as always, some unsolicited food for thought. for a boardgame I've been kicking around, my missions are a one-check affair, but I had up to 4+1 results "Critical Success", "Success", "Failure", "Botch" and "Finally" - ThreadSky

thatrobhuman.com • 67 days ago

as always, some unsolicited food for thought.

for a boardgame I've been kicking around, my missions are a one-check affair, but I had up to 4+1 results
"Critical Success", "Success", "Failure", "Botch" and "Finally"

Comments

norsehound.bsky.social•67 days ago

Four possibilities out of if one opportunity is an interesting thought, but my intent is to make this simple, so it's merely a binary of pass/fail with occasional exceptional results and a few with special rules. I can see this system working in the captains engine, it's just a choice to use it

thatrobhuman.com•67 days ago

for sure - the salient point to my lil diatribe is probably the symbol bit on the card, but I think you did that for 5 year mission, yeah?

norsehound.bsky.social•67 days ago

5ym cut out challenge cards entirely to list the consequences for failing or completing the check and whether you needed to repeat the task to continue. Made missions a little more self-distinct, but hiding cards in the challenge deck is a mechanic I want to use.

norsehound.bsky.social•67 days ago

With the challenge deck I can have deteriorating sector conditions or mission failures hide even worse problems in there that the players have to overcome.

norsehound.bsky.social•67 days ago

This is kind of reminding me of the edge of the empire narrative dice system, which if you don't remember had pass/fail across three tiers of possibility: advantage/disadvantage, success/fail, triumph/despair. Really liked that system.

thatrobhuman.com•67 days ago

Each was represented by a symbol next to the text block. strong visual indicator that ended up cutting down on often repeated text like "If you succeed" or what not.

I think I used a Star, a Checkmark, an X, an Exclamation point, but never had a good symbol for "Finally"

(I used symbolic d8s)

thatrobhuman.com•67 days ago

if a mission didn't have "critical success" text then passing with what would be a critical success used the "success" text, likewise "botch" and "failure"

thatrobhuman.com•67 days ago

the "Finally" gets resolved no matter the outcome, so things like "Discard this card" or "Remove this card from the game" didn't have to get repeated for each outcome.

I always included a "Finally" unless the various outcomes had differing things to do.

thatrobhuman.com•67 days ago

For example
"Critical Success": "gain 3 points"
"Success": "gain 2 points"
"Finally": "Discard this card"

meaning you get nothing for failure or botch and you always discard the card.

thatrobhuman.com•67 days ago

In contrast
"Success": "Gain 3 points. Discard this card."
"Failure": "Lose 2 points. Remove this card from the game"

a success or crit success, you get 3, and discard.
failure or botch, you lose 2, and it gets tossed from the game. the "Finally" was omitted because there was nothing in common.

thatrobhuman.com•67 days ago

I didn't end up liking all the dice cancellation math that I had worked out originally to determine if you Succeeded, critical succeeded, failed, or botched, but in terms of the card layout with the symbols worked out nicely (doubly so when they matched what were on the d8s).

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