Thursday, October 2, 2025

Stakes Dice as Counters

I've been thinking about the excellent BIFF! BAM! KAPOW! from Spectrum Games and how the game side steps mechanisms for hit points and injury altogether in a genre rife with combat. It measures success in momentum and simply ends each scene by measuring momentum gained and lost. It's a brilliant game that I highly recommend



I'm thinking about scene counters that act to measure success and failure in a scene that eliminates the need for anything like hit-points and places focus on an overall result. I'm thinking two six-sided dice. One is black representing negative consequences and one is white representing positive consequences. A result is found when one of the two dice reaches a certain number.

In High Five, the six on a die equals zero. So we can start our counters there on zero [6] and then count up as positive or negative consequences are accrued. Each scene would have a "stakes" value that measured how high a die would need to rise to end the scene. 

A stakes value of one would end a scene after a single action. Good for one off tasks but not really for scenes per se. A stakes value of 5 would represent a full combat encounter where one side or the other wins when their die reaches 5.


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