It’s a Dumb Table kind of week. I might convert this to a script at some point, but for the time being I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way. Just follow along and roll on each table to generate your plot. Figuring out what the elements mean is your problem. 

The PCs find themselves traveling through...

1. An alternate dimension with no shrimp 
2. Possum Trot, Kentucky
3. Frostbite Falls, Minnesota 
4. Welldigger’s Ass, Alaska
5. Buzzard’s Breath, New Mexico
6. Tinker’s Dam, California
7. Indianapolis, Indiana  
8. Junction City, Kansas
9. The sub-basement of One Hex Tower 
10. Tool Town Federal Corrections Facility (Montana)
11. Radical City, Kansas 
12. Caledonia, Massachusetts
13. Harm’s Way, Louisiana 
14. Ultra City, Minnesota 
15. Collinsville, Illinois 
16. Boone County, West Virginia
17. The steam tunnels below Michigan State University
18. Angler’s Taint, Oregon
19. Sprooge’s Pikertat, Middle Dakota
20. An alternate dimension where everything is shrimp

Where they encounter…

1. The Ancient and Honorable Order of Pricks 
2. The KISS Foreign Legion
3. The Tony Danza Fan Club 
4. The First Reformed Church of Priapus Ascending 
5. The Dracula Initiative 
6. Lyle Lovett and His Large Band 
7. The Wombat Brotherhood 
8. Acolytes of Leviathan
9. The Circus of Set
10. Discordians
11. Nihilists 
12. Evil Elvis Impersonators
13. The League of Alphabetical Madmen 
14. The Jack Parsons Project
15. Satan’s Haberdashers 
16. Zombie Reagan Cultists 
17. The Senate Select Committee on Fancy Dinner Parties 
18. The Salvador Dali Died For You Society
19. Abstract Expressionist Peloponnesian War Reenactors 
20. The Occult Disciples of E. Gary Gygax, Super-Wizard 

Who are trying to…

1. Summon a powerful extra-dimensional entity using…
2. Hold the world hostage with…
3. Defeat Kevin Bacon using...
4. Open a gate to the underworld with...
5. Obtain phenomenal cosmic power through…
6. Build a Tantric super computer using…
7. Control time and space with…
8. Enslave the human race with…
9. Build a working faster than light engine that utilizes…
10. Achieve immortality through the power of...
11. Destroy the world with…
12. Determine the location of…
13. Harness the power of…
14. Kidnap The Devil by luring him to this dimension with...
15. Finally blow up the moon as soon as they obtain...
16. Create a pocket dimension with the power of...
17. Immanentize the eschaton with…
18. Resurrect Richard Nixon with a ritual involving... 
19. SHOW THEM ALL once they’ve obtained...
20. Summon Godzilla with...

1. ALF Pogs 
2. Richard M. Nixon’s bowling shoes
3. Hidden knowledge revealed through deciphering hidden messages coded into episodes of Mama’s Family 
4. Bigfoot’s spleen
5. Jim Garrison’s secret files 
6. The unabridged original manuscript of Naked Lunch 
7. The Roswell spacecraft
8. A series of Fortean-themed paintings by George W. Bush  
9. David Lynch’s dream journal 
10. Hitler’s brain 
11. Mel Blanc’s voice 
12. A bag of magic beans 
13. The magic bullet 
14. The occult secrets of the Juggalos  
15. John Oates’ mustache
16. Smurfs 
17. Journals detailing top-secret scientific experiments conducted by Stan Lee and Frank Zappa in the 1960s
18. The Vatican Library’s secret collection of forbidden erotica 
19. Adam West’s Book of Shadows
20. The power of cheese 

Since I’ve occasionally posted links to Zak Smith/Sabbath’s blog, I want start his week off by publicly stating that I believe Mandy Morbid and will not be supporting Zak or those who continue to work with or support him in the future. The three bucks a month I was giving him on Patreon has been cancelled and will be redirected to someone who actually deserves my support (recommendations welcomed) and “Remove all links to Playing D&D with Porn Stars” has been added to the To Do list for the Death Cookie Wordpress conversion that I’ve been half-assedly working on. I once defended him in a private conversation by saying that I thought he was more of an asshole than an actual monster. Turns out he is, in fact, an actual monster. May he eat turds in Hell with Sean Patrick Fannon.  

Now, game stuff. 

I think the change to how roll results are read needs some more explanation and examples to click, along with some terminology. I’ll start with a recap and the introduction of the terminology:

Player makes his roll (for a contest, the opponent also makes his roll)

If player roll beats the target number (or opponent’s roll), subtract the target number from the roll. This is the Margin of the success. For simple pass/fail rolls, you can usually stop here. 

