The Core Resolution Mechanic

I finally got around to writing the core rules mechanic in detail. I had the basics scribbled down in my notes but I didn't write out the full details until last night. I originally started with the resolution system that I call "Detailed Challenges" below, but I later added Simple and Extended challenges. I particularly like the Simple Skill Challenge rule as a pacing mechanic. I was watching the rather lackluster "Solomon Kane" movie a couple months ago when I got the idea. 

In one scene, he's fighting a bunch of goons and trying to save a girl who is being kidnapped. It occurred to me that there is no doubt that he'll win the fight against those guys, but the dramatic tension was based on doubt about whether or not he could fight through them fast enough to save the girl before they rode away with her. I recalled the games I've played in before and thought, "If I were playing Solomon in a game, the GM would probably make me spend an hour rolling to fight and kill all those goons. Why do the exciting, fast-paced parts have to go into slow motion in tabletop RPGs?" Then I realized: they don't. The core rules of Van Gogh (including the Simple Challenge rule for fast forwarding the action) are after the jump.

The Rules

• Attributes and Skills: Characters are defined by their attributes and skills. Passive attributes, which serve as defenses against active rolls by other characters, are rated with a numeral. This number is the number of successes needed to overcome that character's defense and affect them with an appropriate skill. Active attributes and skills are rated with the number of 6-sided dice that are rolled when using those abilities. This is noted as a numeral followed by the letter “D”.
• Basic Rolls: When performing any kind of action where there is doubt about the outcome (and the outcome is important), the dice are rolled for the applicable skill or attribute. Each die that results in a 3 or more is counted as one success and each die that rolls a result of 6 counts as 2 successes. If the character achieves enough successes to match the difficulty of the roll, then the roll is successful. If the roll exceeds the difficulty, then the character is successful with Advantage and gains some extra benefit. This extra benefit usually takes the form of a +1D bonus on a subsequent roll. For example, if the difficulty of an attack roll in combat is exceeded, the resulting damage roll will gain a +1D bonus. The bonus dice for exceeding the difficulty of a roll are called Advantage dice or points of Advantage. By default, the Advantage of exceeding the difficulty is +1D regardless of the number of successes by which the roll exceeded the difficulty. If the difficulty is only 1, then a roll of 2 or a roll of 5 will both gain an Advantage of +1D.
• Wagers: If a player wants to gain additional Advantage dice over and above the +1D bonus, they may make a Wager. When making a Wager, the player intentionally raises the difficulty of the roll. If they fail at the higher difficulty, then they fail the roll even if the original difficulty is exceeded. If they succeed, they gain a point of Advantage for each success over the original difficulty (up to one more than the new difficulty). For example: The difficulty is only 1 but the player chooses to make a Wager for two more points of Advantage and raises the difficulty to 3. A roll of 1 or 2 successes will fail, but a roll of 3 will succeed with a +2D bonus and a roll of 4 or more will give them a +3D bonus.
• Free Wagers: A Free Wager allows the player to declare a Wager and adjust the difficulty after rolling. Each level of free wager allows the player to raise the difficulty by one. For example, if a character with one free wager needs to make a roll with a difficulty of 1 and rolls 3 successes, they can choose to raise the difficulty to 2 in order to earn another point of Advantage with their 3 successes.
• Die Cap: In order to keep the dice pool down to a manageable size, most Van Gogh settings will use a Die Cap of 6, which means that 6 dice is the upper limit of dice rolled for one action. Any dice that are not rolled because they exceed the Die Cap are treated as Free Wagers. For example, a character that would roll 8 dice for an action would instead roll 6 dice and be allowed two Free Wagers (to raise the difficulty by one or two after rolling) for that action. The Die Cap can be adjusted or even eliminated if desired, but this will have an effect on levels of success. A lower Die Cap means that highly skilled character will have their maximum level of success reduced (because they will not be able to roll as many successes), but the Free Wagers will ensure that they perform more consistently near their peak because they will have more Advantage on their rolls. A higher Die Cap means that highly skilled characters will be capable of scoring more successes (each die is potentially 0-2 successes), but they will need to risk wagering to make full use of those extra successes.

• Skill Challenges: There are three types of skill challenges: Simple, Detailed, and Extended. A Simple challenge is resolved with a single die roll. A Detailed challenge is resolved with two rolls: one to generate Advantage and one to resolve the challenge. The most common example of a detailed challenge in most action-oriented games would be a combat action that consists of an attack roll and a following damage roll. An Extended Challenge is resolved with multiple rolls over a period of time and is often used to track progress on a task in the background of the action.

