In my look back at my various versions of Robit Riddle there are many themes that keeps coming back over and over again. In this article I will cover dice and names. I have been hunting for the right balance between story and mechanics.
Version 3 & 4
These two versions were very similar with just small changes trying to perfect my dice mechanics and solidifying names of things.
Dice
Keeping the core close I wanted to make the game appealing to families with young ones. My boys love dice and all different kinds of dice. This seemed to be a consistent feeling across many of my friends kids as well. So I thought, lets add all the dice... Coming up with a mechanic that used three different types of dice (d20, d10, d6).
Character sheet example
Friendly encounter with targets
Each die type represented a different attribute. You would choose the type of action you want to take with the encounter. Roll the number of dice equal to your attribute that matched the encounter. Compare the results with the targets on the encounter card. If you failed you followed the failure path in the book, if you succeeded you followed the successful path while gaining experience. Experience was used to increase your attributes.
Seems legit, but played awkwardly at best. It wasn't smooth.
At the end of the day someone suggested I look into the Fate system. Which I did, which took me down a completely different path, as you will see in the next article.
Names
As a software developer by day, I really believe the thing that gets me stuck the most is what to name things. This has carried through to games. Again, wanting to keep it light and fun and a little educational. I used two rules when trying to come up with the names of everything in my game.
Alliteration
If you hadn't noticed the names of all my things are alliterations. Making them fun to say. There is also at least one card for every letter in the alphabet, X being the hardest to come up with (X'd X'ing).
Onomatopoeia
Most all the cards have at least one word in the name that is an onomatopoeia. Which are words based on sounds. Again hopefully fun and light.
These rules guided me as I named everything. Some of the names would slowly change as I got feedback, but for the most part everything stuck.