Who’s played Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars Edge of the Empire game? *counts hands* Awesome. Whaddya think of the dice? At first, I was afraid. I was petrified. Kept thinkin’ I could never live without numbers on my dice. Seriously though, it’s crazy to try to wrap your head around it if all you’ve ever seen are numbered dice. I had to listen to Order 66 to really get it. But once it clicked? Heck, I even made my own dice roller. The way the two axes of action resolution interact with the game is pretty incredible.
If you’re not familiar with this, check it out. You’ve got a set of three positive dice (green Ability to start, yellow Proficiency for being awesome, and blue Boost for good circumstances), and in the mirror are three negative dice (purple Difficulty, red Challenge, and black Setback). The sides on the positive dice have different amounts of good symbols – Success (which indicates… uh, success), Advantage (which is good things happening not directly related to success), and Triumph (which is basically a Success/Advantage sandwich of woo-hoo!). Similar story for the negatives – Failure, Threat, and Despair. Success and Failure cancel each other out, Advantage and Threat cancel each other out, and you tally what’s left. This means it’s possible to succeed at a task, but garner some threat, or fail but pick up some advantage. In fact, the dice probabilities mean that the flip-flop combo is likely!
But… what if you’re already pretty invested in another system? The dual axis of success/failure vs degree of advantage isn’t really unique. In fact, the classic RPG example of D&D includes it in every edition: your to-hit roll is separate from your damage roll. My new favorite go-to game Marvel Heroic RPG (sadly discontinued) uses an “Effect Die” to gauge the degree of effectiveness, but as with D&D, still relies on the binary success before applying the effect.
What if… what if we brought this idea, this paradigm, into other systems? Just what would that look like? I think throwing it into a system is fairly simple – it’s elegance and balance that are the difficult parts. If you simply give the characters in D&D an “Advantage Die” (that would grow with levels, feats, etc) and the monsters a “Threat Die”, which would cancel each other out? I think we’re halfway there already. But what does it do? A lot of the same things it does in Edge, frankly. Prone, disarm, heal, bonuses/penalties, you name it! With Marvel, the easy answer is just to count a second effect die and compare it separately.
Shoehorning the mechanic in is one thing. But like any mechanical hook for rules, you end up needing (or at least wanting) a way to manipulate it, in-game. In D&D this would be feats or class features that mess with probability or confidence, for instance. A Warlord or Wild Sorcerer might have all sorts of ways to boost or set back these effects. In Marvel, you might have SFX and Limits that target the Advantage die rather than the Effect die.
It strikes me however, that in Marvel there’s already a basic system for Threat/Advantage – Complication/Asset. It’s just that it’s broken out as separate actions – target existing dice (stress or traits) or create new ones (complications or assets). In order to make FFG-style Threat/Advantage a part of Cortex Plus, that action economy would have to come together as one. Cause stress or step down traits with your effect die, and create complications and assets with your advantage die. This might well be something that I start working into my Cortex Plus hacks…
It’s no secret that my favorite edition of D&D is 4e. The tactical depth of the game couples with an open-ended skill system that frees the players to set their own level of RP and player agency. If I ever write a “love letter to D&D” like so many designers are doing these days, it’s going to be 4e with this hack. Well… and some ideas from Star Wars Saga. And some from 13th Age. And Cortex Plus and Fate? It’ll be a gaming turbaconducken.