If you need to the roll to translate into additional mechanical effects, you break the Margin down into two values. The ones digit of the degree becomes the Effect. The tens digit is the number of Raises the player gets. [Note: I hate “Raises,” but haven’t been able to come up with anything better. Suggestions welcomed.]

If the Margin is evenly divisible by 10, the player can choose to either trade a Raise for an Effect 10 or keep all the raises with an Effect 0.  

Margin

I’m giving the difference between the successful roll and the target number a name purely to simplify talking about it. There might be a few cases where it has a mechanical use (for example, if you need to generate a target number from the roll), but I don’t think it will come up very often. In most cases where the degree of success matters, you’ll want to use Effect and Raises. 

Effect

Effect describes how well the character performs the basic action and usually determines short-term mechanical payoff for the roll (for example, how much Stamina damage an attack does or the penalty generated by distraction). For extended rolls, the Effect is used as a bonus on the player’s next roll (it can also be used mechanically, but I think the outcome of individual rolls within an extended roll will typically be descriptive). 

Raises

Effect describes how well you do the basic action. Raises are bells and whistles. For each Raise, you can do something cool. Sometimes the cool thing will have mechanical effects (cause extra damage), sometimes it will affect the characters (disarm an opponent), location (crash through the glass coffee table), or plot (knock somebody the fuck out) in some way, and sometimes it will be purely descriptive (do a somersault as you jump over the shark). 

There will be a few set mechanical uses for Raises (provided the player can come up with a cool way to explain the effect). For example, maybe you can add your Hero Factor to the Effect, carry a Raise over to your next roll (losing it if the roll wastes the Raise), or trade the roll for a bonus dice or Acclaim. Specific sub-systems will usually have their own more specific option. For example, in combat you can cause a wound, pull off a special move like a trip or disarm, etc. 

Finally, instead of using the Raise to do something immediately cool, you can contribute Raises toward a larger goal. In my first draft of this post, I tried to get into the description of it, but it turned into a confusing mess. I know how it works, but I haven’t quite figured out how to explain it clearly. I decided to cut that for now and try to clean it up for next week. The basic idea is to set up an extended roll type mechanic where the individual rolls represent an action while also contributing to a larger goal over the course of several rounds. A few examples:

• Abstractly representing positioning/movement/tactics in a fight scene. For example, the GM may rule that it takes 5 raises to herd the monster into position to spring your ingenious trap; if the monster realizes he’s being herded or has a compelling reason to not go toward the trap, he can use his raises to lower your running total. 
• Standard extended roll type stuff, like a scene where two characters are racing. Individual rolls and totals determine the ebb and flow of the action and the first one to reach the goal number wins the race. 
• Scene goals where several different actions are contributing toward a larger a particular outcome. For example, if you’ve invited your boss over for dinner trying to impress him into giving you a raise, you might contribute raises from a cooking roll (for the meal itself), a couple of charm-type rolls (for the conversation), rolls for whatever you job is (to impress him him when you talk shop), etc. The number of raises you manage to collect determines whether the boss takes a liking to you. 
• Down-time/Off-screen rolls for things like research, science, or magic item creation. 
• “Countdown” rolls for when PCs have a limited amount of time to pull off a complex series of actions (heists are the obvious example). If you don’t collect the required number of raises within the time limit, the cops arrive or the timer closes the vault or whatever. 
• Montage rolls for things like sporting events, preparing for battle, stakeouts, etc. For sports, the number of raises determines who wins and by how much, for the latter two the raises from the montage could translate into bonuses for a future scene (the coming battle, the raid on the bad guy’s lair you’ve been watching, etc.). 

I’ve still got quite a bit of work to do, but breaking things down into Effect and Raises makes the math for running totals easier and differentiates between the immediate gains of the action and the longer-term advantage. 

While the dice are different, the interpretation of rolls in Cinemechanix has so far been exactly the same as QAGS, with the difference between the character’s successful roll and the target number (whether it’s a static difficulty number set by the GM or another character’s opposing roll) representing the extent of the character’s success. One thing I want to do with these rules is to encourage players to use that success number (called Effect in Cinemechanix) to do cool stuff, whether it’s making an attack with special effects or putting some of it toward some goal that takes place over multiple actions (for example, backing an opponent into a corner or hacking your way through a horde of mooks without having to kill them individually). So far, every attempt has been either so vague it’s practically useless or so crunchy that most people won’t bother with it. 

