What is Distortion Dice

Distortion Dice is a system that I originally developed for Distorted Domains, but that I quickly started adapting to other games such as Plucky Princesses and Spectral Sleuths. The core premise of the system is pretty simple, to use dice pools made of d4s to d12s to resolve situations that are uncertain, with a die representing each thing that could play a role in determining the outcome. As a player, you assemble your dice pool of everything that could help you accomplish your task, and the GM assembles an opposition pool of everything that could hold you back. Both the player and the GM roll, and take the highest die from their pool. If the GMs die is higher, then the player loses and something bad happens. If the dice are tied, then the player succeeds, but something bad happens. If the players die is higher, then the player succeeds without issue. If the players die is higher by 5 or more, then that is a critical success and the player overwhelmingly succeeds. Most of the variation in distortion dice games is from changing what the dice represent, and how the dice can be affected by the players and the narrative. This guide functions as an example of my thought process when designing a new game. It is by no means intended to be exhaustive, so take as much or as little from this guide and the games that use the Distortion Dice system as you need for your project.

Getting Started

When using Distortion Dice for your own game, start with an idea. A game, the rules, the setting, how the fictional world works, are basically an agreed upon set of assumptions. This is especially true when a game is in it’s early stages, as unexpected things can happen as a game is being developed. So to start, I generally think of a type of story that I might want to tell. Often, we draw inspiration from our own lives as well as other media we’ve consumed such as TV shows, comics, music, and other games. Maybe you want to be space smugglers working odd jobs, or little critters building a community in a forest, or super heroes who have to balance saving the world and personal relationships, or the staff of a hospital in a modern fantasy setting. It’s important to note what types of stories that you want to tell so that when you are creating your game, the mechanics enforce the experiences you are aiming to create.

Stats

I consider stats to be a core component of a distortion dice game. Stats are essentially universal ways that every character can interact with the world. Generally I use 3-4 stats in my games, but you can use as many or as little as you wish. As a base, you could simply use Mental, Physical, and Social, as this covers just about everything you can do in any game, but it could be good to customize your stats to your particular game. In Distorted Domains, I used Strong, Skilled, and Smart. You’ll notice that there’s no social stat here. Instead, I decided that how you are attempting a social action was more important than the simple fact that you are doing something social. You can have a strong approach to a social interaction, or a skilled approach, or a smart approach, and this demonstrates that how you’re doing something can be just as important as what you are doing. In Plucky Princesses I use Might, Magic, and Manners as stats. Might represents a characters physical ability, Magic represents their ability to use and understand magic, and Manners represents their social ability. Here I opted not to use a stat to represent character intelligence. In playtesting with my daughter, I found that much of the fun could be in coming up with creative solutions as a player, and given that she was my target audience, I decided to play into that. So there is no stat to help you understand a situation, no stat for general knowledge. Instead, the players are forced to use other abilities to learn more, and come up with solutions as a player rather than a character.

By default, each stat also has a harm track. The harm track is basically the stress that you undergo to accomplish tasks with that stat. The higher it is, the harder it is for you to succeed, and if it goes about a d12 your character is incapacitated. When you suffer a negative consequence, usually that comes in the form of a harm die going up.

When coming up with your stats, be sure to think about all of the different actions that a player may want to do when playing your game, and how those could fall into one or more of your stats. I generally prefer stats are that are fairly broad in scope. Another consideration for how many stats that you have, is that it directly relates to how many harm tracks a character has as well. Generally, a character with more harm tracks will be more resilient than a character with fewer harm tracks. So only having two stats could make your game more deadly, though this does depend on how you handle harm and healing, as you can simply opt to have death not be on the table at all, and you can make healing abundant in different ways.

Alternatives to the standard roll

D6 Only

In this variation, instead of having a mixed pool of dice, you have a number of d6s for each asset, aspect, and stat. Instead of having die ratings, you will instead use numerical ratings such as 1,2,3, or 4 where 1 = 1d6, 2 = 2d6, etc. One of the major advantages here is d6s can be more accessible to more people. Things are also easier for the GM, since they will not have to think about die size anymore, just number of dice. One notable thing is that this makes critical successes very rare.

Compare the Highest and Lowest

In this variation, instead of only keeping the highest die, you keep both the highest and the lowest and compare both to the GMs highest and lowest. If your highest die is higher than the GMs highest, that is a success. If your lowest die is also higher than the GMs lowest die, that success comes without any complications. In the case of ties, players are assumed to win ties on the highest die and lose ties on the lowest die. For player vs player conflict, replace “player” and “gm” with “initiator” and “responder” to indicate who initiated the conflict and who responding to it.

Player Highest	Player Lowest	Result
Higher	Higher	Success
Higher	Lower	Success with consequences
Lower	Higher	Failure with positive side effect
Lower	Lower	Failure

This rolling mechanism increases the odds of a success with consequences, and adds in the option for a failure with a positive side effect. This type of rolling works well for games where negative outcomes are wanted more often and will always help drive the story forward. Something with an interpersonal drama focus where the harm being represented is lower stakes to the character. Due to the higher chance of success with consequences, the system for negative aspects will likely also need extra attention.