Detailed Challenges are the most common type of skill roll. A typical example is making a roll with an attack skill in combat then making a damage roll. The skill used to resolve an action is preceded by a roll with another skill to set up an Advantage. In combat, the Advantage from an attack roll is added to the damage roll. Swashbuckling characters can use Athletics to swing on a chandelier or slide down a bannister to gain Advantage for an attack. A powerful brute could use a fierce battlecry (Intimidation) to generate Advantage for an attack roll or even vice versa: he could use an impressively solid hit to give Advantage to his Intimidation skill when he tries to scare off a whole group of thugs after sending one of them sprawling. The skill rolls used in Detailed Challenges do not need to be made by one character. Teamwork is an excellent way to generate Advantage. This two-tiered approach to resolving skill challenges allows for much greater variety and allows characters to achieve the same results in different ways without needing a wide variety of separate skills. Detailed Challenges not only help to answer the question “Does the character succeed?” but also “How?”

• For example, the PCs are a group of smugglers and they need to negotiate with a criminal middleman about a job. How do they intend to negotiate a good percentage for themselves? Different PCs might handle the negotiations differently. One might take a calmer and more thoughtful approach by using the Notice skill to scrutinize the middleman for signs that he is lying or nervous or other clues that could be used for additional leverage before making a Persuasion roll to bargain for agreeable terms. Another character might make an Investigation or Social Circles roll to find some “dirt” before the meeting (such as how “hot” the merchandise is and how desperate the middleman is to move it quickly) to use during his Persuasion roll at the meeting. Another character might just try flexing his muscles menacingly to Intimidate the middleman and unsettle him before trying to bargain with Persuasion.

Simple Challenges are used for actions in which the character's eventual success is not in serious doubt but it is important to know how quickly or how well they succeed. A simple roll can represent one round in combat or it can condense a much longer time into a single roll. When making a Simple roll, the character only rolls one skill to skip ahead to the important part of the scene like a quick action montage in a movie. Because there is only one skill roll, the character doesn't get the benefit of building Advantage like a Detailed challenge, but does benefit from a +1D bonus if the skill being used has an appropriate Sign and can also gain another +1D for providing an interesting description of the action (success at the basic action is guaranteed so the player is free to describe successful uses of the skill even before the roll).

• Can an elite space knight with a laser sword slice his way through a crowd of disposable robotic soldiers? Of course, he can. Can he slice his way through them fast enough to catch up to the dark knight kidnapping the princess before they get in a spaceship and fly off? Maybe, but maybe not. Instead of rolling individual Fighting skill rolls and damage rolls against all the robots in his way, the space knight can just make a Simple Roll to “fast forward” the action like a quick montage in a movie. The GM decides that the player needs 4 successes on a Simple Challenge to get through the robots and cut off the dark knight before he gets into his ship with the princess, but 3 successes will be enough to follow them into the ship before the door slams shut and 2 successes will allow him to grab hold of the landing gear as they lift off (possibly a very bad idea if the ship is going to be leaving the atmosphere). After a quick back-and-forth discussion with suggestions from around the table, the GM agrees that either Athletics or Fighting would work for this Challenge. The space knight chooses to use his Fighting skill of 3D. His Fighting skill has a sign (“He walks with smooth, rapid strides from years of practicing quick fencing footwork.”) so he gets a +1D bonus. To get another +1D bonus, he offers a description of how he grabs the closest robot by the neck, slices through his waist, then hurls the torso into the next cluster of robots to bowl them over before charging over them to cut through the ranks behind them. The player rolls his total of 5D and gets 1,1,2,4,6 (only 3 successes): by the time the knight reaches the ship, it is starting to lift off but he leaps onto the retracting gangplank and rolls through the door just before it seals behind him.

Extended Challenges are used for actions that generally take place over a long period of time while other actions are taking place on a smaller scale. If no other actions are taking place at the same time, then the extended action can be resolved by a Simple or Detailed challenge. The characters acting on the Extended Challenge make an appropriate skill roll at regular intervals until the challenge is completed (or they give up). The length of those intervals depends on the scale of the action: it could be every few seconds for something small scale (e.g. searching through drawers and boxes each round to find a particular item during a combat) or it could be much longer—even months or years—for larger scale actions (e.g. political maneuvering between nations or researching a difficult technical problem). There are 3 ways to resolve Extended Challenges:

