Hrm. I had an idea that I think is neat. Dice pools!
What, someone has done dice pools before?
Darn.
Ok, so that wasn't exactly the point.
:ponder:
I came up with an idea , which I'll present below, but the numbers are not worked on - I just inserted numbers that felt good. Ideally, I think characters should pass these tests most of the time, but far from every time - after all, an important part of these challenges are that the possible complications that come from failing are as interesting as succeeding, if not more so...
Anyway, here's what I came up with:
Every challenge you roll dice for, you use two kinds of dice - black and white (you can pick other colors, but I'll stick to the traditional, thank you very much).
Black represents your skill. It's a value that's written down on your character sheet in the old-fashioned way. In this case, I'm imagining a value around 1-5 or so, but that's something that could be fiddled with to get just right.
The white dice represents story power. You get one die for free, because regardless if this task is related to your story or not, you and the GM together has deemed it interesting enough to stop and roll for. In addition to that, you can get bonus dice for relevant traits on your character sheet. This could be various things - you might have a character motivation that is Greed, and you're doing this all to get to the crown jewels. You get a free white die for that. Another might be that you want to foil the king who imprisoned your brother. Since you bought that as another character motivation, you get another die in the white dice pool.
Finally, and this I think is the neat part, you really want to get past this challenge for whatever reason - the prospect of dealing with the guards seem particularly unappealing to you, for example - so you put yourself in debt to the GM, for a fourth white die.
Finally then, you roll your two dice pools. Every die that come up "positive" is a success. Each pool that reaches two successes passed the challenge - which leads to the four possible results in my original post.
- Skill success (black dice pool passed the test), Goal success (white pool passed)
- Skill success, Goal failure
- Skill failure, Goal success
- Skill failure, Goal failure
Personally, I think it looks darn neat... Obviously, unlike the above ideas, this would pretty much require a completely new game. I can't see anyone being able to insert this in any existing rules system...
Edit: Mixed up black and white dice in their final mention... Bah. Fixed now.