Affinities and Attributes

I think I've been going at this whole design thing the wrong way; for my new game at least. For The Gods of Aureata the Affinity and Intervention system works really well. So well, I have now decided that I am leaving the rule system as it stands. I'm going to wrap up the game in a one city, 12 Affinity, 12 Intervention system that I have build for it. 

After listening to the recording of the first Beta Test, it really seems like everything ran well. The players got the hang of the rules, and everything came together to make a fun one-shot.

I would really love to run another game of GoA soon, but I have a feeling that the gang will want to get back to Dwindle. 

Note to Self: Make a publishable version of Dwindle.

Anyways, thinking of GoA, Dwindle, exploring the excellent Nibiru RPG for the first time, and revisiting Frie Ligon's excellent offerings (such as Coriolis) got my brain working in a different direction.

I really love the Year 0 Engine, which are Frie Ligon's core rules for many of their games. I like the idea of the players gambling to make their rolls better. In the Year 0 Engine, this is done by "Pushing" rolls, which allows the dice pool to be rerolled to either gain a success, or to make a roll more successful. This usually also brings a chance for complications. In some games, the GM gains points, in others, certain results break your weapons, decrease your stats, etc. 

For my new game, I have 2 ideas floating in my head for this.

• The first is when you reroll, you give another player stress. Then any 1s give the GM points.
• The second is: When you reroll, you give the GM a point, then any 1s give you stress.

I'm currently favoring the First idea, just because the I don't want too much stress floating around (it reduces your dice pool, and also powers abilities). Reading through Nibiru and Coriolis, I suddenly made the connection of Psionics and Stress. Often the trope is stress fuels the psionics. So this is helping to shape the world of the game. I may be leaving the ocean bounded islands of Vaeth. 

Another consideration is that I don't want to keep the Attribute + Skill set up that Y-0-Engine relies on. I'm thinking of Skills + Extra dice for tagging Backgrounds etc. I'm still not sure about the dice pools, but I'm leaning to a max of 5, plus extras for the tags. I'll have to play around on Anydice to figure out a good spread.

Thanks to a answering a question on Reddit, I am now considering adding in some extra dice of different sizes, but I'm still not sure about how to make this work.

Anyways, it was a good brainstorming session on my way home tonight.