Graven Utterance

Procedural lockpicking

2021-05-18T00:00:00-07:00

Jump to the proposed rules: general, for 5e or for B/X.

W.F. Smith of Prismatic Wasteland posted recently about making lockpicking and hacking more interactive than a simple skill roll, starting from the follow minigame:

In Errant by Ava Islam (itself the spawn of these rules from Telecanter), each lock requires a specific combination of actions: either twist, tap or turn, none of which are used consecutively. The would-be locksmith tries to guess the correct combination one action at a time. When they first pick a wrong action, it causes the lock to [feel] stiff. If a wrong action is performed on a stiff lock, the lock is jammed.

Thematically this is great fun, and combined with rules that certain kinds of locks share a combination, there’s a nice knowledge-collection and player skill component as well. Telecanter’s version has a bit of problem with probabilities—the rules for stiff locks are too permissive, so that the overall chance of success is 2/3 and the second and third steps don’t matter at all—but Errant fixes this by allowing only one wrong action across all three steps. This results in an overall 1/3 chance of success in the basic case. I think it helps to see this procedure visually:

Flow chart of outcomes in the Errant version of the minigame.

Errant includes modifications to the game for locks of varying quality, but W.F.’s addition is reincorporate character skill:

[To] integrate it more fully into a rule system with stat-based d20 tests[, …] have the wannabe burglar make a moderate Dexterity test at the onset, with the following results:

On a full success, you learn the first correct action.

On a partial success, you eliminate one option for the first action as incorrect.

On a failure, you have no clue as to the first action.

On a critical success, the lock opens immediately.

On a critical failure, the lock jams immediately.

Modifying the game to reflect character skill is a great idea, and the chance of success does vary: The “failure” case is identical to the original game (a 1/3 chance of success), while the chance goes up to 1/2 on a partial success and 3/4 on a full success, although we also have to take the likelihood of success on the Dexterity ability check into account:

Example (3rd level)

Lydia Rainier is 3rd level, with thieves’ tools and a +3 Dex mod, for a total of +5 vs a moderate Dex check of DC 15. Per the optional rules in the DMG, we’ll treat 13–14 as a partial success. With a straight check, Lydia has a 65% chance of success (critical, full, or partial) and opening the lock. With the addition of the minigame, their chance of success goes down to 57.5%.

This looks pretty good! Unfortunately the likelihood of success with and without the minigame don’t always align. As character skill increases, the likelihood of success increases much more slowly when using the minigame, because the chance of coming back from a failed check of the time becomes much less common than losing the minigame after a successful check:

Example (10th level)

Years later in-game, Lydia gets +9 on the same check (from a higher Dexterity and proficiency bonus). With a straight check, Lydia has an 85% chance of success (critical, full, or partial) and opening the lock (+5% for each additional modifier point). With the addition of the minigame, their chance of success goes down to 65.83̄%.

You could argue that this difference will be offset by player skill, if Lydia’s player has been keeping track of similar locks and their combinations, but if we’re going to complicate the procedure to incorporate character skill, then +4 difference in modifiers should net more than a paltry 8.3̄% (1/12) improvement in success rate.

Fortunately, we can preserve the probabilities of the ability check by creating variations of the minigame, each with a different chance of success. I ran some simulations and eventually came up with the following, keeping the basic structure of the game unchanged.

Basic procedural lockpicking

A lock takes three steps to open. At each step, the correct action is tap, twist, or turn, and the same action is never used consecutively. Wrong actions (errors) cause the lock to become stiff and eventually jam. You can’t start over, but you can give up without jamming the lock and try again later if you gain useful information.

Versions by chance of success

Vers.	Odds	~%	Special rule
A	1 in 12	8	No errors allowed.
B	1 in 8	13	No errors allowed, one option ruled out in first step.
C	1 in 6	17	One error allowed but only in the first step.
D	1 in 4	25	No errors allowed, but DM tells you first step.
E	1 in 3	33	One error allowed.
F	1 in 2	50	One error allowed, one option ruled out in first step.
G	2 in 3	67	Two errors allowed.
H	3 in 4	75	One error allowed, but DM tells you first step.
I	5 in 6	83	Two errors allowed, but DM tells you 2nd step after guessing the first.
J	7 in 8	88	Two errors allowed, one option ruled out in first step.
K	11 in 12	92	Three errors allowed.

