05 December 2006

Setting Contest 2: Three Hands

I was thinking recently about a "3-hand" breakdown, but one in which you'd only end up rolling two of your 3 dice pools.

So you'd have Line, Run, and Pass across the bottom of each team's sheet. And players would divide all the dice on their team (either their Offensive or Defensive positions) into those three categories. And both players could watch each other and adjust, just like atheletes adjusting on the line before the ball is snapped.

Then, once those dice were placed, both players would reveal which play they'd called (by flipping over a card?). These would work sorta like weapons, adding dice to particular pools or moving existing dice around. So like, a passing play would add dice to Pass or some Play Action might take dice from Pass and put them in Run.

Then you roll for the Line. I'm not exactly sure what this does yet. Maybe it prevents your players from taking a pounding. Maybe it sets the limits on potential yardage that can be gained in this play. Maybe a really bad roll gets you sacked (if you're the Offense) or adds additional yardage to your opponent's gains (if you're the Defense).

Finally, the player on Offense chooses whether to Pass or Run and rolls those dice vs. the Pass or Run of the opposing player. Usually, the play you choose predetermines whether you're going to roll Pass or Run, but you can probably spend some resource points to go against that, assuming that the dice are stacked against you. Or try to call a penalty against the other team.

Before you roll any of your pools (Line or Pass/Run), you can choose to narrate in one of your Unquantifiable traits and add that die to your pool. If you lose the roll, however, that trait is impaired.

I think you should be able to learn or invent new plays as your team grows in experience and skill. Perhaps the game only comes with a dozen or so basic plays and, after that, teams have to invent their own, according to established guidelines. So if you want to mimick real plays and write rules for a Double Reverse, that's cool. But if you want to write Glorious Prismatic Spectral Pass Deflection, that's cool too.

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