Diceless but it's APOCALYPSE FRAME, or: I Do Love The Token But I Am Now Worrying In A Different Tangential Existential Way

May 16, 2023

Ttrpg Design, Apocalypse Frame, Diceless

Same idea, different game. I'd considered dicelessness for APOCALYPSE FRAME first, actually, but decided it wasn't worth putting it in the core game because I wanted it to come out ever. The big reason I'd do it is that rolling dice actually does slow things down quite a bit and for the most part players usually just reroll with Tension in combat so it's not like consequences come up that much unless folks are using low-die Armaments with low Tension or rolling low Attributes for some reason.

The current situation

It's more likely folks have this game but again, odds are you're not wildly familiar, so here's the rundown of random/non-random elements.

Random

Attribute/Approach rolls. LUMEN standard, roll Xd6 and take the highest, 1-2/3-4/5-6 bands for fail/partial/success.
Armament rolls. These are like Attribute rolls but are based on the Armament - an accurate Assault rifle has 4 dice associated with it, for example, while the powerful but slow Plasma Blade has 1 die. Various Armament tags can amplify this: that Plasma Blade has Charge which lets its first attack have 2 dice instead, meaning it's more reliable 1/turn.
Drops. For each (non-insignificant) enemy killed, roll a d6: 1-2 is a Material (used for advancement), 3-4 is Tension, 5-6 is Vigor.
Shields. Roll a die: if it's lower than or equal to your current Shields value, Shields drop by 1 and the Harm is nullified. If it's higher than the value, the Harm goes through.
Cover destruction and random locations. Usually these amount to: roll one die, on a 1-2 cover is destroyed or artillery scatters or etc.

Not Random

Resource generation by Build (with exceptions).
Systems use. That's NOVA-esque "spend the resource and it happens".
Tension use gives you an extra action that turn (prior to rolling to actually do the thing).
Armor, unlike shields, just flat reduces Harm by X (usually 1 when it exists, occasionally 2).

Attributes/Approaches

I looked at NOVA Tactics for this one and tweaked it slightly by stealing the BOB idea of strong (spend 1 token)/neutral (no spend)/weak (gain 1 token) moves.

For each Approach, you gain a number of Tokens for it equal to the value. (Approaches are always 3/2/1, so this is 6 tokens.)

If you want to do something without error, pick the Approach of your choice, describe how you do it, and spend a Token. It happens, no frills.
If you want to do something with some risk, pick the Approach of your choice and describe how you do it. Don't spend any Tokens. The GM describes what happens as a result.
If you want to do something with major risk, pick the Approach of your choice and describe how you do it. Gain a Token for that Approach (can go up to a maximum of the value). The GM describes what goes really wrong as a result. (This is a double-strength complication: GMs can activate two enemies if this is in combat or have something go twice as bad, for example.)

Anything that says "use an Approach" from here on means to make the above choice.

L1-RECON's Signature Feature doesn't really make sense anymore without rolling, so it has its Signature Feature changed to "once per mission, you can treat an Approach as if you had spent 1 Token more to use it".

Armaments

Obviously number of dice isn't a relevant thing anymore, so we have to replace it with something so I don't have to rebalance everything.

The Attack action is changed to just succeed. However, scratch out "dice" and replace it with "tokens" in every Armament entry: you must spend a token from it to use the Attack action. You can use an Approach to reset an Armament's Tokens to its max value.

There are bunch of tags and a few systems that add or subtract dice which don't make sense anymore. The majority can just be swapped to +1/-1 Harm with no frills as a MVP - that's basically what enemies do already and it's fine - but for greater diversity in tags I'd probably want to swap a few to do other things (like interact with those Tokens). A few do need more substantial changes:

Burst (normally +1 Harm on a 6) probably gets changed to "every time past the second time that you use this during a turn, attacks gain +1 Harm".
Splash (normally all other enemies at that hex take 1 Harm on a 6) probably gets changed to something like "you can use a second Action or Armament Token when using this to also deal 1 Harm to everyone Close to the target". (Splash+ makes this just happen without having to spend another action/token.)

Build

Re: Builds, most of them are fine. I think the main one we have to tweak is MX-BEACON, which, in addition to regaining 1 Vigor rolls a die and checks against current Tension to determine what it does. Change that rolling behavior to:

If your Tension is at half or more, your next System use is free.
If your Tension is at half or less, gain 1 Tension.

so it becomes more about maintaining an exact equilibrium at half tension if you want to maximize your Build's results. It's not exactly the same vibe but like, it's something.

Drops

By default we just say that drops are distributed evenly: for every 3 enemies defeated, gain 1 Material Drop, 1 Tension Drop, and 1 Vigor Drop. If there's a non-multiple-of-3, players pick where the other 1 or 2 Drops go (but if there's 2, it can't be both Drops to the same thing).

Before assigning drops, each player can choose to use an Approach or remove 2 of one kind of Drop to add a Drop of their choice.

Shields

I think the approach to Shields looks like "halve all instances, but each Shield blocks one attack without Piercing". Keeps it short and simple. A few things that add like one Shield probably need tweaking but that's fine. Players can use an Approach to circumvent all enemy Shields for one attack.

Cover/Scatter/etc

I think these come down to "the worse thing happens by default unless players use an Approach". For example:

For Cover if an enemy is being attacked, it holds up after the attack; if a player is being attacked, it crumbles after the attack.
For artillery scatter, it hits the designated location, but a player can use an Approach when it would hit to either move out of the way or have it move to a location of their choice.

And that covers everything, I think! None of this shit is playtested AT ALL so I'm sure it needs tweaking but at a high level it seems functional.

Uh Oh, A New Challenger To Worry About Approaches

Buuuuuttttt...in mocking these out, I'm wondering if this is overall a great idea. Dicelessness in general for tactics, that is. The thing with extremely repeatable outcomes is that you can set up extremely repeatable combos and it becomes extremely optimal to do that. While that can be cool, I'm wondering the degree to which this leads to more intense quarterbacking - when 1-2 people basically tell everyone else what to do with their turn. It's not a big deal when a scenario are intentionally, extremely PC-skewed but as soon as Shit Gets Real it can start to kick in hard because players start to care about outcomes. You start to get into situations where when everything is extremely resource-based, personal resources are team resources, so there's optimal and suboptimal ways to handle things.

I don't know. Is this even a problem actually? Maybe this is fine. It's not like dice-oriented design prevented that either, you know? Can anything? Is this even a solvable problem (if it is one)?