Rules

Unless otherwise specified, count errors globally, so that “one error allowed” means that over the course of guessing all three actions, an incorrect action can be selected just once (making the lock stiff) before any additional incorrect actions make the lock jam. “No errors allowed” means that the lock immediately jams if an incorrect action is attempted.

Note that the original game from Telecanter (with the rule that allows one error per step) has the same probability as if we allow two global errors (Version G). I think allowing two global error is more interesting, though, since all three steps can be dramatic—if the burglar uses up both errors on the first step, they can still choose to continue, but the pressure is on and their chance of success has dwindled. Errant’s default is Version E, and the rules from Prismatic Wasteland include E, F, and H.

Commentary

These rules variants give a pretty good spread across the probability space. (All we’re missing are 5/12 and 7/12—let me know if you think of a way to include those that can be explained in one sentence.) Character skill and lock complexity can now be represented by the number of errors the burglar can recover from before the lock jams, and the options they’re able to eliminate without using up a guess. If you wanted to, you could stop here and have a nice little self-contained system: The group selects an appropriate difficulty (based on the character’s skills and circumstances and the quality of the lock), the DM secretly writes the correct combination, and the player can attempt the minigame. (Maybe a candidate for MOSAIC Strict?) But in the spirit of the Prismatic Wasteland post, let’s graft this minigame into D&D—first 5e, then B/X.

Procedural lockpicking for 5e

There are many factors that affect an ability check in 5e: the character’s ability modifier, their proficiency bonus, and the DC. Fortunately, bounded accuracy ensures that bonuses will almost always be between 0 and 11, and round DCs have common interpretations. This gives us a compact cheat sheet for success rates on ability checks, each of which maps (more or less) to one of the minigame versions above:

Ability modifier to % success and minigame version by DC

Roll mod	Easy (DC 10)	Medium (DC 15)	Hard (DC 20)	V. Hard (DC 25)
+0	F 55	D 30	A 5	– 0
+1	F 60	E 35	A 10	– 0
+2	F 65	E 40	B 15	– 0
+3	G 70	E 45	C 20	– 0
+4	H 75	F 50	D 25	– 0
+5	H 80	F 55	D 30	A 5
+6	I 85	F 60	E 35	A 10
+7	J 90	F 65	E 40	B 15
+8	K 95	G 70	F 45	C 20
+9	– 100	H 75	F 50	D 25
+10	– 100	H 80	F 55	D 30
+11	– 100	I 85	F 60	E 35

Shift up or down a letter for advantage/disadvantage.

Example

Welby Goodbarrel, a nimble (+4 Dex) 4th level Rogue with thieves’ tools (grants proficiency bonus, +2), want to pick a well-made (DC 20) lock. Instead of calling for an ability check, the DM looks up the odds of success for a d20+6 roll vs DC 20. It’s 35% and maps to lockpicking minigame version E. The DM secretly selects a combination and says, “Guess the combination to open the lock. One mistake will make the lock stiff, and a second will jam it.”

This might seem like a lot of table lookups, but in practice you probably only have a couple of characters who’ll attempt to open locks, so for the character in this example, I could jot down, “Easy→I, Medium→F, Hard→E, V.Hard→A” just like one might do for passive perception.

Procedural lockpicking for B/X

Thief skills are already percentage-based, and there are no modifiers for different qualities of locks, so it’s straightforward to map to minigame versions. Note that the easiest version (K, three errors allowed) only has a 92% chance of success, so you may want to revert to a % chance at level 12–14.

Thief level to Open Locks % and minigame version

Level	OL	Vers.	Special rule (repeated)
1	15	B	No errors allowed, one option ruled out in first step.
2	20	C	One error allowed but only in the first step.
3	25	D	No errors allowed, but DM tells you first step.
4	30	D	No errors allowed, but DM tells you first step.
5	35	E	One error allowed.
6	45	E	One error allowed.
7	55	F	One error allowed, one option ruled out in first step.
8	65	G	Two errors allowed.
9	75	H	One error allowed, but DM tells you first step.
10	85	J	Two errors allowed, one option ruled out in first step.
11	95	K	Three errors allowed.
12	96	K	Three errors allowed.
13	97	K	Three errors allowed.
14	99	K	Three errors allowed.