• Building: This method is the simplest. The GM assigns a number of successes that must be accumulated before the challenge is completed: 5, 10, 50, 100, etc. Once the characters have accumulated the total required successes, the task is complete. This method works well for tasks that require an investment of time, effort, and resources to finish but which don't require continuous effort (i.e. the characters can stop and then come back later to pick up where they left off). For example, the design and construction of a building; researching and writing a book; restoring a classic car.
• Maintenance: This method works well for problems that require constant attention to prevent them from getting worse and avoid losing progress that has already been made: “two steps forward, one step back” problems. The GM assigns a number of successes that must be accumulated before the challenge is completed (like the Building method) and a Challenge rating (a number of dice from 1 to 5) to represent the growing problem. Each interval, the GM rolls the Challenge dice and subtracts its successes from the successes that have been accumulated by the characters resolving the challenge. This kind of challenge can also be defined with a loss condition but no victory condition and started with a number of successes as a given. This is useful for holding a disaster at bay until the source of the problem (and the Challenge rating) can be stopped by a different kind of Challenge.
• Opposed: This type of challenge represents a long-term struggle between two or more opposing sides, such as a chase scene or a large scale battle. It functions similarly to the Maintenance method, but the opposition is another character's skill instead of a Challenge rating. The GM determines a number of successes that must be accumulated to win the challenge (typically 5 to 10) and both sides begin with zero. If one side begins in an advantageous position, they may start with a lead of one or two successes. Each interval of the challenge, the opposing sides make their skill rolls and they cancel one another's successes. Any net successes that remain move that side closer to victory. If there are more than two sides involved in the Extended Challenge, such as a battle between three factions, then each side must choose who they will oppose before each roll. In a true three (or more) sided battle, targets may change for every roll as the losers focus on the current winner to prevent them from getting too far ahead or a temporary alliance may be made between two sides until the third side is eliminated.

• Example: A group of post-apocalyptic survivors are taking refuge in an old garage while fighting off a group of marauding bandits. The survivors are traveling on foot but the bandits have mangy horses that could run them down, so one of the survivors is attempting to get an old car running. The other survivors are shooting through the garage windows or guarding the door with a spear. The bandits are circling around the garage, looking for a way in and occasionally taking shots at the windows with crossbows. Once in a while, a bandit will try to jump through a window or climb up to the roof to drop down on the survivors. The mechanic trying to fix the car is working on an Extended Challenge, while the other characters and the bandits are fighting and sneaking with Detailed rolls. If he needs to, the mechanic can stop working on the car to smash a bandit's skull with a heavy wrench and then return to working on the car without losing his progress, so the repair job is a Building challenge. If there were no bandits and no time pressure, the car repair could be handled with a Simple Challenge and a quick skip forward in time to when the repair is finished.
• Example: A group of three pirates are in a small boat which has sprung a leak (they took some musket fire while escaping from their former comrades during a mutiny). The GM says that the leak is a 2D Challenge (the boat is slowly filling with water) but the players begin with 8 out of the maximum of 10 successes (the boat is mostly free of water). The boat will sink if they get down to 0 successes. The maximum successes they can accumulate is 10 (the boat is empty of water) but the leak will still be present and they must continue to bail the water to avoid sinking. Stopping the leak is a separate Building Challenge that requires 5 accumulated successes with the Repair skill to remove 1D from the Maintenance Challenge rating. One pirate goes to work on fixing the leak while the other two do their best to keep ahead of the leak. They have no buckets so they are feverishly scooping water with their hands (a difficulty 2 Athletics roll). After a few rounds, the pirate attempting to plug the holes has accumulated 6 successes and reduced the leak to a 1D challenge, but his two friends have had bad luck and made poor progress: only 4 successes remain before the boat sinks. The third pirate decides that it would be prudent to help them bail some more water before he finishes plugging the leak because he might not finish the repair fast enough to stop the leak before they run out of bailing successes on the Maintenance Challenge. “After all”, he reasons, “there's no sense in plugging the holes just to watch the patched boat sink below the waves.”
• All three types of skill challenges can be used in the same scene. A small group of samurai heroes are fighting in a large battle scene in a setting inspired by feudal Japan. The outcome of the battle in the background is determined as an Opposed Extended Challenge between the enemy generals and their armies. Simple Challenges would be used when a samurai hero wants to cut a swath of destruction through a horde of spear-carrying ashigaru conscripts to reach an important objective like an enemy cannon or an enemy officer. In those cases, a simple Fighting, Athletics, or Wrangling roll (with a difficulty based on the size of the group of armed peasants and the distance to be crossed) would be used to determine whether the samurai hero completely outclasses them and blows through them like the wind or gets bogged down by them. There is little reason to think that he can't cut down spear-carrying peasants, but the important question is “Can he fight his way through the ashigaru fast enough to get to the cannon before it fires again into his own lines?” If they pass a Simple challenge to get to an important objective, their successes in the Detailed Challenges at those objectives—such as winning a duel with an enemy officer or wiping out an artillery emplacement—could be used to justify a bonus to their side in the Extended Challenge.