The Challenge System

I didn’t really do much this week, so let’s talk about something I’ve had almost finished for years now: the resolution system for my great work-in-progress, Monstrous Mishaps. I call it the Challenge System, for lack of a better name.

The thing that stands out with the Challenge System is that it’s entirely free from randomisers – not just “diceless” (a term people keep applying to games that rely on alternate randomisers, like card draws or coin flips, to my constant annoyance) but completely deterministic, with no randomness except the GM’s whimsy and the players’ refusal to stick to the plot. Because let’s be honest, those two are more than enough!

The Challenge System gives each character a set of Abilities, twelve Primary Abilities that are bought and raised individually, and twelve Derived Abilities that are each calculated as the average between two Primary Abilities. For example, your Score in Bullshitting (telling lies) is the average between your Score in Schmoozing (charm and charisma) and your Score in Mindgames (psychology).

Each Ability has a Score that usually goes from 1 to 15. The Score translates into a Level, as such:

There are three more Levels: Heroic (Score 16-31, anything Batman could do), Epic (Score 32-63, anything Superman could do), and Godlike (Score 64+, anything no one could possibly do), but Player Characters can’t have those in their Abilities. So why do I bring them up? Stay tuned, I’ll get to it.

When the players try to do something, the GM assigns it a Challenge Score (and associated Challenge Level) equal to the Ability Score it would reasonably take to accomplish it. So anything a seasoned professional might do within an Ability would be a Basic Challenge for that Ability. Advantages come in categories of +1, +3, +5, +10 and so on. They matter the most in Contests (where one character matches one of their Abilities against one of another character’s) since for regular Challenges you can just set the Challenge Score to anything you want to start with.

Finally, you can apply Upshifts and Downshifts. Those can come from any source that dramatically change the parameters of the Challenge, such as drastically extending or shortening the time the character has to work in, but the most common source of Upshifts is from paying Grit Points (of which a character has a fixed amounts). Paying 1 Grit Points gives one Upshift, while paying 3 Grit Points gives two Upshifts. An Upshift multiplies the Ability Score (after adding Advantages) by 2, and thus also increasing the Ability Level by one step. Downshifts do the same to Challenge Scores.

If, after all this, the Ability Score is equal to or higher than the Challenge Score, the character succeeded. Otherwise they failed.

I’ve playtested the system extensively, and it’s actually really smooth once you get used to it. When it comes right down to it, it’s just about deciding whether it would make sense for a character to succeed at something. And it’s nice, sometimes, to always get a result that fits the scene, instead of having come up with ways to justify the swinginess that comes from die rolls.