Paladinltd/LuckyandUnlucky

This is my idea to throw a proverbial monkey wrench in the Exalted system cause I'm a fae-blooded bastard and the horrified look players get on their face when they die is vastly entertaining

Luck is a random act of fate. Some people are luckier then others (the lucky merit). Some have the universe aligned against them (the Unlucky merit). The rest of us of a good share of both. This system tries to explain that

Whenever a player makes a roll i ask him to count the number of 10s or ones. When the number of 10s reaches seven I put a point into a temporary lucky pool. When the Number of 1s reaches seven i put a point into his unlucky pool

Both pools go up to five, and are purely under the ST's control. If I want to see a player succed a roll that he's failed i may allow him to reroll it a number of times equal to his temporary lucky pool, taking the best roll, or i could give him the same number of extra dice. If I feel he should fail i will make him reroll a number of times equal to his unlucky pool, or subtract that number of die from his roll.

comments

Ummm... every single time a player rolls you want that player to add all their results together? That will take forever and slow down play to a crawl. - szilard

Takes forever? Not really. I suppose it depends on how fast you register numbers and do addition in your head. Besides, soon players would get into the habit of automatically looking for combinations that will add up to one of the three "magic numbers". I think this is a neat little plan. -Okensha

Unless I had a real-life lightning calculator in my game, this would bog it down unnecessarily given how often the dice roll and how many get rolled at once. Besides which, this method is an unnecessarily complex way of generating numbers that could be easily generated in easier ways. - szilard

Seems like more trouble than its worth, or more truly, a lot of trouble and worth... well... nothing. Just my two cents. It sounds like this system would slow play and force the most bizarre sort of min-maxing I've ever seen. And frankly, as a player, nothing sucks more than having a hard-earned victory snatched away by an amused or spiteful ST. -Seraph

But What kind of fun would we be able to have? anyway if there is an easier way of getting such points I would love to hear them. -Paladinltd

That's the problem. Why bother? If you really want to fudge a roll, go a head and do it. You don't need a system telling you when you can and can't. And if you're going to go around snatching good rolls away from your players out of spite, you may well find yourself out of players very quickly. If you can't have fun without arbitrarily messing around with your players and their characters... I dunno. I wouldn't want to play with that kind of ST, but that might just be me. Of course, if it works for your players, more power to you. - Seraph

Ah but could the same thing not be said of the regular flaw unlucky? I see where you're going with it but the idea isn't to arbitrarily screw players over, its arbitrarily to throw them off balance. I want to shake the players up, make sure that they know everything isn't always going to be as simple as roll the die against a set difficulty and thats that. the point of my games is to really have fun, not to make sure everyone follows the rules to the letter -Paladinltd

I guess for me the answer has always been to just be flexible about the rules, not to add more rules, and if I want to shake my players up I go with narrative elements ("I was WHO in my past life?!") or unexpected mechanics to unique elements ("the wyld creature's poison does WHAT?!"). Those ways seem a lot cleaner and simpler.

And as a minor aside, someone who takes Lucky or Unlucky is asking for it. Not everyone wants their character to be fate's bitch. -Seraph who must admit to being ambivalent about merits and flaws in Exalted in the first place

Once again a good point and I too enjoy throwing a plot curveball ("that Dragon-blooded Scion is my WHAT?!") but one of my players brought up the1 point that they really need to be kept on their toes even in the middle of combat when there is no possibilities for a plot twist -Paladinltd

When it comes to combat, I prefer to keep my players on their toes with interestingly built antagonists and cool new stuff. This system still seems a little arbitrary. You could argue that Fate should be arbitrary, and I could argue that it should serve the story, and now we're in the GNS theory debate, and that's been done to death. - Seraph who is almost definately a C driven N.

indeed. Truce? - Paladinltd

Truce. - Seraph Who is impressed that Paladinltd knows what GNS theory is, since he didn't until his girlfriend did a paper on it

My mother always said I had that special ability to know stuff I didn't even know I know.-Paladinltd

Ha HA HA!! I thought of a system that could work just as well but allow things to flow much easier. changes above -Paladinltd