RPG Design Patterns

Dice Pool, Drama Based Initiative, Game Master, Negotiated Contest, Rank, Resource, Shared Power, Trait

Character generation starts by the player writing up a 50 word story about his character. Fifty words is not much to work with, so the player must focus on his character’s most important aspects. These elements are translated into traits. These traits can be assigned ranks by sacrificing dice out of the character’s Pool, which starts out containing 15 dice. Just look at that gauge diagram for Character Makeup. Can it get much simpler?

Conflicts rolls can be called by any player, not just the game master. Conflicts are resolved by rolling dice pools of d6. The number of dice rolled equals the rank of the character in any single applicable trait plus 1 to 3 d6 provided by the game master plus any number of dice (up to 9) from the character’s Pool. Any roll of 1 on any die indicates the player earns a “monologue of victory.” The player essentially earns the right to describe the outcome of the conflict. This does not equate to “success,” though, because the player is perfectly free to describe how his character failed. If no 1s are rolled, though, all dice used in the conflict that were drawn from the character’s Pool are permanently lost. Thus, it is always a gamble for a player to draw from his character’s Pool. The result of any conflict roll covers the broad consequences concerning the player’s intent. That is, it covers much more than the single swing of a sword. It can cover the success of an entire battle (although the game is not focused specifically on combat).

The game foregoes any explicit rules for determining when and how often players perform actions. The game master assumes that responsibility, although the written rules only infer this point. In responding to a request for clarification, the game’s author, James V. West, elucidates: “If a player says he wants a roll, let him.” By observing the other players’ reactions to the resulting monologue, the game master assesses if he “should stop him at some point or let him go the whole nine yards.” In other words, the game master decides whether any given roll applies to a brief sequence of actions or the slaying of the entire dragon. According to Mr. West, if circumstances arise where multiple players interact within a scene, the game master should simply wing it. Like the game Nobilis, The Pool relies entirely on dramatic impact to decide the ordering of player actions.

Whenever a player succeeds on a roll, he must choose between narrating the outcome of the conflict or adding a single die to his character’s Pool. Pool dice can be sacrificed to raise the character’s rank in his various traits.