Designing a Dice System That Feels Like Magic, Not Math

Описание: Eight years ago, my game was just a Dungeons & Dragons port. This is the story of how I threw out the math, cut the mechanic I loved most, and built a dice system that finally feels the way rolling dice is supposed to feel.

In this Ship's Log I walk through every version of the Blueshiners dice system: the D20-plus-modifier days, the math-less experiments, exploding dice, the cascading mechanic I was in love with (and had to kill), and the one-die fix that solved everything.

Blueshiners is a cooperative science-fantasy TTRPG about a found-family crew surviving in a doomed galaxy. This is a designer's-eye look at dice mechanics: keep-highest resolution, step dice, dice pools, target numbers, exploding vs. cascading dice, and why an intuitive system beats a merely fast one. If you design games (or just like thinking about why dice feel the way they do) this one's for you.

0:00 Consulting the Bones
0:37 Borrowed Engine: The D&D Port
1:47 The OGL Panic & Going Bespoke
2:44 When Math Killed the Magic
3:15 Back to Zero
3:44 The Math-less Quest
4:35 Why Keep-Highest Alone Failed
5:34 The Dice Pool Problem
6:28 Target Numbers & Challenge Scores
7:38 Exploding Dice (and a Death)
8:57 Cascading Dice: The Darling
10:09 Hypershift & Scrappy Heroism
11:38 Rolling to Defend
12:33 Kill Your Darlings
14:09 The One-Die Fix
14:42 What the Playtesting Showed
15:38 Does It Hide the Odds?
16:56 Knowing Your Fate

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