Prismatic Wasteland called for tabletop RPG bloggers to create resolution mechanics as a celebration of the New Year in 2024. As the month has drawn out, the 31st has creeped ever closer. Each day this document seems more and more half-baked, but alas I’m too tickled with what I’ve made to scrap it. Let no one say I can’t make a deadline.
“Tidepool Resolution” is the tentative name I’m giving to my toy conflict resolution system. It was vaguely inspired by Arnold Kemp’s Magic Dice, uses pools of d4s, and was made because sleep is boring and dice were made for gambling.
This resolution system is at its heart about resource management and so we must first enumerate our resources. All you will need are an arbitrary number of Statistical pools representing the kinds of actions a player character is expected to take in your world. Each stat pool should contain between one and four 4-sided dice. Players should either assign stats from an array (2,3,4) or roll 2d4 divided by 2 for each stat. For our purposes, the following should be perfectly fine (practical, uninspired) stat pools.
Hands - Being slick, picking locks, slashing throats
Heart - Being strong, busting down doors, crushing bones
Mind - Asking questions, spotting secrets, setting things on fire with your brain
Now we get to the actual resolution mechanic. First the player must state their intent. Trivial actions may be taken without rolling. For especially difficult actions, the GM (or the player) may suggest a more limited version of the player’s intent (“I would like to escape from the hierophant’s grasp” GM: “Fine, you can roll Hands but he’s got you by your backpack, even if you can slip out of it he’s not giving it back” or “Fine, but his athame isn’t just for show. He’s slashing at you with it and trying to exhaust one of your Heart dice”). The player then decides if they still wish to go through with the action, and pulls dice from the relevant pool. They may assign up to 3 dice from their stat pool to the roll.
Next, the player rolls their dice. If they roll doubles, a die from the rolled pool is exhausted and removed from play. If the player rolls triples, 2 dice from the pool are exhausted and removed from play. Any die that rolls a 3 or a 4 is a success.
0 successes - The player may choose to exhaust all dice in any pool to take the effects of a single success, otherwise they do not succeed at the action and cannot try again until the circumstances of the roll change.
1 success - The player character succeeds at the action as described.
2 successes - The player character succeeds at the action effortlessly, and may perform the action without the GM’s modifier. Alternatively they may restore a die from the rolled pool.
3 successes - The action is particularly effective, and the player character may perform the action without the GM’s modifier. The GM and the player should discuss an additional modifier or action that they would like to perform. Alternatively they may take both options available to a character who has achieved 2 successes at once.
Stat pools are fully replenished by being rested. Sleeping rests all stat pools, but takes 8 hours. Taking a couple hours to eat, nap, or perform light activities allows them to choose one of their stat pools to restore, but may involve burning up a resource like rations or incense, or carrying around bulky/delicate entertainment like a chess set or playing cards. Resting is also a great opportunity to role play, and players should be encouraged to play out their activities. It may be necessary to restrict rests per day but I’ve found in practice that my players seem to naturally decide that they would like to reset all of their dice pools after about a session’s worth of play.
Why did I make this? How does it play?
I’ll answer the first question with a question. Why is sleep such a focus of tabletop gaming systems? Realism? Verisimilitude? We ignore dozens of boring mundane human needs on the tabletop (laundry, defecation, masturbation) and often the whole shebang is detrimental to the pacing of a session. Rarely do the commonly cited fictive-roots of fantasy gaming follow the dungeoncrawling pattern of “get up in the morning, spend all of your spell slots and health exploring 4 rooms, and then go back to town and sleep at 9am”. Because an 8 hour rest period is so unwieldy, players will often refuse to risk sleeping in dangerous or interesting places. Sleeping is uninteresting mechanically, but invites the player characters to explore the mundane aspects of their character’s lives and forces the player character’s guards down for at least a few hours.
Resting your dicepool allows for many of the positives of sleeping while avoiding some of the negatives. It’s tantalizingly easy to perform in dangerous situations while still being long/loud/smelly enough to bait out random encounters and put the players in awkward positions. Because players need to be able to defend rooms for a couple of hours, they seek out defensible rooms, reset traps, and generally spend more time “mastering” the dungeon.
Players enjoyed the actual rolling mechanic. Physical dice pools are tactile and satisfying, ideally everyone would have little piles of dice on their character sheet with colors matching up to the stats and a bowl or something to keep their spent dice. The dice math is mostly intuitive and I enjoy that a lot of their roleplay energies were focused into the moments preparing or recovering from a big important skill check.
I may make a write up eventually for how we ran through this, but that feels beyond the scope of this blog post.
If you liked this post check out some of the other submissions people wrote for this challenge, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there!