I think one of the real problems with turning the Effect into something useful is that the numbers are too high for the kinds of things they need to translate into. This is a problem with QAGS as well, which is why damage is so deadly if you don’t understand that you have to use Yum Yums to stay alive. That’s a system eccentricity that most people can pick up pretty quickly, but every other time I’ve tried to turn the Success Degree (which is what Effect is called in QAGS) into a concrete mechanical effect, it’s gotten clunky because it usually requires dividing the number by some factor (the superpowers rules in Weird Times at Charles Fort High are probably the clunkiest example) in order to make the number usable. I can bullshit away 17 points of damage by claiming bennies fix it, but a -17 modifier on a d20 just doesn’t fly. 

So far with Cinemechanix, I’ve been trying the same kind of tricks that I never quite got to work with QAGS. The only real improvement is that with Cinemechanix I can use Hero Factor as a go-to divisor, which seems less arbitrary than 4 or whatever number I used to kick down the numbers in various QAGS systems. But you’re still doing division, which brings up rounding questions and feels complicated even though you’ve had most of it memorized since grade school. No matter how smooth you try to make it, it’s still going to feel clunky. 

One solution might be to dial down the dice to something with a smaller range, but I like the general range that the game operates on (somewhere in the 10-25 range for a typical PC roll) because it lets the GM to hand out small bonuses and penalties without skewing the outcome. A +1 for describing the action in a cool way or delivering a good one-liner with the punch isn’t going to have a huge impact if the final roll is between 10 and 20, but if you’re rolling a d4 that +1 is a potential game changer, meaning the GM has to be stingier with the positive reinforcement that bonuses can provide. Lower dice also mean lower differences between the winner and loser, which (as we discovered in the original “roll a bunch of d20s and keep the best” mechanic) can result in contests that take forever because the rolls are so close the characters are just swapping small changes in advantage (or in combat, tiny amounts of damage). So no, I like the dice we’re using (whatever those are this week). 

So maybe the best plan is to look at the Effect differently. If we just need a general idea of how successful an action is, we can stop at the Effect value, but if we want to translate Effect into other game mechanics, let’s treat the ones and tens digits as separate numbers with different meanings within the context of the roll. This is an idea that usually shows up in d100 systems (I think Unknown Armies uses it), but I think the concept works pretty well here, especially if the 10s digit is used for things where a little goes a long way (since it’s usually going to be 3 or less). What I’m thinking is that the 1s digit is your level of success and the 10s digit is a combination of overkill and stunt points that allow you to do cool stuff. 

For combat, the application is easy if we assume a damage system with two types of damage, Stamina (exhaustion, cuts and scrapes, aches and pains) and Wounds (lasting damage). The ones digit is Stamina damage, the 10s digit causes wounds. For every point in the 1s digit, you can also do something cool, like try to disarm the opponent or knock the opponent down or whatever. Some options might make you trade the wound for the cool move, but I think in most cases you’ll get to cause the wound and do something. One reason is that the 10s digit will usually be a low number. The other is that getting players to trade actual damage for cool combat effects can be a hard sell (even when it doesn’t require the players to do math that simple bloodshed skips right over). Giving an opponent a penalty by using a cool move or dirty trick might allow you to win the combat faster, but knifing the fucker seems like a surer path to a quick victory. So screw it, why not both? 

Outside of combat, the same basic idea applies. If you’re questioning someone, a 10s digit higher than 0 means the witness reveals additional things the PCs didn’t know in her answer. If you’re shooting pool, the 10s digit is the number of extra balls you sink in one shot. If you’re doing a high dive, the 10s digit is how many somersaults you pull off before hitting the water. In general, every point in the 10s digit lets you do 1 more thing to make the action cooler or more useful. 

The 10s digit can also be applied toward goals, which is an idea I’ve only touched on previously but really want to expand on. In addition to letting characters accomplish tactical goals (herding the monster into position to spring your trap, cutting through big piles of mooks without having to personally kill each one, etc.), the basic concept can replace the (currently way too crunchy) rules for extended rolls, especially if you use the 1s digit as a bonus to the next roll in cases where the individual rolls don’t need mechanics. When it comes to Goals, I think the player does have to give up the extra cool thing if he wants to add to the gaol. 

Example: Agent Booth is chasing Paulie Walnuts. Paulie has a bit of a head start, so the GM decides he needs 2 successes to get away from Booth. Booth needs 4 successes to catch him. 

