Combat in Threshold — Structure and Flow
Before getting into the details, a quick note on scope.
The previous post focused on what combat is meant to be in Threshold—its role in the game, how it fits into the broader experience, and what kinds of outcomes it should produce.
This post is different.
This is about how combat actually runs at the table.
How Different Games Structure Combat
Once you move from intent to implementation, you start to see how differently games approach the same problem.
Some systems lean into structured tactics. Combat is broken into discrete turns, positioning is precise, and the rules define exactly what a character can do at any given moment. Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are the most familiar examples of this approach. It provides clarity and depth, but it can slow the game as complexity increases.
Others treat combat as another form of conflict, using the same core mechanics that handle everything else. In games like Blades in the Dark and FATE Core, a fight may resolve in a small number of rolls, with the focus placed on consequences rather than step-by-step execution. This keeps pacing tight, but trades away some tactical detail.
There are also systems that experiment with alternative turn structures. The Cosmere RPG, for example, uses a fast turn / slow turn model where players choose between acting early with fewer options or later with greater flexibility. It creates meaningful tradeoffs and keeps momentum high.
I strongly considered that approach.
In the end, I didn't use it—not because it doesn't work, but because it solves a different problem. Fast/slow optimizes for individual heroics—the skilled warrior who reads the moment and acts at exactly the right time. That's a protagonist-centered fantasy. One person making the perfect call.
Threshold prioritizes collective competence instead—a group of people who aren't individually superhuman using communication and planning to punch above their weight. The initiative system needed to reflect that thesis about what heroism looks like.
Initiative — Coordination Over Timing
Combat begins with an initiative roll.
Each character rolls Clarity at the start of the encounter. I chose Clarity over Agility deliberately—awareness of a situation is what lets you prepare mentally and physically, which felt more coherent than pure physical reflex speed as the determinant of who acts first.
From there, the system branches based on the situation:
If the party is prepared, players may freely rearrange their initiative order before the first round begins. This allows tactical coordination—the rogue can go first to create an opening, the defender can position before enemies close, the caster can delay until the right moment.
If the party is surprised or ambushed, initiative remains in rolled order. Characters react in the moment rather than coordinating beforehand.
Enemies always act in their rolled order.
After the first round, the order becomes fixed.
There is one exception: Seize Initiative. A character may spend 2 Strain to act immediately, interrupting the current order. This can be used once per encounter.
I evaluated several alternatives before landing here. Static initiative (roll once, fixed order) was too passive—it removes coordination as a meaningful choice entirely. Contested initiative each round (like the Cosmere model) created too much overhead. A popcorn/side initiative system where players choose to pass to an ally or enemy after each turn maximized coordination but required a decision every single turn, compounding drag across the encounter. It also assumed clean two-sided conflicts, which doesn't hold for the morally complex, multi-faction encounters Threshold's setting implies.
What I kept from those alternatives was the tactical coordination of popcorn—players can arrange their order to set up combos—without the per-turn overhead. You make that decision once, before round one, and then execute. Seize Initiative preserves the emergency override that popcorn builds in structurally, but gates it behind a resource cost and a once-per-encounter limit so it doesn't become routine.
The surprise condition matters because coordination is the mechanical expression of Threshold's core fantasy. If coordination is always available regardless of circumstances, it loses meaning. Being caught unprepared doesn't just mean you act in a bad order—it means you lose the thing that makes your group effective. That's a more meaningful consequence than "you rolled low initiative."
Fast/slow systems have no equivalent vulnerability. Your timing trade-off is always available because it's an individual decision that doesn't depend on your relationship to your allies.
Turn Structure — Three Categories That Do Different Jobs
Each turn consists of three parts:
1 Action 1 Maneuver
1 Reaction
Actions represent meaningful commitments—attacking, casting a spell, or taking a decisive step.
Maneuvers cover movement and smaller adjustments—repositioning, taking cover, or interacting with the environment.
Reactions allow characters to respond outside their turn.
I tested several alternatives before settling on this structure.
