Example

GM: Inside the garage you see Mr. Jones but he is already inside his armored parade float, waiting for the procession to begin. It’s designed to be impregnable to small arms fire, it’s like a hi-tech popemobile. It’s behind several layers of scary looking laser barricades.

Player A: Are there guards?

GM: Not right now, but they will probably be back soon. Looks like they were all on the outside and they have just dumped Jones here while the rest of the parade starts.

Player A: are there any openings? How is he getting air in his bubble?

GM: There are vents near the bottom leading to the inside.

Player A: Okay, I am small and squishy so I will see if I can get in there, navigate the float, and see if I can possess Jones.

GM: Going to be tough to get through the barricades and the workings of the float?

Player B: I am trained in Force, I will see if I can throw you over the barricades?

Player C: I’ll stay out here in case there is trouble.

Player D: Me too.

Player A: Okay so I will get tossed over the barricade, slip in the vent, use my technomancy to navigate the interior of the float without getting crushed or shocked, and  try to get to Jones.

GM: So that’s 1 for your Technomancy skill, 2 challenge die to navigate through, an opposition die from jones, and an advantage die from your comrade helping with the throw.

Player A: Sounds good.

GM: okay so you rolled a Success with a level 2 Threat. Do you want to each take 2 Harm or do you want to create a challenge 2 complication? 

Player B: I can’t take the harm, take the complication!

Player A: okay, I am thrown over the barricades and land perfectly near the vent, I scurry in and using my Technomancy prowess I follow the wires straight to the bubble. I slip out and he feels me scurry up his leg, but it’s too late. I get under the shirt and attach to his back. I am now in control of Jones. But there is a complication, he has an adoring fan that was looking through the window the whole time. She saw the whole thing and she is freaking out, that’s the 2 challenge complication we will have to deal with later…

Intro

I considered going with a chronological story with the blog, but this is a time traveling game, so going out of order is on theme. Last week I talked about why I decided to make Chronomutants and where the idea came from. This week I am going to skip talking about the early versions and jump right into the resolution mechanic that made it.

The mechanical core of Chronomutants, something I call the "narrative dice pool."

It's pretty simple. A player wants to do something in the game, they need to identify:

What is the player trying to accomplish?

By what means?

How skilled are they with those means?

Is anyone actively trying to stop them?

Is anyone actively trying to help them?

How dangerous is this?

They build a pool of dice that reflect those things, adding positive and negative dice, and then rolling them all at once. This will reveal if the plan achieved the player's goal and if any positive or negative unforeseen events transpired.

These big rolls are very different from tactical combat games or games that move towards simulation. They are one roll that tells the results of a series of actions, maybe even for the entire table at once. They are a tool for giving players the results and leaving them with lots of room to embellish the details.

That's the second half of the Narrative Dice Pool system. Players reading the results of their actions and then using those results to tell the detailed story of how those results came to be. This is the real magic of the system, what makes the game very different then DnD-A-Likes, players actively steering the narrative. 

This can be a red flag for a lot of players and GMs. It requires the GM to give up control of some of the details. I think allowing the players the weight and responsibility to tell the details of the story is the core of what makes tabletop gaming special when compared to video games or wargaming. Take for example a player that wants to sneak past some guards and into an interior area. They roll a success with a complication. Having the player (instead of the GM) decide if they slipped and fell and hurt themselves before scrambling up and into the interior, or that they made it in but were spotted, or made it in but found that they entered into a heavily secured room, or something else the GM would have never thought of on their own. This really increases player interaction by shifting the responsibilities from a more traditional “this is what I intend to do” by adding “and this is what happens when I try.” 

Shared GM responsibilities are a fairly controversial and large topic, I’ll shelve that for a later blog, for now the important context is that players are in charge of more narration then in DnD-a-likes.

Costs and Benefits

So this is what the narrative dice poll system gets us: Flexibility in scale Player agency

Complex results

Abstracted results

Quick resolutions

And this is what it costs us: Granularity

GM railroading

Potentially introduces complications to every roll

Simulation

More complex than a single die roll

I can think of plenty of styles of games where these trade-offs would be unwelcome. It’s not good for games where the GM is telling a pre-planned long-form narrative to players, it’s not good with strict resource management, it’s not good for simulation games, it’s not good for tactical combat. These are mainstays of popular tabletop gaming, and I get why anyone would be reluctant to throw those out.

So what kind of things is the Narrative Dice Pool system good for? It’s good for drama, it’s good for set pieces, it’s good for bombastic action movie style, it’s good for supporting creative and/or clever players,it’s good for telling big stories, it’s good for sandbox games, and most importantly of all it’s good for player shenanigans.

To use a video game analogy, if a dungeon crawl where a Doom or Call of Duty where players move through a series of prescriptive encounters, then Chronomutants would be a Deus Ex or Prey where players are given a smattering of tools and set loose in a sandbox. Both can be fun, but they are different experiences.

Let’s talk about some of the good stuff

Flexibility in scale.