The usual caveats for how to think about thief skills apply here; see Robert Fisher’s “On thief skills in classic D&D” and “The B/X Thief is Good” from Gorgo Mormo, and only call for a roll (or minigame) when the lock is challenging and failure would be interesting.

Changelog

Date	Comment
2021-05-19	Substantial revisions to the discussion about precursor rules.
2021-05-18	Posted initial draft.

Mausritter character sheet for online play

2020-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

Like many of us, I’m playing more games while social distancing, and all of those games are online—mostly in Discord or Google Meet. I’ve been working through a backlog of great systems (like Trokia! and Moonhop) and next up is Mausritter.

The game’s inventory system features an arts-and-crafts, paper Tetris approach to management, and I think it’s important for players to be able to experience that, so in lieu of asking folks to print things at home, I’ve made a version of the character sheet and item cards in Google Sheets which you can copy here or by clicking the image above. (You can also just view it here, if you want to leave comments.) The original character sheet is nicely designed, so I’ve tried to stay as true to it as possible.

Update: Mausritter’s writer Isaac Williams has a post about running Mausritter online, which I’d not seen and offers some other options. There’s also a larger set of item and condition card images you can download there and use with this sheet.

Alphabetical adventures (A–B)

2020-02-03T00:00:00-08:00

I’m starting up a new 5th edition campaign for a coworker and friends, as part of a New Year’s resolution to play more games in person. I went into session zero mostly blind, so to prep, I decided to start reading through the 5e Monster Manual to come up with a potential scenario for each monster with CR 3 or less. I only got through letter B before I had to move on to other prep, but it was a fun exercise which I think I’ll continue.

A

A shard of the Rod in Seven Pieces lies on the roof of the castle’s highest tower. A raging storm prevents anyone from getting close, but a flock of Aarakocra will do anything to retrieve it.

A wizard is trapped and wounded by a spell of her own design, within her secluded tower. With her resources limited, she communicates with the outside world through Animated objects, crudely enchanted to “bring help” or “bring a mortal soul” to free her.

A farmer lures Ankhegs to attack his rivals’ farms, but now they’ve learned to demand tribute (and there are a lot of them).

An artificer has bound an Azer to the Material Plane and makes it work the furnace. The shop produces the finest weapons you’ve ever seen, but the surrounding land for 30 miles around has become a desert.

B

The Death Palace of Endon is built from the petrified bodies of thousands of his subjects and foes. His beloved Basilisks, which he bred for sport, still live within, guarding his treasure.

A legendary illness has returned to the land, and the only cure grows in a glade guarded by a Spectator Beholder. Ironically, the creature was summoned a generation ago by a great medical scholar, to ensure that the cure would be available in just this situation…

Some misguided druids perform regular sacrifices over the stump of a great tree. Now there is new growth, and Blights carrying echoes of the sacrifices prowl the night.

It’s a reverse siege: Bugbear mercenaries burned a path to the middle of town, saw their warlord fall to a lucky arrow, and promptly quit the fight. Now they control the town square and the inn, and they’re almost out of beer.

Baron Uurk Urgit, a Bullywug, thought he’d stolen a shiny bauble for his queen, but that’s a fire elemental in a delicate jar. Get it back before someone breaks it!

Flip to continue: B-side sessions

2019-11-04T00:00:00-08:00

My regular gaming group prefers to play our main campaign only when every player is available. Scheduling is hard, so we’ve canceled a lot of sessions over the years as a result. The past few months though, we’ve kept to our schedule more often because we’ve introduced a backup game. This game is:

Run by me, so that the main campaign’s GM can PC (and also because I like to GM)
Set in the same world and time as the main campaign
Run as a series of one-shots, with weaker continuity than the main campaign, and
Thematically distinct from the main campaign.

We call it the B-side game, and hitting all of the bullets above each time we play is a fun little side project for me. While my group started this to deal with scheduling challenges, I’d recommend this format for any group that wants a change of pace, especially if there’s a player who’s looking to experiment or build up skills at running one-shots with little prep. Here’s how we do it.

Tag in a backup GM

Or even better, a couple of them, since you want to be able to play this game when a subset of your players are availble; if you can avoid having any single player be a lynchpin, you’ll get to play more often.