Harm

I’ve already talked about harm a little bit, basically the idea behind a harm track is that everytime a character does something with a level of uncertainty they are doing so under duress. As they fail, the amount of stress increases, resulting in an increased harm die. This stress can represent social stress such as anger or feelings of awkwardness. It can represent a loss of confidence, it can represent a mental block, or it can represent physical harm done to the character. All of these things are harm done to a character.

Just as important as understanding what harm is, is how harm is reduced. I believe that in every game, that harm can be reduced through actions by the player characters, and through rest. When taking an action to heal a character, the player makes a roll with the most appropriate stat, and rolls against the harm being healed as well as the harm track for the apropriate stat. This does mean that a player character healing themself may roll against a pool of two of the same harm die. Failure means that you made it worse, and a mixed success means that the harm die tied to the stat goes up, but the harm die attempting to be lowered goes down. Unfortunately this does mean that attempting to heal can simply result in nothing happening on a roll. This is rare and probably the only occurance of nothing happening on a roll within Distortion Dice.

When it comes to rest, is where we can see a lot of variance for healing. How much time constitutes a rest, and how much does rest heal you? If you want a lighter and less stressful game, then resting for a few hours may heal you fully, reducing all harm tracks back down to a d4. If you want a deadlier and more stressful game, then it make take a full night of rest for a single harm track to go down by one, and several weeks for all harm tracks to be reduced to a d4.

Also of importance is incapacitation. By default, when a characters harm track goes above a d12, that character is not yet dead, but rather taken out. They incur or increase a negative aspect to indicate long term trauma. If you want a more deadly game, characters that are incapaciated may need to be healed to stop them from dying. In a lighter game, simply switching scenes may have the character back up on their feet and ready to go, with the harm track being reset to a d4 and the only real negatives being the new negative aspect and their inability to act while incapcitated. If you don’t know where to start, set a rest to be a full night and that it reduces each harm track by 1 step, and adjust from there.

Alternatives to Harm Tracks

As an alternative to standard harm tracks you may want to have freeform conditions. These are narratively named according to the current situation. If someone uses a mind blast that restricts your movement and you resist with Smarts, you don’t increase your Smarts harm track because you don’t have one. Instead, a condition called “restricted” will be created and set at a d6. Conditions essentially work as temporary negative aspects, and can be stepped up and down just as a harm track would be. However conditions can be removed entirely when that specific scenario is resolved. If you are using conditions, you roll against all conditions that would hinder your particular action, and if you do not have any conditions you simply use a d4 with no label as well as the other dice in the opposition pool.

Somewhere between conditions and standard harm tracks is independent harm tracks. Like standard harm tracks, there is set forms of harm. However, as the name would imply, these are not tied to a stat. These harm tracks represent the different types of stress a character can take on depending on the action they are taking and the situation they are in. Some examples would be fear, fatigue, hunger, and injury for a survival focused game.

Another alternative is the singular harm track. In order to make the singular harm track less deadly, some additional rules (and rolls) need to be done. When taking harm on a singular harm track, roll the harm die, and on a 4+ the harm die is increased. This maintains the danger of a larger harm die while also slowing down the rate at which you can be taken out. However, it should be noted that this mechanic will slow the game down some as it results in an extra die being rolled.

Perhaps you want a more traditional HP mechanic, where each character has a number of HP determined by their stats, and aspects. For this you may want to assign specific HP ranges to specific die sizes.

The alternatives provided above are simply examples to show the different ways that a harm die could work. If you have your own ideas about harm and harm dice, please implement them.

Assets, Aspects, and Other Character Traits

Here’s where we put everything else a character can do, and what makes them unique. Assets are generally the stuff a character has. You could have a d6 sword or a d8 shield. Personally, I think that if an asset is important it should have something more descriptive, like d8 My Grandfather’s Pocket Watch. Each asset comes with a die rating, and that die gets used in your dice pool when you use that asset. The die represents the narrative impact that this item has. So it could represent the quality of the item, or the significance it has to the character.

Aspects are abilities, personality traits, goals, or values that separate your character from the others. I like to have some pre-set questions for Aspects such as where are you from, what is your reputation, what are you looking for. These are leading questions that can give a character depth, and an implied backstory. Aspects are also where we can mechanize why you are doing a task, in addition to what the task is or how you are trying to accomplish it. Aspects also each have a die rating to represent their importance in the story. Uniquely, aspects can be negative. A negative aspect is used in the opposition dice pool when it would hold a character back. This also grants them an inspiration point.

