Push your Luck, Stealth/Time Dice Mechanic

Creators & Designers
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I’m super excited to share this mechanic as I’ve been working on it for a while. It is a variation of a previous mechanic I had shared here, but this one feels more elegant. I’ll try my best to articulate it, and I’m looking for feedback! The game itself has a long way to go, but I’m hoping to use this mechanic to capture the tension I want to feel in my Dungeon Crawler.

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Pictured above are the dice used for this game (they are TTsim d6 templates so feel free to import them and fool around). The black dice are called Danger dice (DD), and the white dice are called Skill dice (SD).

Basics

  • On your turn, you announce an action (move, explore, attack, search, etc), then roll 1 DD and 1 SD together.
  • These dice function both mechanically, and physically as “resources” to spend.
  • Each DD can be spent as a “colorless” or “basic” skill point (SP) by placing like a resource cube on the thing you want to spend it on. Each SD can be spent as the specific type of skill point (strength, cunning, or insight) that was rolled. Most basic actions require “colorless”, while more specific things require the types.
  • Depending on the action or situation, completing the action might cost 1 colorless SP, or some combination of types of SPs.
  • You can continue rolling to complete/perform actions UNTIL you have rolled 2 hourglasses (Out of Time) on the DD. Then you can no longer roll.
  • Once you have chosen to stop performing actions, or run out of time (ending your action phase), you sum the values (1 or 2) on your rolled DD and multiply that sum by 2 for each x2 you rolled on the DD. This number is called your Danger Radius (DR)
  • Once your DR has been calculated, any enemies within that radius on the board (whether in spaces or however you wish to use it) Attack You!

Combat
Combat as I envision it is very simple, and all or nothing:

  • Enemies have an Attack and Defense value.
  • If you attack an enemy, you must exceed it’s Defense with SPs to defeat it.
  • If an enemy attacks you, you must exceed it’s Attack with SPs or YOU DIE!

In brief, you can potentially sneak past an enemy if, when you stop rolling, your DR does not contain the enemy. It is a stealth game. Alternately, you might choose to stop rolling before you run out of time knowing that you’ve attracted an enemy so that you can roll more dice and defend yourself and defeat it.

Obviously, spending SP on all sorts of skills etc. is what will make this game interesting, but the tension of the DD is very exciting for me. Discovering an enemy lair and sneaking into it to steal the loot is very very exciting to me.

Thanks everyone!

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I’m glad at the end there you added in the option to stop rolling before getting two hour glasses. Seems important to keeping the decision space interesting.

So it’s a kind of press-your-luck system for each round? You can roll more, to do more, but risk calling in more enemies to attack you. Do you have to exceed each individual enemy’s attack with SPs? Or if you’re being attacked by multiples do you only need to exceed the highest one and it’ll cover all incoming attacks? I’m guessing the first, but didn’t want to assume.

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When you’re attacked by muliple enemies, you have to overcome their combined attacks. Pretty brutal!

I think you understand it pretty well. You take actions until you choose not to, or run “out of time” all the while risk attracting attention. The getting 2 hour glasses while “in danger” is basically a death sentence as you can’t roll anymore to defend yourself. That is truly where the push your luck comes from, the overlap of danger and not having time to respond.

I ran a lot of trials with different dice to get the basic statistics to where I wanted them.

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Consider also that, as you develop your character, you might have an ability to spend cunning SP to “blank” a danger die, or spend strength SP as defense (with armor).

You might be in a dark tunnel and need an insight SP to escape. The skill dice allow you to do all the conventional dungeon crawly things.

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Yeah, that sounds interesting to me. Sort of a dice placement game (even if you’re just assigning values and not actually placing them) but with variable amounts of dice based on both choice and luck.

I like a crawler that requires both good strategy and luck to succeed. At least for one-offs. Deep Madness & Lobotomy 2 come to mind, even if this isn’t in that same vein. But needing to make a plan, adjust it on the fly, and still have decent luck in order to succeed is something my wife and I really enjoy in a single session crawler.

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It sounds like an interesting system
How are the cumulative DD ones, twos, and multipliers tracked? Do they have cubes too or a simple tally?

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I was trying to make the components all as multi-use as possible:

  1. You use the DD as “colorless” skill points by placing them on the card/ability (like the cubes in dragons down).
  2. You simply collect all the DD with 1s, 2s, and x2s that you’ve rolled as part of your actions at the end of your turn and do the math.

So, you have a lot of dice to use as both dice and resource cubes. Does that make sense? They’re performing double duty.

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