Ok, move hackers, here’s my query:
I’m working on a thing where characters increment a tally when certain things happen. My intent is that the more of this tally you accumulate, the higher the chance of something awesomely bad happening.
But here’s the mechanical rub: Is it better to have the player roll -tally and hope for a high roll, or to roll +tally and hope for a low one? The former seems to be something I’ve never seen before – rolling and subtracting a stat, rather than adding – but I am happy to be corrected if there’s a move somewhere I’m not aware of. The latter seems to break the fundamental mechanic of *World, where you want to roll high to avoid catastrophe.
Any advice?
Rolling and then subtracting are a thing existing in the Apoc Engine.
As is rolling and then 10+ being bad.
I would give them a stat. Every X times they do Y it goes up. At poinz Z they roll+stat and on a 10+ something extremely bad happenes.
Thas is an okay thing to do.
yeah. Harm moves in AW use that exact format: roll +harm suffered, and hope to roll low. it’s actually fun!
Excellent – I am not as familiar with Apocalypse World, so I’d forgotten about harm moves.
Mwa. Ha. Ha.
Sub, this sounds pretty interesting!
Also, this seems REALLY interesting. We want more information!
Soon. Negotiations with Ningauble are ongoing.
It sounds like you found what you need, but there is some precedent for “-Stat” being a thing: In the equipment list, some items are tagged [cost]-Charisma.
In converting some DCC RPG ideas to DW, I added a Luck stat, with this associated move:
Burn Luck
When you are about to make any move roll, you may spend 1 point of Luck to modify that roll by +1 or -1. However, if you roll 6 or less, you lose 1d4 additional points of Luck, in addition to any other effects caused by the 6 or less result. You recover 1 point of burned Luck at each full moon.
Another effect is that any time something bad has an equal chance of happening to one of two or more characters, it happens to the character with the lowest current Luck, and any time something good happens to one of two or more characters, it happens to the character with the highest current Luck.
And the last effect is that you can use Luck to defy danger in the right circumstances, like any other stat.
Sounds like the grim portent track? On a fail you add to the tally and move toward the impending doom?
There is a charming little card game called Dungeoneer with a mechanic similar to this that I find very interesting. In it, you accrue ‘bad points’ as you go on adventures. Then, your OPPONENTS spend your points in order to make bad things happen to you. It’s an interesting resource economy.