Thread by @AlexandraErin

So, after considering many fairly intricate ways of handling degrees of complication in success for Dragons, and So On..., I have come up with what I think is the final (final final FINAL) revision, and it highlights player agency.

If you roll a check and don't like the result, you can choose to roll again and use the better result (similar statistically to the D&D and adjacent concept of advantage). This nets you a complication, a small wrinkle, that will change your situation whether you succeed or not.

If you have still failed, you can pay a cost (something bigger and longer-lasting than a complication) to add the two different die rolls together.

Or you can make a sacrifice (bigger cost) to just succeed, if the dice won't do it but you need the success.

Key to this is you're not rolling for things that are impossible to achieve by rolling, so the possibility of Auto Success But At What Cost is not something you can use to achieve literally anything and everything.

The draft that this supersedes basically allowed players to keep rolling and adding more dice for each level of setback they were willing to take, which... worked. But felt like it would bog things down, and also lead to frustration.

Now, there's some canonical examples of what sort of thing constitutes a complication, cost, or sacrifice, but they're situational and as often story-based as mechanical (with losing access to character features being an example of a more mechanical one).

But it creates situations where, for instance, if your rolls aren't quite enough for you to use your magic to seal a portal breach or whatever, you could burn out your magic for some time, and do it.

Rolling still matters - a good enough roll and you don't have to give anything up, but if you don't succeed in one go you have to accept a minor setback to see if you can succeed without further cost, and how well/poorly that goes determines what you'll have to give up to succeed

But mechanically, it's all decided in one or two throws of the dice.

And after that, it's a question of what this success or failure means to the character and what the player is willing to do, to succeed.

Ironically this project started out as being very like D&D in gameplay mechanics and very not like D&D in character creation and it's sort of trending in the exact opposite direction?

I mean, character creation still allows you to ignore the "character classes" and just mix and match freely, but in the interest of keeping it simple for people who just want to be a paladin, I'm including prefab archetypes and guides for each of the recent edition core classes.

...just realized the actual trend, on both sides, is towards simplification. More abstract and freeform gameplay = less like D&D, more ability to create a character through small tweaks to off-the-shelf builds = more like D&D.

I always feel like it's a positive sign when one of my gaming projects is trending towards simplification, because it's much more likely to actually be completed when it's growing simpler instead of spawning branches.