Pathfinder 2e's three-action pool offers maximum flexibility but creates decision paralysis and makes ability balancing harder—if everything costs actions, you have to carefully price every technique across the entire system. For a game being built through playtest refinement, that's a fragile foundation.
D&D 5e's Action + Bonus Action + Move + Reaction has too many categories, and the Bonus Action creates feat tax problems where certain builds depend on having something to do with it.
A single "one meaningful thing per turn" model collapses the distinction between acting and existing in space. A character who crosses a room and then attacks isn't doing one thing—they're doing two things that flow together. A single-action model either makes movement free (removing positioning as a meaningful decision) or makes it cost your only action (creating fundamentally different experiences for mobile versus stationary fighters with no mechanical acknowledgment).
The three-category split maps directly onto three distinct questions a player answers each turn:
What do I do? (Action — the meaningful, stakes-carrying activity)
How do I position? (Maneuver — tactical adjustment that doesn't carry stakes on its own)
How do I respond? (Reaction — off-turn agency)
That third category is load-bearing in a way specific to Threshold's design. Reactions provide a structural slot for off-turn agency—interposing yourself to protect an ally, triggering a readied action, responding to something unexpected in the moment. They create opportunities for dramatic choices that fall outside the normal turn sequence.
Separating Maneuvers from Actions lets positioning be a real decision without making it costly. Under minimal resource pressure, players shouldn't feel like moving costs them their turn. Movement is always available, but going beyond standard positioning costs Strain. That's minimal-resource-pressure design with tactical depth preserved.
In practice, these categories are easy to use but harder to define precisely for edge cases. The system is currently driven by examples rather than strict classification rules, with the underlying structure still being refined through playtesting.
Positioning Without Precision Counting
Movement is handled through a zone-based system rather than exact measurement.
Horizontally, positions are divided into:
Engaged
Close
Near
Far
Extreme
Vertically:
Ground
Elevated
Airborne
Beyond
A standard Maneuver allows a character to move one zone.
This approach is grounded in how distance is actually experienced during action. Through training and repetition, you develop an intuitive sense of what is within reach and what isn't. Whether that's striking distance, effective range with a weapon, or how far you can move before someone can respond, those judgments come from familiarity rather than measurement.
My military training and time in combat arts taught me this: when you're moving and fighting, distance is understood intuitively rather than calculated.
That's the perspective I wanted Threshold to capture.
Zones preserve the importance of positioning without requiring constant calculation. Players can make decisions based on intent and relative positioning rather than exact distances.
There are still open questions around zone density and edge cases, but the core system is already functioning as intended.
Strain — Pushing Beyond Limits
Strain serves two roles simultaneously, and the tension between them is intentional.
Within an encounter, Strain is a tactical resource—a budget for pushing past your baseline capabilities. Every spend is a decision: burn Strain now to move an extra zone or seize the initiative, or hold it in reserve because the fight isn't over. That spend-now-versus-save-for-later pressure creates meaningful choices without adding mechanical complexity to every single action.
Across encounters, Strain becomes an attrition resource. It doesn't fully reset between fights, which means the cost of the last encounter is visible in the next one. A party that burned through Strain taking down a patrol arrives at the fortress gate already depleted. That's a design choice rooted in the world of Threshold—this is a setting defined by scarcity and slow collapse, and the resource system should reflect that.
Without Strain, combat becomes a series of isolated tactical puzzles with no connective tissue between them. Characters would be functionally fresh every fight, which contradicts everything Threshold is trying to say about the weight of living in a dying world.
What Strain Does
At this stage of development, Strain's primary combat uses are:
Take additional Maneuvers (2 Strain each) — Extra movement or tactical adjustments beyond your base allotment.
Seize Initiative (2 Strain, once per encounter) — Act immediately, interrupting the current turn order.
The full scope of Strain is still being refined through playtesting. The core principle is clear—it creates meaningful decisions about when to push beyond your baseline—but the exact range of applications is still in active development. I'm also evaluating how Strain and techniques should interact: whether techniques have their own costs, whether they consume Strain, or whether they operate independently. That relationship will shape how advancement feels in practice.
