be using the “base” forms of these actions, and before anything I want to state these are not a flaw of these systems.
Let’s say I want to attack with a sword, whoever my character is. Roll d20 + Attribute, meet or beat the target, roll Effort.
Now I want to heal someone with a spell, drawn from the faith I have in some divine power. Roll d20 + Attribute, meet or beat the target, roll Effort.
Or I want to cast a Fireball, having studied magic formulas for years on end. Roll d20 + Attribute, meet or beat the target, roll Effort.
I find this… mostly OK, to be honest. I understand the design purpose behind it. You only have to teach the game once and the player can then pick up most any character and play it instantly. This is great, right?
But at the same time, I find myself seeking out different mechanical resolutions for these actions. How exactly can “hoping for a small miracle” resolve identically, mechanically, to “manipulating the forces of the cosmos to conjure a spell”?
So I’ve been thinking about asymmetrical resolution - that is, different things resolving in different ways.
Leaving aside ICRPG, let’s take a dice pool approach, similar to VDS Skills. Get you dice, roll them, get N or more dice above a certain value.
But what if some things resolved by getting just one die on the value, against a die rolled by the GM on the spot? What if some others resolved with the player being able to literally fiddle with the dice, “fudging them inside the rules” one number up or down to get the results they want, instead of simply rolling them and hoping they’re high?
Would this be a turn-off for players?
Would the probabilistic inequality between different resolutions be a problem?
I know it’s a lengthy and somewhat weird topic, but I’ve debated it with myself so far and need outside input on this. I appreciate y’all who reply to discuss this.
TL;DR: Would it be cool or a turn-off if a system presented different ways of resolving things that, in other systems, are resolved similarly?