Fractayle: The Collision of Worlds

Action & Rules

Using Attributes

Basics

So...you've made your character in both form and numbers...now how can you use him?

Role-playing is about play a fictional character's role in a fantasy world through in a tale that is fundamentally interactive.  A vast majority of role-playing is speaking either the words of your or another character or telling the tale as the bard, but some of it will take the form of action.

Action can be combat orientated or the testing of skills or even luck.

The basis of any action is that the character or characters will roll one dice and add their combined relevant attributes to it--in the case of one character that will equal his attribute and in the case of many it will equal the sum of all of their attributes of the same type.  Note that only one dice is ever rolled, no matter how many people combine their attributes to help each other perform an action.

Before any dice is rolled the Bard should decide upon a difficulty level and tell the players what it is.  It is suggested that the difficultly level should fall between 1 (for impossibly simple actions) to 30 for (impossibly difficult actions).

If the total value of the attribute and the dice roll exceed the difficulty level then the action is a success, else the action fails.  In either case something happens or doesn't happen.

Brief Examples

Example 1

There are four players (and one of them is the bard) each with one character in the Far World.  The characters are trying to break into one a Moriati blood-money mansion to steal encoded currency chips that will allow them to hack into the e-Konomy surface server and fuel a civil war they started on a distant planet.  They have hidden outside the mansion just beyond security radar sweeps all night and have crept inside the walls when the guards changed shifts at 1am old time.

They reached one of the side doors inside the walls that leads into a lounge area, but the door is locked with nano-tech operated locks.  Luckily the one player (who is not the Bard) is a good hacker with a high tech score and a organic short-range modem implanted in his brain that may allow him to hack into unconnected wireless devices like nano-tech bots that are directly linked to the Web.

The Bard decides that the Moriati are a wary bunch of criminals and verge on paranoid.  Thus they have installed very complex locks on their doors...and that they all have firewalls and alarms attached to them to pick up any attempted hacks.  So he sets the difficulty to 25.

Unfortunately no other players' character has a device that might aid the character attempting to hack the lock, so he has to do it alone (i.e. no one may logically combine their tech attributes with the character taking action).

...oh, no...they thought about it too long and the guards are walking in this direction...

The Bard decides that the difficulty should rise to 27 due to the pressure and speed now needed to perform a complex task.

While the acting character activates his short-range modem implant and begins to hack the other characters pull out their guns, activate their cybernetic shields, and form a defensive line around him:

The acting player's character has a tech of only 13, but luckily bought a mizzlewaft software upgrade for his Conduit which gives him a bonus of 5 to his tech.  He will need at least a 10 on the ten sided dice to beat the difficulty.

...so...he then rolls a ten sided dice and gets...a 7!

Not enough!

The alarm goes off, the guards come running...and who knows what will happen next!

Example 2

A group of five imperial characters in the Realms of Wonder are surrounded by a barbarian ambush that occurred as they crossed a lonely ravine in the Daemon Mounts as part of a quest to penetrate the secrets that are held within the Endless Wilds and possibly find the legendary Shrike Blade that is rumored to have surfaced in the hands of a demon-god there.

Previously the Bard had asked the group to roll a collective mental check to difficulty 100 (5 times 20 difficulty per character = 100).  The group collectively has a mental score of 85, thus on a ten sided dice they have no chance to beat the difficulty.  Realizing this, the Bard declares that each player may add the higher of his physical and mental attributes to the collective pool.  This is because the check will be to see whether the group notices the barbarians sneaking around them for the ambush.

(Note that this check could have been done for each character individually, but perhaps the Bard wanted to save time or there was another reason to combine them...to, say, give an example of a combined roll?)

The new score comes to a total 93 and a player rolls a single dice and gets an 8 on it: the Bard explains how the group notices glinting metal and becomes aware of the barbarians skirting around the edges of the ravine readying their bows.

What will the players do next?

Combat

Although the Dynamic Gaming mechanism should provide the framework upon which the details of combat can be decided by a group of players, a set of rough guidelines is suggested.

Combat should have an order: Each character should roll a physical check against a difficulty level that is higher the faster the opponent is and is higher the more the element of surprise is in the favor of the opponent.  All characters that win the roll go before (in the order of highest roll to lowest), then the opponent, and then the characters that lost the roll (in order of highest roll to lowest).  Where more than one opponent exists, then it is suggested that each one is assigned a difficultly level and this level is compared against the single roll of the character.  E.g. one opponent has a difficulty of 11 (slow), another opponent has one of 27 (fast), and the character rolls 4 that adds to her physical of 11 to make 15.  Thus, the second opponent will act first (27), the character second (15), and the first opponent will act last (11).

Give each character and each being a chance to decide what to do (an action) and then give then a chance to resolve it before moving onto the next in line.

How are attacks made & what effect do weapons have:  An attack is simply a physical roll against a difficulty class.  This goes for both attacking and defending, although some weapon bonuses may only add to attacking or only add to defending, e.g. a scope on a gun would add to attacking only and plate mail would add only to defending.  If a character is attacking an opponent he rolls an "attacking" physical--i.e. with all attacking bonuses--against a difficulty determined by the bard--like any other action--and if he succeeds then he hits.  The damage is equal to the how much the roll succeeded by.

Likewise, if the character is being attacked then he must roll a "defensive" physical against a difficulty set by the Bard based on the opponent's weapons etc.  If he succeeds then he avoids or blocks the attack.  If he looses then he takes damage equal to the amount by which he lost the roll.

How does damage work:  When damage is dealt it comes off a character's physical trait--unless it is some other type of damage, like a virus, that might take off the mental or another attribute.  When any trait--except bardic--reaches zero the character is dead.

When non-player characters are created by a bard in a battlefield scene then their "health" should also be created.  WHen damage is dealt to the non-player character lowers or comes out of this pool or attribute and when it reaches zero the non-player character is dead...unless designed otherwise by the bard.

Healing attributes:  It is suggested that rates and methods of healing are determined by the group, but that attributes cannot be healed above their initial or "natural" levels that were reached when the character was created.

Can combined combat rolls be made:  A general rule is that combined combat rolls cannot be made...but, given the right set of circumstances (a clever ambush..?) a combined combat roll might well be justified.