It’s especially valuable to play your B-side game when the main campaign’s GM is available to play, so that they have a chance to experience their own game world. I also recommend sticking to the same ruleset for the same reason, and so that there’s less of a mental shift required if you switch from A-side (main campaign) plans to B-side last minute.

Meanwhile…

Setting the B-side game in the same world as the A-side lets your group enrich the setting and explore paths that the main party didn’t follow. As the GM, you also get the benefit of free plot hooks, recurring NPCs, and lore, courtesy of the main campaign. You also leave open the possibility of crossovers.

In our game, each player has a B-side character that they reuse between B-side sessions, although they’re welcome to change at any time.

One and done

B-side sessions should be self-contained, so that they never interfere with scheduling the main campaign. This requires forethought to pick an appropriate starting point and discipline in guiding the session to a satisfying conclusion.

There’s often an impulse to over-script a one-shot, but try to fight this. My trick is to make the first scene so open-ended that I can’t predict what the players will do. We collaborate from there, and in the last hour of our planned game time, I’ll start actively looking for ways to bring the session to a close.

All the usual one-shot tricks apply: Start in medias res, cut scenes agressively, pit the characters against the clock, and don’t pull your punches.

If your players reuse their characters between B-side sessions and you use the tricks above, weak continuity is a natural consequence. Even if a session ends with a cliffhanger, seriously consider jumping in time or space for the next session. Blank spaces and apparent contradictions are interesting.

Remix

Besides ensuring that we play more often, my goal for the B-side game is to complement the A-side game in a way that’s exciting for the players and doesn’t compromise the main campaign’s status as the main game. While organizing play into one-shots help with this, the tool I employ most is using setting, characters, and plot to push the tone of the game away from the tone of the A-side.

We’re playing Starfinder. Our A-side crew is a party of semi-professional space pirates, chasing down an ancient super weapon while getting in the middle of some complicated interplanetary politics: Great stuff for a long-running campaign, with a lot of space opera and space horror influences on a grand scale.

For the B-side game, we stick to smaller stakes. So far, the party has been down on its luck, stuck on a desert planet. While there are still big action moments, I’m drawing on cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic tropes, and aiming for a tone like the slow episodes of Cowboy Bebop. It’s punchier, more comic, and generally less real than the A-side campaign, which makes it natural for the players to want to flip back to the A-side by default.

Roll for fluency

2019-04-12T00:00:00-07:00

My friend Crypt Thing from Swords Against Dungeons gave me a shoutout in an article about fantasy languages last month, so I figured I’d chime in on the subject. CT’s post touches on a lot of topics, but I’ll just pull out a few of them.

Keeping Common

First and foremost, “Common” is replaced by regional languages.

Common gets a bad rap for at least two related reasons, both of which are reasonable reactions to the way Common is used in many classic fantasy settings.

First, there’s a family of arguments that say that glossing over linguistic differences harms the setting and makes the game world less “rich” or believable, because language should be one of the most obvious markers of difference and interest in games where travel and travelers otherwise take center stage. I’ll call this the “Common is unrealistic” argument.

The second family of arguments takes this further and says glossing over language in this way is actively harmful because of how easily Common can make one culture or set of viewpoints the default. Under this view, it’s not just that Common is unrealistic, or even boring, but that Common has a homogenizing effect that erases differences.

To the “Common is unrealistic” camp, I’d say that there’s more precedent to this than you might think: Throughout history, disparate groups have settled on common languages to use for trade or government purposes while still retaining their native languages. This is often called a lingua franca. (The TVTropes page on the Common Tongue actually covers this fairly well.) If you imagine your setting’s Common as a trade language, or the language imposed by an empire that fell a couple hundred years before, it’s totally reasonable that many people would speak it, at least in the circles that adventurers tend to move in.

To the “Common is homogenizing” camp, we need to retcon Common so that it becomes a reminder to celebrate differences instead of ignore them. This post offers a nice fix along these lines to avoid falling into the trap of human = common = default, suggesting that you make Common a trade language that developed from a pidgin of multiple major languages in your setting. If you must have languages that are named after fantasy species, then just adding “Human” alongside “Elven” and “Dwarven” (as separate from Common) can be a step in the right direction.

