Called it! This dice roll is not just about chance
FIST1 is a great roleplaying game.
For one, it allowed me to print all of their 216 character traits, hand out the pages with scissors and a glue stick, and watch as the players stuck their cut-out traits to their sheets. I’ll play that way until I’ve seen every trait in that game (hopefully, someday).
One trait features a dice mechanic that’s just a one-in-six chance on an ordinary six-sided die, made significantly cooler by how you determine that chance:
CUT: You can easily cut any mundane object (such as a tree, a dumpster, or an oil tanker) into several pieces given enough time. You may also instantly cut something perfectly in half, as long as you identify its unique fracture point by rolling 1D6 and correctly predicting the result […]
I mean. You’re reading what I’m reading, right? Our table cheered and hollered when it happened. They called it!
It feels different
By literally flipping who calls the shots, this trait gives you the power to determine when you’ll be successful instead of the rules. You saw the fatal flaw in the robot’s structure and now its legs are still standing while its torso lies among the grass, helpless.
You might’ve seen that little video on Mothership’s death save.2 (If not: it’s here below.) In it, Alfred Valley highlights how your death save is rolled as soon as you go down but is hidden under a cup until someone checks your vitals—a beautiful way to tell you that your fate is sealed.
Both of these rules take chance and contextualize it. It does not make a difference, qua chance, to call the number beforehand, nor does it matter if the save is rolled before or when you check someones vitals, qua chance. But: it feels different.
Rules that tell a story
Beyond the actual result of rolling a die or drawing a card, it matters how you get ther. There’s a who, a what, and a when to mechanics, and these two examples make clever use of those aspects to change the way results impact our experience.
It matters that the Warden rolls your death save in Mothership, instead of you, and it matters that even they themselves do not know the result. It matters that you predict, that’s the word the FIST uses, what you’ll roll, instead of a rule setting the number.
Not every rule can get this specific, of course. Most rules function on a level of generality where their procedure tends to disappear into the flow of play. These two little rules just show how little changes to procedure can make a big difference.
I’m grateful Valley singled out that death save. In a way, these rules feel almost like zooming in on a structure and finding that it’s built up of tiny little versions of itself.3 Isn’t stuff like this a big part of what makes roleplaying games interesting in general? A game of chance, resource allocation—games take abstract systems like these and contextualizes them so they start to tell a story.
Bye for now,
Hendrik
FIST: Ultra Edition, by B. Everett Dutton, Ripley Caldwell, T.H. Cochlin, Back-Alley Coalition, and Max Danley.
Mothership RPG in 1 rule, by Alfred Valley.
Please, someone tell me what this is called.