the gift of dice

You Have One Stat

You have X Stat(s)

There is a running joke that everyone makes a lasers and feelings or honey heist hack at some point (guess what I have one)

Then we have Sexy Battle Wizards with is maximalist 3 stats (gasp!).

Someone even made a lasers and feelings hack generator!

In the interest of expanding our horizons, I present you with:

You Have One Stat

It's Strength

You have a dice chain for your stat, pick one:

You have a number of abilities such as skills, spells, and other useful features, pick 3 of those.

You also have a number of items. You have as many item slots as the total number of dice you have.

So if your dice chain is d6/d4/d6/d8/d8/d8, then you have a total number of 6 item slots.

Dice Rolls

When you do something risky, tricky, in the nick of time or foolhardy, the GM may request a dice roll. Roll the highest die in your chain. If you roll 4 or more, that's a success. If you roll 3 or less, that's a failure.

When you make an opposed check, both sides roll the highest die in their chain. The highest number wins.

Items

Anytime you make a dice roll and you have an item that can help you, you can roll your highest die twice and keep the highest result. The same rules for critical hits and critical misses for help apply, except that on a critical miss the item breaks.

Abilities & Impairments

When you have an ability that helps you with a check, your die counts as one step higher for that specific roll.

In some situations you may be impaired, and that means your die size counts as one step smaller for that roll.

If both advantage and disadvantage apply on the same roll, they cancel out. No matter how many sources of each side, they cancel out entirely.

Optional rule: Pushing Rolls

When you push a roll, add the next die in your chain to the check, and add them together. The highest die is always lost. You can push more times: you roll more dice, but every time you will lose the next highest die.

For example: if your dice chain is d6/d8/d10/d10 you first roll a d10. If you rolled a 1, you can push. You roll another d10. Now you have lost the top die. Suppose the total result now is 3, then you want to roll another die, you roll the d8. Now both d10s are lost. You keep the d8. The cost of pushing rolls is spending the highest die every time you push.

Optional Rules: Critical

A roll of 1 is always a critical failure. The maximum number on the die is always a critical hit, except when you have a d4, then it's just a normal hit.

Optional Rules: Helping

You can get help from a friend or from a companion. When someone helps you in your check, both of you roll your highest die, and then you get to keep the highest number. On a failure, then both of you share the consequences.

If either of the dice rolls a 1, it means that both of you fail but it's just a regular failure. If both dice roll a 1, then that's a critical failure.

Finally, when you are being helped, if both dice come up with a double number that is 4 or higher (4‑4, 5‑5, 6‑6, etc.), that is a critical hit.

Optional Rules: Harm

For games where harm is a real risk, you can include these.

Whenever you would receive harm, the attacking side rolls their damage. Then you roll your dice chain, adding results together until the total rolled is equal to or greater than the damage received.

For example, if your attacker rolls 7 damage and your dice chain is d4, d6, d8, d8:

If the total exactly matches the damage, all dice rolled are lost. If the total is higher than the damage, you keep the last die you rolled (the d6 in this exxample).

Use Cases

This basic setup is good enough for a simple game. However, when I was coming up with it, the first idea that came to mind was: what if we play a game where players control an entity such as a vehicle, a mecha that has multiple body parts or multiple sections or multiple areas? Each part of that vehicle would gain its own dice chain and be able to do things. When you make checks, you would use the dice chain related to that part of the entity.

Playing Mecha

You are the pilots of a mobile combat unit, a big ass robot. While you pilot that mecha, you use its stats as your own.

A mecha has parts: a core, which is mostly your own ability to make decisions and also survive: if the core goes to zero, you die because you are in the core.

You also have left arm, right arm, legs, etc, and maybe you have extra elements, such as wings or a back cannon, something like that. Each one of those gets its own dice chain.

When you create your mecha, you assign the functions of each part. Mobility probably gets a mobility type such as legs, wings, etc. Arms can get, for example, a cannon, sword, or shield, so each arm can get a different thing. The core is the core. The core is you. Any other parts get their own specific names and types according to what they do and what they are designed for.

So if you have an arm that is a sword and you want to strike the opponent with a melee attack, you roll that arm. But if you want to strike an enemy out of range, you roll with the other arm.

As you take damage, you take damage to parts of your unit or even the whole unit.

Other Use Cases

If you’re playing a dungeon fantasy game, perhaps a similar approach could be used to represent a whole party of characters as a single unit.

Each member of the party has their own dice chain. So you have fighter, wizard, thief, each one gets their own dice chain.

On a challenge‑by‑challenge basis, you will test one of those characters. You have to be mindful that the party as a unit should not lose all of its members, become dysfunctional, and so on. Inventory can be shared.

What about a sports game where you have different player positions? Striker, goalie, defense, etc (I have no idea how footbal words go in English).

What about other types of adventure and story? You are a bioligist in a new planet and you have only so much supplies to register your discoveries and get back. You are a criminal bear and when you run out of dice the Criminal part goes out of the window and you're just a bear with a thirst for violence.

There is so much to explore!

Conclusion

This is a nice, simple mechanic that has a very subtle theme attached to it: getting yourself in perilous or stressful scenarios will take a toll on your ability to complete tasks, and that is represented by the die size and the dice pool going down as things get worse for you.

So I hope you enjoy this little blog. If you have comments, questions, or if you use this somewhere, please do let me know—I would be delighted to hear.

Credits

License and Attribution

This module is published under the Anti-Capitalist Attribution Cooperative License.

You may use the template below for attribution:

[your thing] used/was inspired by [my thing] by Gabriel Caetano Barbosa.

#RPGLATAM #TTRPG