Doing Stuff With D6s

Since the post about Player Character Progression I've been thinking about how to handle 'Class' (or Paths as I'm thinking of calling them) for Legends of Alba.

In 5e I always like the idea of a Class having access to a dice pool which they can manipulate to do their Cool Stuff. A Bard has Inspiration Dice. A Battle Master Fighter has Superiority Dice. The Psi sub-Classes have Energy Dice. As a player I find it fun to have a resource that's unique to my Character. I also like specifically that it's Dice rather than Points. You can use Dice to physically keep track, whereas Points tend to be tally marks on a Character Sheet.

I also really like the idea of each Class having it's own little minigame around their unique abilities. I was really impressed by how this was achieved in You Will Die in This Place. I'm not certain I'm up to a design challenge as involved as that, but I have been thinking along these lines.

So far the core rules of Legends of Alba only require a D20. Chances are that anyone who owns a D20 also has a healthy store of D6s. So what if Characters in Legends of Alba had some D6s they could use to do stuff?

Warrior

Combat Dice. You have a pool of three Combat Dice (D6). When you take an Attack Test, you can spend a Combat Dice to roll it and add the result to your score. You regain spent Combat Dice at the start of each day.  

Hunter

Skill Dice. Choose one of the following Skills: Beast Taming, Navigation, Stealth, Tracking. While you are in the Wilderness, anytime you would take a Test where one of these Skills would apply, you may instead roll a Skill Dice (D6). On anything but a 1, you Succeed.

Bard

Story Dice. You have a pool of three Story Dice (D6). When an ally who can hear you takes a Test, you can give them a Story Dice to roll and add the result to their score.  

Druid

Spell Dice. You have a pool of six Spell Dice (D6). At the start of each day, roll all of them. Group them by result into Singles (one of a kind), Doubles (two of a kind), Triples (three of a kind) and Quadruples (four of a kind). You may use a set to cast a Spell from the corresponding list.

I'd be quite keen to try this out. It keeps the Paths pretty light in terms of rules and they feel evocative enough. It also opens up room for progression and a design space for further development. There's some stuff here that requires further development already (e.g. a spell list for the Druid)!

Till Next Time!