Pool Size and Scaling
Strain pools run 10 to 14 for most characters, derived from 8 + Essence + Force—the two Quality scores underlying physical endurance and mental discipline.
The pool is intentionally flat. Base stats are capped at 1-3 for most characters, with investment pushing toward 4-6 only through deliberate building choices. The difference between an uninvested character (pool of 10) and a heavily invested one (pool of 14) is real but not dramatic. A maximum-investment character hits 20, but that requires significant resource commitment across both relevant stats.
This flatness is a feature. Strain represents your innate threshold for pushing past what your body and mind want to do—the kind of grit that's more about who you are than how hard you've trained. Working out every day doesn't fundamentally change how far you can push yourself past your limits; it changes what your baseline limits are.
Advancement in Threshold gives characters better tools for managing Strain—techniques that cost less, abilities that trigger at low Strain, more efficient recovery—not a dramatically larger pool. That's horizontal progression in practice.
Recovery
Strain recovers through Threshold's four-rest progression, and the amounts are deliberately modest:
1st Rest (10 seconds, combat action): Half Vitality, round down, minimum 1. A battlefield breather—enough to matter, not enough to reset.
2nd Rest (10 minutes): Vitality × 2 if Strain is your primary recovery choice; Half Vitality minimum 1 if you prioritized Stress instead. The choice between resources is itself a meaningful decision.
3rd Rest (1 hour): Full Strain recovery if chosen as primary; Half Vitality minimum 1 if secondary.
4th Rest (8-10 hours): Full recovery of both Strain and Stress, progression resets.
The key principle here is that the 2nd and 3rd rests force a choice between recovering Strain or Stress—you can't fully address both until a full night's sleep. A character depleted in both resources has to make a real decision about which gap matters more before the next fight. That's the grounded protagonist experience in mechanical form: you don't fully reset between fights, and managing that depletion is part of what skilled play looks like in Threshold.
Why Strain Supports the Design
Grounded protagonists: Strain doesn't fully reset between fights. The cost of every desperate sprint and every seized initiative accumulates and carries forward. Characters are capable people operating under real limits, not action heroes who shake off exertion between scenes. The four-rest progression ensures that recovery is earned through fictional action—taking shelter, catching your breath, tending to each other—rather than assumed.
Horizontal progression: The pool stays flat. Veterans don't have dramatically more Strain than fresh characters—they have better techniques, more efficient costs, and harder-won experience with when to spend and when to hold. That's the distinction Threshold draws between experience and power: you get more capable, not more superhuman.
Fast resolution, lasting consequences: Strain keeps the action economy from becoming a spam problem—extra maneuvers cost 2 Strain each, which means movement decisions have real weight without requiring complex opportunity attack rules or movement restrictions. At the same time, the attrition model ensures those costs don't disappear at the end of the encounter. The fight was fast; the consequences linger.
Flow of a Round
A round of combat follows a consistent structure:
Initiative is established. Players act in their determined order. Each character takes a turn using their Action and Maneuver. Reactions occur as triggers arise. The round advances.
The system provides enough structure to support coordination while avoiding unnecessary procedural overhead.
When Combat Ends
Combat does not end because a specific condition is met.
It ends when the situation changes.
One side may retreat, surrender, or disengage. The objective may be achieved. Continuing may no longer be viable.
As established previously, combat is not assumed to be a fight to the death. The structure supports that by allowing outcomes to emerge from the situation rather than enforcing a fixed endpoint.
What I Worked On
This phase focused on translating combat from a design goal into a usable structure.
The emphasis was on clarity, flow, and keeping players engaged without introducing unnecessary complexity.
What Went Wrong
The main challenge was classification.
Dividing actions into Actions, Maneuvers, and Reactions works well in play, but defining those categories cleanly—especially for edge cases—has proven more difficult.
Some systems also revealed dependencies that weren't immediately obvious, particularly around reactions and partial outcomes.
What I Changed
Earlier versions relied more heavily on rigid sequencing and precise positioning.
These were replaced with:
Flexible initiative that rewards coordination
Zone-based movement
Player-driven flow
Each change reduced friction and better aligned the system with its intended pacing.