The magical language faculty

[S]tart thinking of other factors in your world: magic, monsters, and the influences they will have in language as a whole

Mateo Diaz Torres’s A Most Thoroughly Pernicious Pamphlet has my favorite take on fantasy languages in a gaming book. It’s also fun to see how the inventory of languages evolved over time.

In particular, I like the idea of painting the world with language the way that we paint it with magic. What if mortal children could speak the language of the Fey? What if it were impossible to learn Thieves’ Cant until you’ve committed an irrevocable crime?

Language in play

Does this mean you could get a party where nobody speaks the same languages? Absolutely. […] I think that, unless the player wants that challenge, that it’s something to avoid.

I’m in favor of rolling in the open, sharing information with players that their characters don’t know, and generally doing whatever I can to keep information flowing around the table. To that end, I agree that characters ought to be able to communicate with one another, and tend to make it a requirement that everyone speaks mutually intelligible languages, on par with the requirement that the characters start with a reason to work together, rather than just having them meet up in a bar. (“You look trustworthy!”)

That said, navigating the world and conversing with NPCs is another matter, and I’d have no problem with the party deciding that they don’t really speak the language where they’re adventuring.

One alternative to making that kind of decision up front is to let the dice decide. This is how language skills work in Lamentations of the Flame Princess; language knowledge is determined at the time the language is encountered in-game. For some related thoughts, Necropraxis has a good article.

There’s also some article out there which I haven’t been able to track down, but I recall it makes a point about identifying languages, and how any adventurer worth their boots would have at least passing familiarity with the languages that are prevalent in their world.

Recluse: A solo engine

2019-03-24T00:00:00-07:00

Download Recluse as a one-page PDF on itch.io.

Here’s a simple question-answering tool you can use to tell stories with unexpected twists, or as drop-in replacement for the oracle in your favorite GM emulator. (I like so1um and the CRGE.) Its two defining features are:

Quick interpretation: No arithmetic, large table lookups, or state tracking to understand the results of a roll. Instead, we only do value comparisons between dice and a high/low judgment. After a test roll or two, this can be done with a glance.
Surprise: Lots of tools like this one inject randomness in the form of plot twists, but the twist is usually introduced in the course of answering the question, or after it’s been answered. If you’re GMing or playing solo, that means you’re adding elements to your narration that you didn’t expect, but it’s not really surprising, the way that players get surprised when they think they know what’s going on and it turns out they don’t. This tool tries to mimic that feeling of surprise by making the GM into an unreliable narrator; whenever you ask a question using this mechanic, it’s possible that the question itself is wrong, which fosters less predictable twists.

Consulting the oracle

You’ll need 2d6 in one color, and 2d6 in another. I’ll use black and white.

To resolve a yes-or-no question, roll one black die and one white die. If white is highest, the answer is Yes. If black is highest, the answer is No.

To find out if the answer is more nuanced than just a plain Yes or No, also look at the value on each die. If both are low (3 or less), add But. If both are high (4 or more), add And.

Example

You ask, “Does the vampire catch fire?” You roll one white die and one black die and get 5 4. That’s a Yes, because the white die is higher, and an And, because both rolls are 4 or higher. If the black die had come up as 3, it would have been a plain Yes instead.

Likely and unlikely events

Yes and No are equally likely if you use one die of each color. If circumstances are different, include an additional die in favor of the more likely outcome when you roll, but only keep the higher die of that color when you compare.

Example

You ask, “Does Lydia make it over the fence?” Unlike the werewolf that’s after her, she’s just a puny human, so it’s pretty unlikely she’ll succeed. You roll one white die and two black dice. You get 3 3 5. You ignore the black 3, so the answer is a plain No; she doesn’t make it over.

If you do the math, you might notice that you’re about three times more likely to get And than But on an uneven roll, since you’re throwing out low dice. This means more extreme outcomes for extra drama.

What if I roll doubles?

If the dice are equal, some presupposition behind the question is wrong! This means that you’re taking something for granted that makes it impossible to answer with “Yes” or “No.” If it’s obvious how you’re the question could be assuming something, change it and ask something else. You can also use your favorite plot twist generator if you need to, but keep in mind that the question itself was wrong; you’ll need to revise your assumptions about the situation and the world, not just add something new.

