Ultrablamtacular!

While writing about stuff I like, I skipped something else I like because I wanted to save it for a separate post. This one. Because it’s something I like, but it contains something I didn’t like for Ultrablam. If you’d like to read the story of why I didn’t go there, and how I got from there to here, then read on!

One thing I like is George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I would dearly love for the next book to come out this summer. That’d be awesome. Not likely, by all appearances, but awesome. Possibly even bawsome, though after the fourth book I will have to reserve my judgment on awesome vs. bawsome until after reading. If you haven’t read this series, you should. Gripping fantasy written almost as history. Compelling characters – on both sides. Good stuff.

Like most settings that I like a lot, I really wanted a roleplaying game for ASoIaF. I converted The Riddle of Steel for Westeros. In fact, you can see the fruits of that effort. I bought the Guardians of Order game – which basically put GoO out of business, as far as I understand. I have my signed, numbered, limited edition copy of that enormous game and sourcebook. I have a table copy that I printed from the PDF that I got for proofreading a section of the game. My name is printed in the limited edition. I bought the game Reign expressly because it sounded like it would be a good fit for playing ASoIaF. I really did everything I could to get an RPG that would let me live in the Seven Kingdoms, even for just a few hours.

Recently, I bought the new Song of Ice and Fire RPG (SIFRP) from Green Ronin. Let me tell you, if you’re interested in playing ASoIaF, this new game is my second choice for playing in. Ultrablamtacular, obviously, is my first choice! But since at present, something like seven people can play Ultrablam, this game might just do the trick for the rest of humanity. I haven’t gotten to play it yet, but one of the things I like about it is that it’s comprehensively designed to cover all of the activities you need for Westerosi gaming – not just characters and combat, but intrigues, warfare, and what I call “realm management,” that deals with the large scale fate and activities of a noble house. Realm management is what I bought Reign to study. At any rate, it does all of that with a pretty cohesive set of mechanics.

And here’s the interesting bit, to me at least:

The cohesive mechanic used in SIFRP, is very similar to a mechanic that I considered, and rejected, for Ultrablamtacular. Now, you can go read all about the way that SIFRP resolves challenges at Green Ronin’s site, but I can just give you the gist: You roll some d6s and add up the total rolled to see if it meets or exceeds a target number.

In Ultrablam, you’ll roll some d6s (pretty similar so far), but instead of adding up the total, you’ll check each die individually for success against a target number.

Each of these are pretty familiar dice pool mechanics to those in the audience with rpg-fu. So what motivated me to reject the mechanic that later appeared in a game I really like?

Well, it was important to me that if you could attempt an action at all, you had a chance to succeed. In Ultrablam, that’s the case. In any roll-and-total pool system, it’s not. If you’ve only got one die to roll, you can’t beat a target number of seven. It’s just not possible.

So Ultrablam gives you a small chance to succeed – the game is about what you’ll risk to give yourself a better shot at success. By allowing a small chance, the system encourages players to take risks in order to increase that chance of success.  If they couldn’t succeed at all, they’d never have to decide what was worth a risk and what wasn’t.

So there ya go. Design insight!