Manifest: A Complete Rework

I knew this would happen.

My brain goes through phases. I tend to get interested in something, and then as my excitement starts to wane, a new idea drives me in a new direction. In some cases it’s a whole new subject or project. In other cases, its a fundamental rework of the project I’m working on.

To explain: After describing the system to one of my friends, he made a suggestion that grabbed my attention. I liked it enough that I started rethinking the entire Power Roll mechanic. The idea that my friend gave me was “what if the Manifestations give you a pool of dice that you can distribute between them for actions? That way you can decide where to put your energies.”

Now, I had given a fairly bare-bones description of the full(ish) ruleset, so I needed to adjust a few things, but the result is…well, I could say simpler or cleaner, but really what appeals to me about it is it’s different. I’d had a good length of time to get used to the other way of rolling, so this new idea was, if not better, at least new.

There are two kinds of fools in the world. Those who say “this is old and therefore good,” and those who say “this is new and therefore better.”

Guess which one I am today!

Is it a better mechanic? I don’t know. Not yet having playtested either, I’m a bit at a loss: but that’s okay, because I don’t have to throw anything out. As of this moment, I will be playtesting two separate mechanics for how Manifestations and Agents interact in combat. The first has already been detailed: let me go into the second.

The old Power Roll was an XdY (BOND-d-TIER) roll, keeping the highest to find an attack’s power. What if X was not a static variable, but dynamic based on the player’s choices? This means there would be a Pool of dice that could be spent on actions: this pool could be Universal or Individual, and refresh at different instances.

If the pool is Universal, that means everyone gets the same — say, twenty dice at the start of the battle, and it’s up to them how they use those dice. This puts a time limit on each combat, which isn’t a bad idea: consider the exhaustion mechanic in Gloomhaven, or the Round limit in Warhammer 40k. At the same time, most tactical RPGs don’t have these limits, instead ensuring battles won’t last forever through damage/health balancing, rather than a set time-limit. Consider the interesting choice of throwing all your dice at one Manifestation, or spreading them out over multiple targets.

This also ties into the refresh mechanic: the dice-pool could refresh every round. A universal round-refresh is like the action-economy of D&D, Lancer, Pathfinder, or lots of other systems: you have a set number of “actions” each turn, and a few special abilities take more or different kinds of these “actions.”

An Individual round-refresh system is much more interesting to me: Individual systems give different numbers and/or types of actions to each unit. A Mage might have one move action and three “magic” actions, a warrior might have two move, two guard, and three attack actions, etc. If these actions are then pooled together, different combinations of Manifestations will result in different capabilities and strategies.

So where does each Agent’s individual pool come from? One of the things I’m not keen on with the old Power Roll, is how the Agent’s Emotional Stats don’t play much into the system. They’re a bit of an afterthought, mechanically, which fits, because I put them in as a bit of an afterthought. Could the Stats help here?

No, because every Agent has the same number of Stats. They are organized differently, but with only a few exceptions, everyone’s got 8 points in their stats. That means 8 dice. We can do better.

What if we changed the Tier and Bond stats to be dice-pools, instead of individual rolls? A Tier d8 Bond 3 Manifestation could give 3d8, while a Tier 6 Bond 4 could give 4d6? Then, you can roll any number of dice for any attack, provided you still only ever use two actions. The other effects still apply, so if you had the Manifestations, you could roll 1d12 and 3d4 with a Bond 3 Manifestation to get a possibly powerful attack with a reliable amount of Sync.

That works, and I could easily slot that into the old mechanic, but it doesn’t do anything with the Emotional Stats.

So what if…what if I reworked everything?

If the Agent has a high Anger stat, Anger Manifestations should be more powerful in some way, right? Whether more reliable, more in-sync, or stronger, Emotional Stats should be involved in the Power Roll. I mentioned the Armor/Toughness mechanics of Valiant Quest when I discovered Sync; I could implement that as the armor system. Characters with an Anger stat of 3 deal 1 damage to any anger manifestation for every 3 Power of an attack? -1 if the attack is Caustic?

