New (Year's) Resolution: Hit Me

Prismatic Wasteland has issued a very inspiring challenge and boy do I love reinventing the wheel.

“I issue a challenge to YOU and ye to all bloggers! In the dawning light of 2024, you must come up with a New Year’s Resolution. But I’m not talking about your typical forbearance from vices or oaths to lift weights. I’m talking something way more important: Resolution Mechanics.”

Hit Me

Stats & Fatigue

Character have 3 Stats to describe what they are good/bad at: STR, DEX,  and WILL. One is an 6, one a 10, and one a 14. The higher the better.

Each character also has a pool of Fatigue representing how drained they are from their adventure. This starts at 0 but increase with things such as travel or lost sleep.

Making a Roll

When the outcome of an action is unknown you must roll a d6 under the applicable Stat and above Fatigue + the Difficulty Rating of the task, determined by the GM (typically between 0 and 4).

At any point while resolving a Roll you may take a Hit. Increase your Fatigue by 1 and roll an additional d6 adding OR subtracting it from your current roll.

 

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 Closing Thoughts

Honestly before this system could be anything but frustrating it would need some number crunching to determine the balance of challenge and pain in the ass. However it sticks to my usual motto of letting players choose when they fail. “Do I take another hit so I can succeed at this even though that will make all my future checks harder? Nah I can stomach this failure.” Which I think will usually lead to players feeling less cheated when the dice don’t go there way. But yeah right now it’s fully an untamed death spiral so oopsies.

However I think there is 100% room for building on this mechanic. You have a tool that should help you pry this door open? Free d6 that you can use without gaining Fatigue. Or even just lower the challenge of any task where a tool makes sense for helping. Having Rations reset Fatigue adds some choices to inventory management which is always a plus.

This probably won’t be the last New Year’s Resolution so keep an eye out. Hell this probably wont even be the last post related to this resolution.