• Round 1: Booth rolls 14, Paulie rolls 8, so Booth’s Effect is 6. That doesn’t give booth any successes, but he gets +6 on his next roll. 
• Round 2: Booth rolls 20, Paulie rolls 3, so Booth’s Effect is 17. He scores 1 success and gets +7 on his next roll. 
• Round 3: Booth rolls 10, Paulie gets really lucky on an exploding die and rolls 21, for an Effect of 11. Instead of putting a point toward his Goal, he uses his success to blend into a group of senior citizens on their way to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The GM decides Booth will have to burn a success to spot him. 
• Round 4: Booth rolls 12, Paulie rolls 6. Since Booth doesn’t get a success to burn, he temporarily loses Walnuts, but he does get +6 on his next roll as he scans the crowd (Paulie’s not moving too fast in the middle of all those old people). 
• Round 5: Booth rolls 20, Paulie rolls 8, so Booth has an Effect of 12. He spots Paulie by burning his success and gets a +2 to his next roll.
• Round 6: Booth rolls 25, Paulie rolls 4 (Effect 21). Booth now has 3 successes and gets +1 to his next roll. 
• Round 7: Booth rolls 7, Paulie rolls 17 (Effect 10). Paulie scores 1 success, meaning that the next success will decide the chase. Since Paulie’s 1s digit is zero, neither character gets a bonus to the next roll.
• Round 8: Booth rolls 15, Paulie rolls 10 (Effect 5). The chase is still on, but Booth gets +5 to his next roll. 
• Round 9: Booth rolls 23, Paulie rolls 5 (Effect 18). Booth is now close enough to tackle Paulie Walnuts, and the GM rules that he can add the +8 to his attack roll. 

The same basic pattern can be used for any kind of roll that you don’t want to resolve with single die roll: research, negotiations or persuasion attempts, science and inventing, etc. You can also slightly switch it up  slightly to provide a countdown clock. For instance, if the players are doing a break-in, the GM may rule that the countdown clock starts at 5 and decreases by 1 per round. When it reaches zero, the guard patrol will pass by the safe the players need to crack. The players can use success to add to the clock. Depending on what actions the players are taking, these additions to the clock could represent the burglars either working faster, getting lucky, or slowing down the guards in some way. 

As usual, math and playtesting will be required, but if it works this scheme may get around a wall I’ve been banging my head against for quite some time. 

I need a break from posting about Cinemechanix, so I decided to put together a few dumb tables to use in the James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Time Machine game I’m going to be running at GenCon (and probably some others) this year. 

Random Historical/Future Destinations

1. Santa Monica Pier (July 11, 2013)
2. Ancient Rome
3. Los Angeles Freeway (June 17, 1994)
4. Post-Apocalyptic Future 
5. Dallas, Texas (November 22, 1963)
6. Renaissance Italy 
7. RMS Titanic (April 14, 1919)
8. Dinosaur/Caveman Times
9. Braunau am Inn, Austria (April 20, 1889)
10. The Old West 
11. Jerusalem (33 AD)
12. Revolution Era America 
13. Thermopylae (480 BC)
14. A Pirate Ship 
15. Whitechapel, London (1888)
16. A Viking Village 
17. Nottingham, England (12th Century)
18. Vlad the Impaler’s Castle 
19. New York City (September 2001)
20. The Utopian Future 

80s Celebrities Who Might Make Travel To The Future Awkward

1. Bruce Jenner
2. Robert Downey, Jr. 
3. Princess Diana
4. Todd Bridges
5. Gary Coleman
6. Dana Plato
7. Hulk Hogan
8. Steven Seagal 
9. Roseanne Barr
10. Bret Michaels
11. Johnny Depp
12. Corey Feldman  
13. O.J. Simpson
14. Bill Cosby
15. Michael Jackson
16. Flava Flav 
17. Eddie Murphy 
18. Mel Gibson 
19. Whitney Houston  
20. Donald Trump 

Special Guest Stars (From The Book of Dumb Tables) 

1. Mr. T
2. Dom Deluise
3. Zsa Zsa Gabor
4. Jerry Mathers
5. Rich Little 
6. Charles Nelson Riley
7. Mary Tyler Moore
8. Scott Baio
9. Charro
10. The Harlem Globetraotters
11. Richard Simmons
12. Dr. Joyce Brothers
13. Phyllis Diller
14. Chris Elliot 
15. Richard Mulligan
16. Buddy Hackett
17. Ted McGinley
18. Jimmie Walker
19. J.M. J. Bullock
20. Jamie Farr 

Musical Guest  

1. Eddie Murphy  
2. Dexy’s Midnight Runners
3. Rockwell 
4. Bow Wow Wow
5. Eddy Grant 
6. Frankie Goes To Hollywood
7. Bobby McFerrin
8. Big Country
9. Toni Basil
10. Men Without Hats
11. Oran “Juice” Jones 
12. Timbuk 3 
13. Paul Hardcastle 
14. The Weather Girls
15. Nena 
16. The Vapors
17. Thomas Dolby 
18. The Thompson Twins
19. Bobby Vera & The Beaters  
20. Bruce Willis