What I'm Working On Next
The next step is to define how combat resolves at a mechanical level—what players actually do on their turns and how those choices create tactical depth:
Attack and defense interactions
The action economy in practice
How decisions during combat create meaningful consequences
Several parts of the system are functional but still being refined:
The exact definition of partial success in combat
Formal rules for engagement and reactions
Full mechanical definitions for conditions
The complete scope and scaling of Strain
These are active areas of development and will be clarified through playtesting.
This post establishes how combat runs. The next will establish what those actions produce.
Questions
Does coordinated initiative feel like meaningful flexibility, or unnecessary complexity?
How much structure do you prefer in turn order before it begins to slow the game down?
Do zone-based systems feel intuitive in play for you, or do they require additional scaffolding to remain consistent?
Combat — The Meaning of Violence in Threshold
Combat is one of the most visible parts of a tabletop RPG.
It's also one of the easiest places for a system to drift away from its own goals.
Before getting into initiative, actions, or mechanics, I want to step back and define what combat is actually supposed to be in Threshold. Not how it works, but what role it plays in the game.
Because once that's clear, the mechanical decisions become much easier to justify.
What Combat Does in Different Games
Combat tends to feel like a constant across tabletop RPGs, but its role varies more than it first appears.
In some systems, combat is the primary engine of play. It provides structure and challenge, and much of the game's depth comes from how encounters are approached and resolved. In games like Dungeons & Dragons, a large portion of the rules exist to support this kind of play.
In others, combat is simply one form of conflict among many. It sits alongside negotiation, stealth, and social pressure, often using the same core mechanics. Games like Blades in the Dark treat violence as one option rather than a default path.
There are also systems where combat is less about step-by-step resolution and more about consequences. A single roll or move can determine how an exchange unfolds, with the focus placed on what changes rather than how each moment is simulated. You can see this approach in games like Apocalypse World.
None of these approaches are inherently better than the others. They reflect different priorities.
What matters is that the mechanics align with the role combat is meant to play.
Combat as One Tool, Not the Default
In many systems, combat becomes the center of play almost by accident.
The rules for fighting are the most detailed. Character options often point in that direction. Encounters are structured with the expectation that violence will resolve them. Over time, this trains both players and GMs to treat combat as the default solution.
That isn't the direction I want for Threshold.
Combat is one way to engage with a problem. It sits alongside negotiation, exploration, manipulation, avoidance, and preparation. It should feel like a meaningful choice, not an assumed outcome.
When players choose violence, it should be because it makes sense in the moment, not because the system quietly funnels them toward it.
Stakes Before Strategy
It's easy for combat to become detached from the world it's happening in.
Once initiative is rolled, attention shifts toward positioning, sequencing, and optimization. The reasons the fight started can fade into the background.
I want those reasons to remain present.
Before a fight begins, there should be a clear sense of what's at risk. Who is involved, what happens if things go poorly, and what changes if the characters succeed.
Those questions should still matter while the fight is happening.
Winning isn't just about ending the encounter. It's about what that outcome means in context.
Fast Resolution, Lasting Consequences
One of the most consistent friction points I've run into with combat-heavy systems is pacing.
Fights expand to fill entire sessions. Turns stretch longer than the moments they represent. The table's attention shifts from decision-making to process.
That's not the experience I'm aiming for.
Combat in Threshold is designed to resolve quickly. Not because it's unimportant, but because it shouldn't crowd out everything around it. A fight should feel like a sharp moment rather than a prolonged procedure.
The outcome, however, should persist.
Damage carries forward. Resources are spent. Positions change. Relationships can shift. The world doesn't reset once the fight ends.
The contrast matters: resolution is brief, consequences are not.
Combat Is Not Binary
Many systems quietly assume that combat ends when one side is no longer standing.
That structure is simple, but it flattens behavior. Every fight becomes a question of endurance rather than judgment.
That isn't how conflict usually plays out.
Creatures respond to danger based on what they are and what they want. A wounded animal doesn't continue fighting if escape is possible. A pack may break once its leader falls. Something more cunning might withdraw early, choosing to regroup rather than risk a decisive loss.
