____                _ _               _   _            ____  _          
|  _ \ ___  __ _  __| (_)_ __   __ _  | |_| |__   ___  |  _ \(_) ___ ___ 
| |_) / _ \/ _` |/ _` | | '_ \ / _` | | __| '_ \ / _ \ | | | | |/ __/ _ \
|  _ <  __/ (_| | (_| | | | | | (_| | | |_| | | |  __/ | |_| | | (_|  __/
|_| \_\___|\__,_|\__,_|_|_| |_|\__, |  \__|_| |_|\___| |____/|_|\___\___|
                               |___/                                     

Nobody struggles to roll a D6 and add +2 in their head, but there’s something nice and immediate to any system that lets you just read the dice as they are. Here’s a random proposal for a system which takes things into account, without any mental arithmetic.

This whole thing will follow the format of my thinking on systems[i], but that’s not required reading.

• The system recognizes Attributes, Skills, and Equipment.
• Each one is rated with a die.

So a bare-bones character might look like this:

• Attributes

• Head D3
• Eyes D2
• Legs D4
• Arms D3

• Skills

• Chat D6
• Sprint D2
• Throw D3

• Equipment

• Stick D8
• Local Area Guide D8
• Catapult D4
• PC D6
• Mainframe computer D10

• Hitting someone with a catapult would mean rolling D2 (for eyes), D3 (for throwing) and D4 (for the catapult itself).
• Chatting about local area would mean rolling a D3 (for head), D6 (for chat), and D8 (for that guidebook).

I don’t know how the rest of the system would work, so I’ll just think out-loud for a bit.

There’s a temptation to just use the highest result. If you roll 3 dice and the highest is ‘6’, then you get a ‘6’. Easy!

Of course that computer leaves an outstanding question. If someone has no computer knowledge, they shouldn’t be able to hack into another system. So, how do we show that kind of limitation with the minimal possible set of rules.

Solution 1: You need 3 dice for each action

Everyone gets an automatic ‘D1’ in things like ‘chat’ or ‘run’, so you can always attempt them. But you need to spend points on the ‘Computer’ Skill to get to a ‘D1’, or you can’t make the roll.

This solution creates another problem: how do people speak? They don’t usually use Equipment, so they don’t have 3 dice. Perhaps the notion of equipment should be expanded into ‘general environment’, and we can assume a ‘D3’ in quiet places, or a D8 when you have an auditorium, and then just nothing when underwater.

Functionally, this all sounds good until you have to explain to people that in order to speak, you roll the dice for ‘head, and chat, and D4’, then they ask where the D4 came from, and then they ask the same thing for running, throwing, and eventually you need to hand out a table of dice for every action and every environment.

Solution 2: Select Middle or Low Dice

Perhaps computers and other advanced actions always require picking the middle-die, or the lowest die. That means you can chat fine with two dice (even if you have to pick the lowest out of 1 dice), which makes this an innately easier thing to do that using computers.

This divides all actions into:

• actions which require equipment and are difficult, and
• actions which cannot use any equipment, and are easy.

Which one is combat? This makes no sense at all.

[i]