Okay, I’ve gone away and had a long think about a core resolution mechanic for a Dust to Dust-based tabletop game. For aesthetic reasons, a core resolution mechanic for this game should involve dominoes, but what if it’s a combination dice-and-dominoes system? (The fact that both “dice-and-dominoes” and “Dust to Dust” involve initial letters very similar to another game we all know and many of us love is… well, it’s not a problem yet.)
This idea is less than 60 minutes old as of this writing, so I beg your forbearance, O you reader.
Let’s say that the core die roll is 2d6. You get this for just being, you know, a basically capable character. (Can you get more dice? That’s a consideration for later.)
You roll your 2d6 and you get a 2 and a 4. You don’t add them together, you just take the highest die. Let’s say your target number is a 6.
You also have some domino bones, pulled from a bag of double-six dominoes. (That’s 28 domino bones, numbered 0-0 to 6-6.) For this roll you currently have 0-2, 0-3, 5-5, and 1-6 in hand. You can match the 2 die to the 2 pip on the 0-2 bone, and you can match the 0-3 bone to the 0 pip on the 0-2 bone. (I’m trying to describe standard domino matching rules. It’s clumsy in text, without visuals.) You add the dice pips to your die result, so that 2 becomes a 7 and succeeds.
My instinct is that you have a limit on how many bones you can spend on any one roll that is your skill rating (rank 2 in a skill is probably a very good rank at start of play?), there’s some form of cooperation so that your teammates can add one bone to your roll, and you refill your bone pool up to whatever your normal hand size is at the start of the round, so you don’t necessarily want to spend everything you have on your main action in the round. You might need bones to improve avoidance or resistance rolls of some kind.
I think it could create a game of setting up dazzling combos with your teammates where you hit a target number in the 30s. What I know from Dust to Dust and Citadel is that cooperative casting with dominoes feels great for players. I want the system to have room for wrinkles so that magic and character skills can do a lot of interesting, weird stuff.
The point of this post comes down to “is this anything?”
A Starting Point
Playing around with the idea a little more:
Character Name: Skara
Concept: Apprentice Wizard
Level: 1
Health: 4
Pool: 4
Skills:
Agility: 1
Awareness: 1
Craft: 0
Healing Ways: 0
Lore: 1
Might: 0
Resolve: 1
Skullduggery: 1
Weaponry: 0
Wizardry: 2 (Wizardry is an example of a locked skill. You can’t roll Wizardry without at least one rank in it.)
Skara has a belt knife. His attacks with it might use Agility or Skullduggery. On a success, he deals damage equal to 1 (knife’s base damage) + his choice of Might, Agility, or Skullduggery.
Skara knows four spells:
Novice’s Sign of the Tethered Star. Creates light as a torch, Difficulty 4. No backlash on failure.
Rune of Threefold Flame. Attacks twice. Each hit (Difficulty 6) deals 1 damage. On a failure, your Pool is reduced by 1 until you take a short rest.
Mark of the Queensguard. Grants +1 Toughness (temporary Health, let’s say) to each of 3 targets. On a failure, your Pool is reduced by 1 until you take a long rest.
Sign of the Bitter Blade. Adds Skara’s Wizardry rank to the damage of the next attack with the target weapon that hits. Difficulty 6. On a failure, your Pool is reduced by 1 until you take a short rest.
The basic dynamic of an attack is that you roll with your attack stat against the target’s Defense, which is normally 4 + Agility. (Thus a roll of 5+ hits Skara.) Wearing armor helps, uh, somehow. I don’t know yet.
Miscellaneous Thoughts
I would like to see warrior and rogue types have just as many interesting action options as spellcasters, essentially in the form of maneuvers that maybe make them turn a bone face-down for a round.
Maybe crits happen when you have a bone that you can play that matches both dice? So you roll a 2 and a 4, and connect them with the 2-4 bone. Now you have a result of a (2+2+4+4) that is also a crit if it beats the Difficulty.
Anyway. It’s an idea, and it feels good to have those even when they’re messy and half-formed.
Next Bit
Samhaine rightly points out that I’ve created a result range from 1 (or, with two dominoes, 2: 1, 1-0, 0-0) to 25 (6, 6-6, 6-5), before we start talking about other PCs contributing a bone. We’ve discussed a few different possibilities there. Without further rules changes and a typical difficulty of about 6, the main benefit of the low-pip bones is setting up a combo, either from your own pool or from someone else’s. Alternately, maybe we don’t care much at all about the sum of the pips, and instead we care about setting up chains. Each bone you connect to is a success. (Side note here: it’s possible that a double-nine or even double-twelve set would be better, though those sets have a lot more bones.)
Or maybe there’s a Strain mechanic that hits you with a minor cost for playing pips above a number, such as 3. If you roll a 3+, you’re either paying Strain or keeping that result. If you roll a 1 or 2, you can play bones with 0s, 1s, and 2s without paying Strain.
Or maybe you expend (without pairing them with a die or other domino) those low-number bones to activate other stuff. That might mean discarding or flipping face-down (as described above) or… I don’t know yet. This is the design step where I just have to start making decisions, even wrong ones, so that I can find out what the right ones are.
Work and LARP-prep cycles permitting, I’m going to keep messing around with this, to see where it goes.
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