There is no reason to limit yourself to these two things of describing your character. If you want a game more about interpersonal relationships you can have a die to represent those relationships. You can have powers with die ratings as well. When separating something from an aspect, or when renaming aspects to something else, be sure to put some thought into what that name means. As well as what it means to have Powers separate from aspects instead of simply having them as one aspect. Separating out what could be an aspect into another category can introduce additional game complexity, as well as add emphasis to this part of a character. In a cyberpunk game, you may wish to have augments as a separate category from assets and aspects because augments are so important to the game. Improving augments could also have a unique mechanic separate from the rest of character improvement. This emphasizes the importance of augments in this game.

Activated Abilities can also be a part of your Aspects, Assets, or other traits. An Activated Ability is either an additional die, or the raising of a die under certain circumstances. These can range from something like your electricity powers being enhanced by saltwater, to spending an inspiration to fire a special round out of your revolver. So the conditions on activating a special ability can be entirely narrative, or somewhat mechanical. The easiest mechanical activation would be to spend inspiration. Another activation would be having a harm track above a certain threshold. Narrative activations can be something like the environment that you’re in, how many allies you have around, or even what song is playing on the radio. What activated abilities can represent are special techniques, or key points of motivation or expertise for your character. They are used to add depth to Aspects, Asset, or other traits of your character.

Obstacles

An obstacle is simply something that stands between a character and what that character wants. This can be a policy or law, a locked door, a gorge, an NPC, or simply the difficulty of what a character is attempting. Everything that a character needs to overcome in order to accomplish their task is an obstacle. Obstacles, like everything that impacts the narrative in a distortion dice game, are represented by dice. Simple obstacles can be represented by a single die such as a d8, and be resolved in a single roll. More complex obstacles can have more dice. This can be represented as something like 3d6 angry mob, or something like d10 Sky Whale with a d8 appetite, and d8 hates humans. The more you break down the dice, the more characterization you’ve given the obstacle.

When a player succeeds against a complex obstacle, it reduces a die from that obstacle. When a die is reduced below a d4, then it goes away. An obstacle is defeated when it has no dice left. However, this doesn’t mean that obstacles always need to be reduced to no dice in order for the player characters to succeed. Obstacles that are living beings often have a sense of self preservation, as well as the ability to make their own choices. When it no longer makes sense for them to be an obstacle within the narrative, they are no longer an obstacle.

You can also include specialized obstacles with custom rules. The tension die from Spectral Sleuths is an example of this. This die represents the constant tension in the air due to the supernatural events occuring in the area. A variable tension die can be raised by actions taken by obstacles that cause the threat to grow, and can shrink when players take actions that reduce the power of the supernatural threat. A static tension die represents a threat that was always there, and will remain constant unless that threat can somehow be mitigated, defeated, or contained.

Inspiration

Inspiration is the metacurrency of Distortion Dice. By default, it can be used to change the dice that you roll, or to change the harm that you take. You can spend an inspiration to either raise a die in your dice pool, or to use a die that doesn’t make sense for you to use. After a roll, if you are going to take harm, you can spend an inspiration to move that harm to another harm track, or to a negative aspect. This also allows you to avoid being taken out in a scene. As with everything distortion dice, feel free to change or break these rules to best suit the feel of the game that you want.

Inspiration is gained by taking harm, helping to reduce an allies harm, or by using a negative trait in a roll. Your game may have more or fewer ways to use inspiration depending on how you want the inspiration economy to work.

At the end of a session, or the end of an adventure, inspiration will turn into advancement, which is used to upgrade your character.

Advancement

By default, advancement is gained at the end of an adventure, and at the end of each session in the form of leftover inspiration. Advancement is used to enhance stats and aspects, unlock or enhance activated abilities, or reduce negative aspects. Other ways to gain advancement will be specific to what you want your game to be about. If it’s growing as a person, perhaps you gain advancement when you challenege a belief that you have. This can further be represented by that belief being an aspect that must change when a character is challenging it. Perhaps is more focused on relationships, and you gain advancement when a relationship changes. Maybe advancement can only be gained through training within the narrative, and you give it out during extended breaks between adventures, or when visiting someone who can train you. If the game is about exploration and discovery, advancement can be gained when the characters see something new and unique.

Crew and Vehicle Sheets

If you’re making a game very centered on inter-group dynamics like turf wars or centered around vehicles like space ships, then it can be a good idea to have an additional sheet for these things. This could function in a few different ways. The first is to have different aspects of your vehicle basically act as assets that your characters use when doing ship-centric actions such as steering the ship, withstanding ship damage, and firing guns on the ship. A ships armor/shields, weapons, communication systems, engines, and navigation systems could all have die ratings. Another way is to have a sort of “crew sheet” where it only interacts under certain conditions, such as when using your crews reputation, or to determine how resources and reputation might change between sessions based on the actions taken during the session. A crew could have die ratings that represent their influence or control of different areas and resources. Having a relationship with other groups could also be given a die rating. Both crew and vehicle sheets can also be used in conjunction if, for example, you want to play a group of pirates who are fighting to control the seas. As always, these ideas are meant to be the start of how things could work in your game.