This page describes the game system used for BTW.
This is very tentative. Just writing down ideas at this point, but comments are welcome.
I'm questioning the idea of dice for a lot of things. Which is not to say that I want to eliminate an element of uncertainty in the outcome of actions - there needs to be a way to have some things be more risky than others. But I am considering a non-player-visible "luck pool" that is depleted by risky actions (and replenished at a set rate.) I need to research this.
Character development will be by exercising skills. I'm going to write a program for this, so rather than doling out skill points and you spending them on things (maybe things unrelated to what your character has been doing), your character will gradually improve at the things he or she actually does. For exercising new skills you'd like your character to develop risk free, the ship has virtual reality training facilities that characters can exercise skills in.
Ideas...
Characters have a relatively few aptitudes which determine how good they are at learning specific skills. They acquire skills by practising them (either before the game, by attempting things during active play, or in in-universe training or study.)
Randomness: Gaussian distribution. SD goes down and mean goes up with increasing skill. Roll for everything important, but GM decides if the outcome is fixed or floating. Luck is depleted by the GM giving successful results for unsuccessful rolls, and restored by the GM giving unsuccessful results for successful rolls. Floating rolls (where the outcome is not fixed) are affected by the sign and magnitude of the luck pool.
How to prevent extreme success being less likely for more skilled characters, if it goes by SD?
So, e.g. if a character does a bunch of stupid stuff that should have negative results but that the GM does not penalize for narrative reasons, luck is depleted. If, on the other hand, the GM makes a character fail stuff the RNG says they should have succeeded at, they will get luckier in future floating rolls.
e.g.
r3 tom ling 75 # Floating roll for a player character, Tom, in Linguistics, difficulty 75. > marginal success -> marginal success. > tom: linguistics exercised (+24) r3 mindy dama 35 s # GM-mandated success for player character Mindy at Damage Control, difficulty 35. > critical failure -> marginal success (-62 luck) > mindy: damage control exercised. (+7)
If Mindy had failed at her damage control skill on that roll, multiple player characters would have pointlessly died, so a minimal degree of success (s) was mandated by the GM. In this case, a critical failure was rolled, and since success was mandated by the GM, luck was spent to achieve the minimum acceptable result.
The idea here is to allow GM fudging when it is narratively important, without allowing statistically unrealistic accumulations of good fortune, and also reward the party for not always getting into situations where the GM has to bail them out to prevent the story from ending badly. (And also reward them for making their plans so good and randomness-insensitive that the GM has to actively make dramatic complications when appropriate.)
After her GM-forced success that should have been a failure, Mindy will have compensatory bad luck in floating rolls. Floating rolls that fail or succeed because of luck should probably replenish/deplete luck independent of forced rolls.
A succinct notation for individual-character situation modifiers is needed for mass rolls (e.g. noticing things)...
Needs to be able to revert previous rolls in case I typo something
r4 - 4th generation diceroller program r4 skillname-expr [charname-expr] [mandate-expr] use interactive prompt? there is a python library for that with autocomplete... skillname-expr [charname-expr] [mandate-expr] charnames: m[illie] ti[m] to[m] w[endy] sa[m] su[e] etc. no character and skill may share a name. (if they do, prepend a ' to the character name e.g.?) "What kind of parents name their kid 'Sociology'?" Nerds. [] - anonymous characters +/-N: circumstance bonus for the character only *: Everyone. skillnames - abbreviated by the same system. skill exprs and char exprs freely intermingled mandate expressions: (default:) better than or equal to < worse than or equal to = equal to 0: catastrophic failure (< 5 sd) 1: severe failure (< 4 sd) 2: major failure (< 3 sd) 3: failure (< 2 sd) 4: marginal failure (< neutral) 5: marginal success (> neutral) 6: success (etc) 7: major success 8: great success 9: extreme success Suffixes: *: charge or credit to party luck pool, not individual luck pool. Commands: (other than the default of doing a roll) !d[iceroll] (dice expression) [for random numbers] !r[evert] (revert to immediately before a particular roll) $/!p[retend] (give statistics on the proposed roll, don't actually roll it) !t[urns] (next turn), !turns on (char expressions may follow, with possible adjustments, !turns off (reset counts, print out status effects) !turns back (go to previous turn) `/!s[tatus] apply a note / status effect. ` to[m] 5 stunned ( stunned for 5 turns) e.g. to[m] li[nguistics] <5
Possible aptitudes...
Aptitudes on a percentile scale (calibrated for humans.) ? (makes extreme values hard to deal with... maybe auto conversion?)