Tuesday, August 25, 2015

#RPGaDAY2015 Day #25: Favorite Revolutionary Game Mechanic

I'm horribly behind the times.  I missed the umpteenth Small Press Revolution in Gaming of the early part of the century and just about every game I play was built from conceived notions from the 20th Century.

My revolutionary concept isn't too ground breaking, but it is volatile: non-damage exploding dice.

The argument for the 20-point kicker for hit points in Hackmaster was two-fold for me.  First, most other creatures had it and the critical hit charts resulted mandated it for mere survival.    Second was the concept of exploding damage: the idea that if you maxed out your damage roll, you rolled you d-1 again and added the result.  And if you rolled max on that roll, you rolled d-1 again, and so on, and so forth.

Most players went gaga over that, but I was far more interested in exploding dice for character advancement, skills, etc.

All dice for attribute improvements (on the percentile stats) could explode, any skill increase could explode, and heavens to Betsy if you're rolling an honor dice on top of it.

There was plenty of cinematic fun with exploding dice in combat.  It was nice to see a company acknowledge some excitement on a more mundane facet of the character and the game. 

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