What if Stats functioned similarly to Sync, in that the number on the die relates to the stat number? Perhaps Emotional Stats are better measures of Sync than a Manifestation’s Bond? This is a pretty good and simple rule-shift, also slot-in-able, but what if I went even further? What if Emotional Stats dictated successes?

In [[https://firstfallingleaf.itch.io/sins][Sins], by First Falling Leaf, every action has a die-pool that is created from two stats. The first dictates how many d6’s you roll, and the second dictates which number you have to roll higher than to count a die as a success. This means — ignoring equally high or low levels in both stats — A roll might reliably give low numbers of successes, or wildly swing from no success to many. The bell curve shifts in the same way I’m looking for my Manifestations to shift.

Now, if I use Stats to dictate which number you have to roll to count as a success, I also have to look at the die-size mechanic. I was always a little leery about asking for large numbers of polyhedral dice: cheap as they are, I don’t like the idea of asking people to buy five sets of dice just to be able to play my RPG. What if we standardized the die?

With the current setup, I have four emotional stats ranging from 1 to 5. I could raise the number of stats and the maximum allowed, but if I didn’t, using a d6 makes a lot of sense. What if a Power Roll was rolling a number of d6’s, and counting the number of successes — the number of dice that are equal or lower than the emotional stat’s rank?

This makes for some interesting balance. Currently, the average emotional stat ranks a 2, meaning a d6 will only score on a 1 or 2, 1/3rd of the time. To increase to a higher and more reliable attack, you’d have to start lowering some stats, shifting the reliability of the attack. Spending 4 d6 on an attack means you could get anywhere from 0 to 4 successes, but whether a success is a 3 or less or a 4 or less makes a difference.

Okay, now we have a whole new system, and we’ve got to work on it.

If you get Bond d6s at the start of every turn, can spend them how you will, and get better rolls with higher Emotional Stats, then what happened to Tier? Does it mean anything anymore?

Well, we could get rid of it and say Bond and Tier are the same thing: however connected you are to the Manifestation, the stronger it is. Alternately, Tier and emotional stats could be the same. The angrier you are, the more reliably powerful a Manifestation becomes. Really, is there a place for Tier as a metric? Can a player have a high Tier manifestation without a strong bond or emotional state?

What if Tier decided how many d6’s you got — what would Bond decide? I still like the idea of Sync, so Bond could be a flat number that grants additional benefits to an attack, reliably. A high Bond manifestation could have the same attack as a low Bond manifestation, but with a longer range, cause stronger conditions, or grant more free move.

This would mean a high Tier low Bond Manifestation would provide a lot of dice, but since it is possible to roll 0 successes on an attack, they would be getting a swingy attack at the cost of reliable pushes, conditions, or range. Low Tier high Bond means you don’t get a lot of dice, but even a 1d4 that rolls 0 successes can do a reliable Push(4) or Enrage(5).

Let’s look at Anydice. This is the base program I played around with a lot to find out how the dice and numbers all interacted with each other:

DICE: 1
SIZE: 6
GOAL: 2
ARMOR: 0
BONUS: 0

loop BONUS over {1..5}{
loop DICE over {1..5}{
if DICE+BONUS = 7{
loop GOAL over {1..5}{
 output [highest of 0 and [count {1..GOAL} in DICE dSIZE]+BONUS-ARMOR] named "[DICE]d[SIZE]+[BONUS]-[ARMOR] v [GOAL]"
}}}}

A lot of possibilities here. At this point, some heavy playtesting is going to need to happen to figure out which system is simplest, easiest, more engaging, and encourages more emergent strategies. I might even be able to combine different parts together to create a frankenruleset, based on what else pops into my head.

…because my brain is still thinking, and I’ll probably be coming up with more ideas between now and next time.

There is still room for tweaking these rulesets, and playtesting will reveal a lot. Speaking of next time, I’d like to throw together an ashcan compilation of the entire ruleset so far.