If you’ve never thought about questions this way, it can be tricky to recognize what one presupposes. One approach is to imagine what would have to be the same about the scenario if the answer were either Yes or No. For example, if I ask, “Does the villain’s sidekick escape before the train explodes?” there are a lot of things that would have to be the same under either answer, the most obvious one being that the train explodes! (This is a presupposition introduced by the use of before.) There are other presuppositions in there too, like that the villain has a sidekick, and even that there’s a train.

Example

You ask, “Does Sam grab the gun from the mobster?” and roll 4 4. This means it’s not possible to answer “Yes” or “No,” but why? You think, “Well, maybe the thing that the mobster is holding only looks like a gun,” but decide that can’t work because it was fired just a minute ago. Instead, you realize the mobster isn’t a mobster at all, but an undercover cop! You follow up with a crucial question: “Does Sam know he’s interrupting a sting operation?” Fingers crossed…

Changelog

Date	Comment
2021-01-08	Updated to v1.0, fixing typos, tweaking examples, and adding PDF version on itch.io
2020-08-25	Ricardo from Tragos Games has translated Recluse v0.2 into Portuguese! Check it out.
2019-03-26	Added more discussion of presupposition (v0.2).
2019-03-24	Posted initial version (v0.1).

“Recluse” by Graven Utterance is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Risks and rewards in Starfinder

2019-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

Here’s a thought experiment in narrative control. The GM of my biweekly Starfinder campaign asks of my previous post:

I’m not familiar with DRYH and how the dice pools work but this looks really cool. Something similar to a Raise the Stakes concept. I’ve always liked allowing players to accomplish more if their willing to take some risks. Do you think it would be possible or practical to use DBYP in a Starfinder game?

I’m a big fan of the supplement linked in that quote, which provides additional mechanical hooks for players in d20 games to control the narrative. In games with lighter rulesets, you can usually get the same kind of creative contributions from players just by encouraging them to ad lib, but in D&D/3/3.5/Pathfinder/Starfinder, I’ve always had more luck by (paradoxically) introducing extra rules of this sort.

So what would it look like to mash up Don’t Rest Your Head and Starfinder (or another d20-derived game), and what would you gain from it?

DRYH rules in a nutshell

For the uninitiated, Don’t Rest Your Head is a game where you play an insomniac whose sleeplessness has let them see through the world’s illusions. They have a weird power as a result (a Madness talent) and are hunted by nightmares given physical form. A partial rules summary:

You have three pools of six-sided dice: Resolve (3 dice), Exhaustion (1 to 6 dice), and Madness (up to 6 dice), which you roll together against the GM’s Pain dice pool when you want to do something risky. Every die that comes up 1, 2, or 3 counts as a success. The side with more successes wins…
…but that win is accompanied by consequences depending on which pool dominates the roll. The dominating pool is the one with the highest single value. (Drop tied dice until you have a winner, then go in the order that the pools were introduced above if there’s nothing left.)
It’s only a good thing when Resolve dominates; otherwise, your Exhaustion will start spiralling out of control, your Madness will trigger a fight-or-flight response and/or consume you, or the situation will become increasingly painful for your character and the people they care about.
You always roll Resolve and your current Exhaustion, but you can choose how much Madness to use; those dice sit in front of you, every turn, waiting for you to decide whether the action warrants the risk that using them poses.

I’m going in a different thematic direction with DBYP, but as an emergent property of the sytem, both are games of hard choices with a strong resource-management component that’s a little like Yahtzee: You can accomplish almost anything, but how much are you willing to push your luck to do it?

Torches vs lighter fluid

This kind of resource-management stands in contrast to games in the tradition of the original fantasy game (including its rules-heavy children like Starfinder), where you tend to be counting down to oblivion: Consumable items like torches, spells, and especially hit points all represent scarce resources that the player must deploy judiciously to prevent their character from dying.

In DRYH, you’re not in danger of running out of light in a dark place. You’re in danger of burning the place to the ground while you’re still inside. So let’s turn up the heat in Starfinder.

Drift, Health, and Void dice

To model an ability that a character can use to an unlimited degree but at great personal risk, assign it a pool of six-sided Drift dice. (I’m using that name because the Drift is a big unknown in Starfinder, and so is a reasonable source for weird powers, but feel free to look elsewhere for inspiration.) Assign at least three tiers of effects to the pool, e.g.:

Drift-ability: Cross-dimensional resonance

Your exposure to the raw energies of the Drift let you peer for a moment beyond the edge of time and space, into other times and spaces. As a standard action, channel the Drift for any of the following effects.

