6- Resolution II

I'm rapidly finding that, for me at least, the more I work at something the more inspiration I get and for the last few days I've been working off and on at turning hazard into a resolution system. It's been a challenge.

I wanted to develop a system that has enough flexibility to create detailed resolutions, particularly for combat, but is very simple to learn. The final design constraint I put on myself was that the system had to be a fast and seamless part of the roleplaying.

So in a nutshell I wanted the game part of Victoria to serve the roleplaying part, interrupting the flow of the story as little as possible or even enhancing it.

Worryingly this puts me completely at odds with Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, who is on record as wanting to minimize roleplaying in his game. His feelings were that the dramatic roleplaying element should serve the game element and he created* the best selling roleplaying game of all time!

Fortunately, one of the great things about roleplaying games is that they fall on a continuum in this respect and so do peoples tastes so maybe it's not so bad.

Anyway, today it finally all came together and a whole slew of other ideas about conflict resolution resolved themselves as well. I think I managed to create a system of dice rolling that is the echo of hazard I was looking for as well as meeting the other points I was aiming for.

Once I had the concept for the system I spent a few hours breaking it down statistically to check that it didn't contain any quirks. Lucky I did because there were a few but they turned out to be a good thing as the solutions to these problems had the unintended consequence of also helping to answer some of the questions I still had about experience points.

Of course play-testing will really show whether this is workable or not.

*I didn't forget Dave Arneson!