Cinco: Flattening Curves

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I like the 1:1:1 odds of success, bargain, and failure much better than the 1:2:3 odds. Besides being more appropriate for heroically competent characters, the d6 pool in general is more effective at distinguishing simply between qualified and unqualified characters without reducing the resolution procedure to an optimization game.

There's one problem: aspects and inspiration each add 1 die to the pool, turning a 33% chance of success into a 55% chance into a 70% chance, not to mention additional dice from features. This eliminates friction from the equation, turning these rolls into road-bumps rather than opportunities for decision-making.

I looked at FATE for direction. There, aspects have a cost to be invoked at all. That's a little extreme, isn't it? But there's an interesting in-between that came to mind and that I really liked: instead of spending inspiration to invoke aspects, why not spend inspiration to establish facts about your character which would make an aspect applicable to their situation?

This helps flatten the probabilistic curve, making 1 or 2 dice more likely than 2 or 3, but it also emphasizes the continual conceptualization of characters. Establishing facts about your character, making them more specific and 'lived', becomes a central activity in the game. Characters should probably start with a handful of 'facts' to get started (or as many as desired), but conceptualizing your character outside of play is easier than during the game when you are now reacting to situations rather than anticipating them.

An aside: you can easily swap the mixed resolution with binary resolution if it doesn't make sense for a situation to have an in-between. The truth is that I think of dice less as outcome machines than oracular bones anyway, so I don't think of there being a hard-line distinction between the two 'methods'. More dice is better, and higher rolls are better.

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