Dwindle Rewrite Rewrites

 Last night I began to write a quick summary of the Dwindle changes. This was primarily to get the ideas down on paper. When I first made dwindle, 18 months ago, one of my goals was to have all the dice (d4~d20) used during play. But lately, I've been thinking of dropping the d20. It is just so swingy.

I was crunching the numbers last night with anydice.com . This is an excellent resource for punching in numbers to see what the actual values are. 

Here is a spread for the new mechanics I am looking at. It really helps to sort by "At Least". After looking at the outcomes, I think I'll keep the d20s. The newest Background mechanic greatly improves your chances for success, so I am hoping this will have the players talk about their characters more.

This will cut down on the number of dice the players are adding together, but still make the bonuses meaningful. Recent sessions have had outcomes of less than 20 be the exception.

This contradicts this post, as well as, what is currently on the Dwindle sheet.

This is the messy part of journaling every step of building an RPG. You rethink mechanics, and overhaul sweeping parts of your game. This is why so many people reskin existing games, such as Apocalypse World.

Newest Background Mechanic

Previously, I was going to have the Backgrounds grant a Background die. I'm cutting that all out. Now, if your backgrounds apply, they add d20s to your pool, but you only keep the highest d20. Advantage and Disadvantage will slightly move the TN (+/- 3~5) but I haven't decided on the actual amount, yet. I'll update the Dwindle Page when I get a chance.

Setting Idea

In other news, I am nearly done hammering out my game for my middle schoolers. They will in a magic cafe. This will be a bit like Tales from the Floating Vagabond, but was originally inspired by this excellent episode of RPPR. Each session, I'll use Jump the Shark's genre, setting, and episode beginning tables to set up the day's genre and setting and episode arch. This will establish where the cafe goes, and what the PCs need to do. Hopefully the variety will be able to keep the attention of 3 teenage students.