GRIM REALITY

Still kicking around ideas and stuff.  So far this is becoming a very tight and tactical system.  I just need to work out some concept labeling and how to not confuse people with what I am rambling on about.

I think I might have the 3 action dice icons lined out.

 Posi- Used for the players active phase.  Represents positive actions and being at a tactical advantage. Worth 100 points.

 Equa- Used for the players inactive phase. Represents reactive actions and being equal tactically. Worth 10 points.

 Negi- Used for special abilities and such for either play phase.  Represents focus or being at a disadvantage. Worth 1 point.

Still open to suggestions on the icons.  Wanted to go with a theme that didn’t have any specific game setting or culture.  Something that was easy to distinguish from one another, but looked like they go together visually.  Also had to look cool and nothing like anything else out there.  Using some universal concepts like play, pause, and stop kind of ideas.  Anyway, I think they look cool.

It has been a while since the last updates.  A whole lot has changed for me over the last few months and I have been unable to get back to my work.  Anyway, the system is getting a restructure once again.  Still keeping most of my basic premise, but figured out some way better game mechanics to use.  Once I have some more of the basics of the new system worked out I will post them again.

Forget the previous post.  Everything just works much more smoothly using only the Grim dice instead of adding the d10 dice to the mix.  It is so much quicker to add up results of 1, 10, or 100 and not have to make multiple rolls.

Also, I haven’t uploaded the updated rules lately to reflect only using these special dice.  Be patient, I’ll get updates out just as soon as I have a chance to.

I think I have it all figured out now.  Or at least the basic framework.  The action dice system worked well, but also needed a way to have a success or failure when doing actions.  I started playing with using a standard d10 that was then multiplied by the character’s base attribute for the action being attempted.  I kept trying variations of this method but found it wasn’t a fast enough system.  The goal was to cut down on the crazy math as much as possible.  But what would happen is you would end up with working out multiplication tables every time your character tried to do anything.  I needed to cut it down to a simple yes or no, success or fail, 1 or 0.  The it hit me to just use the attribute to indicate the number of dice to roll and forget the multiplication.

So now I am just using multiple d10 for the attributes, but I didn’t want to roll them out and add them up.  Typically a human would have all of his attributes at 3.  So roll 3d10, but even then it seems a bit slow and awkward to do.  So instead of just adding up all the dice for a result I decided to change it up to a best of roll.  In the case of a human, he would roll 3d10 and choose the best dice that was rolled for his score.  It is fast and easy to pick the highest number from a bunch of dice and best of all, the more dice that are rolled, the greater the odds of getting a higher dice to roll.  Otherwise, just doing the roll and add method would mean that the player with the most dice would almost always win.  That just didn’t feel very fair.  Granted, the guy who is stronger should be more of a threat on the battlefield, but not by this large of a margin.

Next up was now that I had figured out how to use these “Resolution Dice”, I still wanted a chance for that crit hit effect.  The old stand-by for this was to simply make it to where when a dice comes up as a natural 10 the player got to roll another d10 and add its result to the total.  This just makes things too crazy to deal with.  There is always going to be times where someone will roll a bunch of 10s in a row and be able to leap the Grand Canyon.  So then I tried a threshold amount by which if the dice comes up to be lower than the characters attribute it would mean another dice was added.  It was better, but still had the chance to become a problem with scores being too high and players sitting around re-rolling dice a lot.  So instead I went the poker route.  Roll the dice and pick the highest number, but if multiple dice come up with the same number they could be added together as one score.  If the combined dice was the highest value, use it, otherwise just use the highest number rolled.  Simple to use and a fast system.  So without going into a lot of the math, rolling 3d10 would still give you a score from 1 to 10, but would be more likely to get a higher value of that 1 to 10 than someone only rolling 2d10.  And with the chance for critical results, that 3d10 could possibly be a 3-30 while the 2d10 would get a 2 to 20.

All this and I haven’t even scratched the surface on skills or equipment yet.  When they are factored in there is virtually unlimited possibilities in even the simplest of skirmishes.

It’s been a long hard road for me when it comes to the Grim Game.  I’ve only been kicking around these ideas now for 20+ years, so you would figure I’d be so much further ahead with the entire system by now.  The main excuse I’ve been using all these years has been that life kept getting in my way.  I have been working on these basic concepts since I was 16 or so, and back then it was because there was so much more to do than sit around and work on game mechanics.  After that in my 20’s it was getting my act together was priority over working on rules.  This was followed with the usual things like, find a girl, get married, get a house, have a kid, and keep it all together.  In reality the actual problem I had was that I just wasn’t satisfied with how the rules worked out.  I had all these basic concepts that I wanted for a game system, but each time I thought I had everything worked out, I ended up with a more complicated system that wasn’t very fast-paced or fun to play.  So revision after revision I would come up with some new game mechanics but they ended up the same each time.  I had good core concepts, but the execution would fall short of what I wanted.  So because I could never get the game to work exactly the way I wished it would, I wouldn’t waste my time writing everything out just so I would end up rewriting everything from scratch.

The problem I had was that I kept using the same old paradigms of how a tabletop system worked.  Everyone’s character sheet had a list of attributes that in turn told them what kinds of dice to roll for attacks and so on.  It was basically the Gygaxian model that everyone has been using for decades now.  Even though each rework of the rule set was technically doable, it just didn’t strike a chord in me as to how the Grim Reality System should be.  The rules just kept getting more and more complicated for them to be playable.  The more complicated the rules got, the more it dragged down the overall experience.  Crazy charts and random tables that had to be looked over was just time wasted for everyone playing.  I got smart one day early on and started making a Universal Physics Chart.  The goal was to have everything accessible from one single chart.  It worked great for the most part, and might revisit it again latter, but found that to be somewhat tedious at times too.  It just felt too much like the original Marvel Super Heroes RPG system with the whole crazy power level charts and what not.  The other thing I focused on for a great many years was the game dice.  Most systems used the standard set of game dice from d4 to d20, some used only percentile, some would only use a couple of d6 for everything.  I was mostly in the d6 for everything camp.  I tried a few other variations, but the math just didn’t work out.

After lots of trial and error I have found what I’ve been looking for.  In a nutshell, the players use what are called Action Dice to determine what actions are available to them.  The action dice are a special type of d6 that the players roll to act upon, react to, or use special abilities.  I am still amazed at how well this system is working out so far.  At any rate, I have started my work on outlining how everything plays out now.  You can find the latest updates I have posted under the “Grim Reality Universal Game System” menu.  This is all very rough right now so bear with me, it is going to take a bit to get it all straight and readable.  In the mean time, check it out and let me know what you think of it so far.

Getting closer to home…