01/01/22 Dramasystem Procedural Scene Resolution
Recently, I was asked by my friend David for my thoughts on an alternative procedural resolution system for Hillfolk (a game also often referred to as Dramasystem). This isn’t out of the blue; I’ve a Dramasystem series previously and played in a couple other single sessions.
Hillfolk is a game that intentionally sets out to foreground interpersonal drama and create a role-playing experience that feels, at the table, like a prestige tv drama. Much of the mechanics are built around building relationships between the players (up to 8 at the table) and using a system of trading tokens to encourage one character to accept or deny the emotional overtures of another. In my experience, this works fine but could probably be revised to be a little simpler without losing much. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
Hillfolk has a separate procedural set of mechanics to resolve actions that are not interpersonal drama, such as fighting a battle or sneaking into someplace. With these mechanics, each player starts play with three different tokens (red, yellow, green) that they can spend during a procedural scene to try to accomplish their goal.
How it works is that the GM draws a card from a standard card deck to set the difficulty the task and then each player in the scene spends one of their tokens to draw cards in an attempt to match the color, suit, or face/number of the card, each of which creates different results. How many cards a player draws depends on the token spent: green=3, yellow=2, red=2 but the GM also gets to discard one of the cards drawn. (If it sounds complicated, it is and intentionally so, as the designer has publicly stated. He was making a game about interpersonal drama, after all, and wanted to make it complicated for players to use procedural scenes so that they would avoid them.)
Now, to the question asked: how would I make procedural resolution less complicated?
Initially, I gravitated to something simple and familiar: the tiered success system in Powered by the Apocalypse games. So, something like: the player rolls d6s based on the token they spend (red=3 but drop the highest, yellow=2, green=3 but drop the lowest). 10+ is a success, 7-9 is a success with a complication, and 6 or below is a failure. However, in reviewing the Hillfolk rules I noted one of the sidebars in which the author talked about wanting characters to actively use dramatic scenes to build support with other characters for procedural scenes and success at doing so, ideally, leading to better outcomes in the procedural scenes.
With that in mind, my completely untested idea is as follows:
The GM sets a difficulty for what the characters want to accomplish, between 2 and 6; the higher the number the more difficult the situation.
Players choose which token they want to spend. Green=three dice, drop lowest; yellow=2 dice; red=three dice, drop highest. Any result rolled that is 4 or higher is a success. If the player has a Strong skill relevant to the challenge they get to add a die to their roll; if the relevant skill is Weak they lose a die from their roll.
As a bonus, hardcore story-gamers could use the die results to narrate the success and obstacles of the scene together by going around the table and pushing a die forward to briefly describe a moment that illustrates their success or failure.
From my point of view, this preserves the need for characters to build alliances for help with difficulty tasks while making things a little less complex and gives opportunity for cooperative story play even in a procedural scene.