Pool size Effect

1-2 dice Cast Mirror image on target touched creature. It lasts 1 minute.

3-4 dice Flood target touched creature with memories of another life. Will save DC 20 to act normally.

5-6 dice Replace target touched creature with their double from a mirror universe. Details up to the GM.

Pool size	Effect
1-2 dice	Cast Mirror image on target touched creature. It lasts 1 minute.
3-4 dice	Flood target touched creature with memories of another life. Will save DC 20 to act normally.
5-6 dice	Replace target touched creature with their double from a mirror universe. Details up to the GM.

I think the most critical aspect of this subsystem is to tie the consequences back to the original system, which in this case means hit point depletion. Starfinder characters have two-tiers of health (Stamina and Hit Points), so we’ll define the Health dice that the player rolls alongside their Drift dice to correspond to different levels of health. I’ve chosen not to include a pool like Exhaustion because it models a longer-term resource and would mean tracking extra bits for this subsystem.

The size of the GM’s opposing Void dice pool is left to GM fiat, but I wouldn’t recommend going over 4, and you should tell the players what you’re going to oppose with while they’re making their decision to roll. Keep in mind that they’ll only have a 50/50 shot to succeed if your Void pool is the same size as their Health+Drift pool. Here’s the final proposal:

Channel the Drift

When you channel the Drift, assemble your pools of six-sided dice and roll against the GM’s Void dice:

Start with one Health die. Add a second if you have all your HP. Add a third if you have all your stamina.

Pick up as many Drift dice as you need to get the desired effect.

Roll all your dice and count up every die that comes up 1, 2, or 3.

The GM will also roll some number of Void dice (usually 2-4), and count successes the same way. If you have the same or more successess, the effect takes place, otherwise it doesn’t.

Figure out which of the three pools dominates the roll.

If Health dominates, nothing more happens. (Whew!)

If Drift dominates, act randomly for a number of rounds equal to the size of your Drift pool, probably not in your own best interest.

If Void dominates, you lose health: If you have stamina, drop it all. If you don’t, drop to 1 HP. If you have no stamina and you’re at 1 HP, drop to zero.

Drift domination is a pretty punishing rule, but since the player decides when it’s worth it to push it and the possible outcomes are known prior to the roll, I don’t think it’s unfair. The player also has Resolve points that they can use to recover – characters are pretty resilient in Starfinder.

Inspirations for mystic heroism

2019-03-14T00:00:00-07:00

Don’t Break Your Pact (DBYP) is my house-ruled hack of Don’t Rest Your Head for stories of mystic heroism. From a mechanical perspective the bones of the hack are pretty simple; Discipline, Exhaustion, and Madness dice pools from DRYH become:

Soul: Represents the core of who you are. You have 3 dice in this pool, and if you lose them, you’re likely to lose yourself and what’s important to you.
Guts: Represents what makes you exceptional. You start with 2 and can push yourself to gain more (max 6). Having a lot of guts dice means you’re near your limit and you’re in danger of having the situation get out of control, whether that means losing your nerve or going into a frenzy.
Pact: Represent fantastic power granted by a patron. You can have access to up to 6 pact dice total, possibly from multiple patrons.

There are some differences in how these pools work, but it’s basically still the case that you have a “safe” pool (Soul), a “push it” pool (Guts), and a magical pool that you can exploit at great personal risk (Pact). Games of this sort allow the characters to accomplish a lot as long as their players are willing to take risks, and so the drama often comes from the danger of collateral damage to things the characters value.

I’ve been trying to hone in on what kinds of stories DBYP is supposed to help tell and build an meta-setting that supports it. In terms of inspirations, I think the list below is as short as I can get without leaving out anything essential.

Dragon Ball (Akira Toriyama)
Le Monde d’Edena (Mœbius)
Avatar: The Last Airbender & The Legend of Korra
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Chrono Trigger
The Earthsea Cycle (Ursula K. Le Guin)
The Old Kingdom series (Garth Nix)
The Broken Earth trilogy (N. K. Jemisin)

Bonus: There’s also a visual inspiration album on Pinterest.