More on Criticals and Degrees of Success

More on Criticals

The Raleigh Tabletop RPGs “Dark Carnival” spooky-themed game day last month turned out to provide me with more to think about with respect to S&P mechanics, e.g. example character sheet UI/UX/readability, avoiding terminology reuse/confusion. But a happy accident turned out to give me something to really chew on with respect to criticals.

At “Dark Carnival”, raffle tickets were sold to attendees, the proceeds of which would go to website upkeep and other RTR expenses. By purchasing the raffle tickets they’d go into a drawing for some prizes, but also give the attendees tokens they could trade in at the tables they played at for automatic successes, re-rolls, and so forth. My session was in the #2 slot, aka late afternoon/evening; by the time the players sat down to my table they'd accumulated a literal pile of these tokens!

This prompted me to add some nuance to the criticals mechanic, representing moments of extraordinary fortune (thanks to Rich Flynn for asking the clarifying question) (text comes from the “Basic Game” document):

• Every unmodified 10 rolled beyond the highest earns you a critical success (critical, or “crit”)

• By default you can only bank a # of criticals equal to your Potential Threshold; your “critical bank” remains available to you indefinitely until it’s exhausted (thanks to Alex for asking that clarifying question)

• You can expend criticals for something special, such as an automatic success on an upcoming challenge (the default)

  • Can only be spent to obtain automatic success (1) when issuing challenges and (2) before the issuer knows what the answerer’s total result is

  • If the issuer waits for the answerer’s result to be declared, betting that their result exceeds their opponent’s, then the issuer’s only recourse is to then trade criticals to turn their dice to natural 10s in an effort to succeed the challenge, but automatic success is no longer guaranteed

  • This must be done one die at a time, one result 9 or less than traded for a natural 10 at a time

• Criticals can be given to other PCs (or other player-controlled identities) or CCs (or other chorus-controlled identities) as it makes sense within the fiction, and the group agrees on the particulars

Degrees of Success

Fast-forward to Metatopia 2024, and at the third playtest session I ran. For the longest time I’d always wanted to have the system allow for partial success, aka success with cost or with consequences, and failure to be more meaningful in terms of shaping/steering the narrative. A second thanks to Rich Flynn for bringing it up specifically as a way of accomplishing one of my design goals going into Metatopia, because now I have the avenue to accomplish this.

• Did you succeed without having to break tie(s)? Clear success

• Did you succeed by breaking tie(s)? Success w/cost/consequences

• The cost/consequence depends on the type of challenge:

  • Interaction: the opposition looks back, you reveal/communicate something to them

  • Power: Your agency is in some way affected

  • Attack: You exchange injury