Because the Narrative Dice Pool is good at simulating a series of tasks or events, it can easily cover a large range of events or a longer period of time in a single die roll. Think of it   like rolling as if you rolled all the dice for an entire encounter in a dungeon crawler at once and they gave you the results about everything that happened, instead of multiple rounds of positioning and back and forth and resource depletion, etc. You just found out what happened. You could if you wanted to zoom in very close to a single action and roll, but this would probably be slow and tedious to figure out the factors and play and build a dice pool every time someone swings a sword.

As a general practice I let players decide the scope. If it’s natural for them to roll to sneak past a guard and then to open the vault in two rolls that’s fine. It’s also fine for them to sneak in and open the vault in one roll. I find that people are better natural storytellers than they give themselves credit for and because the players will be narrating these chunks of story themselves they tend to break it up into narrative beats without thinking too much about it. If the GM wishes to slow things down they can easily do so by making the larger rolls more challenging. Like in the previous example by rolling only once to snake past guards and open the vault, I would probably add Opposition Die to the pool for the guards on lookout.

A single die roll can also be done to cover side stories or larger events. This is a game about time travel and things can get pretty epic in scale. A single die roll could cover an entire lifetime. A player wanted to know about the ruins they were exploring and decided to go back in time for some recon, instead of a quick peek ended up serving as a soldier in the ancient war and participated in the battle that brought down the fortress. They got the info but also came back older and grizzled, telling recap of the battle and the inspiring commander they dedicated years of their life to. That’s an extreme example, but again, I let the players set the scale, and the dice system easily handles large events.

A more common example is set-piece encounters. What would be a slog to run in a Dnd-A-Like can be done quickly and dramatically. Say the party is trying to reach the magic orb at the top of a wizard’s tower as the stairs crumble behind them and demonic minions our in through the windows.Easily done in one or two die rolls and very dramatic. If I tried to run that as a 5e combat it would take all night, with lots of granularity, but I’d argue not worth the time and less exciting and dramatic because of how slow resolution would be.

Player Agency

Player’s always start by making a plan. This was the original idea for the game. Support players making crazy plans. Their character sheets list the tools they have, they work with their tools and their allies to decide what they will try to do, but the plan is always theirs. The GM will present obstacles to their objectives, but it is up to the players to choose their plan of attack. Again the idea is that we are supporting sandbox style play, and trying to say yes to players as much as possible. As a GM I try to let players come up with their own plans/solutions. I will ask questions for clarification and answer any questions they have about the obstacles, objectives, the environment, their tools, etc. Because Chronomutants gives players such a powerful and diverse set of tools (time travel for crying out loud) it is unlikely players will get stuck, but they may come up with a bad (aka risky) plan. That’s fine, risky plans are fun.

Complex Results The possible results of the die rolls are:

2 binary results: 1.Success or 2.Failure

but also include 3 possible added scaling variables: an A. unexpected windfall or a B. unexpected complication and /or C. how long it took

And a rare chance of

1. Triumph or 2. Despair

Together these create a varied rubric of results that say what kind of thing happened, but not how it happened. That’s up to the player.

So you end up with results that look like: Success, but with a level 2 unexpected complication and 2 ticks of time passing.

Or

Success but with a heavy cost (despair)

These complex results are another aspect that make it well suited to larger scale events.

Abstracted Results

Players take these results to tell the story of their character’s story. It’s a little akin to an oracle like Tarot or the Iching, or even psychotherapy. As someone fascinated by occult practices and a former mental health counselor, I cannot stress enough the impact of letting people come to their own solutions and tell their own story. What all these things have in common is it gives people something to reflect/express their own thoughts and ideas. There are some guidelines in the rules for what a “level 2 unexpected complication” is but there is also intentional room left here for players to steer. The goal is that players will be able to come up with crazy plans, so by necessity also needs room for “tell me how it all went wrong?” or “what were the unexpected consequences?” or “it didn’t work but something good happened, what was it?” Remaining broad with the terminology in results also helps make the system scalable with large and small actions. 

  Quick Resolutions

The final boon of the system is that it is fast. Players make a plan, work with the GM to build the dice pool, roll the pool, count the results, and tell the story of what happened. This means an encounter can go from start to finish in a few minutes, or a little longer if the players are embellishing the narrative. Almost all the time players spend on this is talking to each other, asking for help, workshopping plans, and narrating the action. The game moves fast, and no matter the die result, nothing never happens. Even a total null dice pool passes time, and ticks down the clock towards doomsday.

In practice my groups have averaged about 6-7 major encounters per hour at a leisurely pace, with lots of time spent on RP. This is great for telling large narratives without requiring a group to play a 30 session campaign.

Outro

So there you go. My analysis of my core resolution mechanic Chronomutants. There are at least two other related topics for another day. Why I decided to use the Fantasy Flight weird dice (a choice I still have misgivings about) and the math behind the system.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions or comments about the game, leave a comment. Please check out the rules and leave feedback.

See ya next time

-gary