Intelligent opponents go further. They assess risk, change tactics, and recognize when a situation has turned against them. Surrender, retreat, or negotiation can all emerge once the outcome is no longer in their favor.
That doesn't remove tension. It changes where that tension sits.
The question stops being "who survives to the last hit" and becomes "how far this situation escalates before someone chooses to end it."
Ending a fight also isn't the same as winning it. Driving something off, forcing a retreat, or reaching an uneasy pause can all resolve an encounter, but each leads somewhere different.
Combat becomes part of a larger chain of events rather than a closed loop.
Positioning Without Precision Counting
Positioning plays a meaningful role in combat.
Where you stand, what you can reach, and how you move all influence the outcome of a fight. Those decisions should remain visible to players.
At the same time, there's a point where precision stops helping.
Grid-based systems often push toward exact measurement. Counting squares can slow the flow of play and shift attention toward optimization rather than intent.
In practice, that's not how people actually experience distance in motion.
Through training and repetition, you develop a sense of what is within reach and what isn't. Whether that's striking distance, effective range with a weapon, or how far you can move before someone can respond, those judgments come from familiarity rather than measurement.
My military training and time in combat arts taught me this: when you're moving and fighting, distance is understood intuitively rather than calculated.
That's the perspective I wanted Threshold to capture.
Instead of tracking exact units, the system uses zones. The goal is to preserve the importance of positioning without requiring constant calculation. Players should be able to understand their options at a glance and act on them based on intent, not measurement.
Characters Are Capable, Not Untouchable
Power scaling has a direct effect on how combat feels over time.
In many systems, characters eventually reach a point where threats must escalate dramatically just to remain relevant. That escalation can disconnect the system from the world it's meant to represent.
In Threshold, characters become more capable, but they remain vulnerable.
They gain reliability. They expand their toolkit. They learn how to approach situations more effectively. What they don't gain is immunity from risk.
That keeps combat grounded. Stakes remain personal, and decisions continue to matter even at higher tiers of play.
Violence Has a Cost
This ties back to the broader themes of the setting.
The world of Threshold is already under strain. Environments are fragile. Resources are limited. Relationships are unstable.
Violence interacts with all of those.
A fight can solve an immediate problem, but it often creates others. It can escalate tensions, damage environments, or close off alternatives that might have been available earlier.
That doesn't mean combat is discouraged. It means it is consequential.
Choosing violence should feel like a decision, not a default action.
What This Means for the System
All of these ideas feed directly into the mechanics that follow.
The resolution system needs to be fast without becoming unclear—fights should feel like sharp moments, not prolonged procedures. Players need to stay engaged throughout, with meaningful decisions on every turn. Coordination matters, but rigid turn order can kill momentum. Positioning creates tactical depth, but counting squares slows everything down.
Most importantly, the results of a fight need to carry forward into the rest of the game. A combat system that resets the world to neutral after every encounter misses the point.
The system doesn't start with mechanics and hope they produce the right experience. It starts with the experience and builds toward it.
What I Worked On
This stage focused on clarifying the role combat should play in the game.
Rather than building mechanics immediately, I spent time examining how combat behaves in different systems and where it tends to pull attention away from the rest of play.
What Went Wrong
One recurring issue was how easily combat becomes the default focus of a game.
Even when that isn't the intention, systems tend to reward it simply because it is the most detailed and supported part of the rules.
What I Changed
The main shift was making the purpose of combat explicit.
Instead of assuming it would align naturally with the rest of the system, I treated it as something that needed clear boundaries and design goals.
That clarity makes it easier to evaluate every mechanical decision that follows.
What I'm Working On Next
The next step is to move from philosophy into structure.
How does a fight actually begin? How is initiative handled? What does a round represent, and what can a character do during it?
Those questions lead directly into the next post.
Questions
Two things I'm especially interested in:
In your experience, what causes combat to overtake a session? Is it the mechanics themselves, or how they're typically used?
Do you prefer combat systems that emphasize detailed tactics, or ones that resolve more quickly with broader decisions?
Next time, I'll break down how combat in Threshold is structured at the table, starting with initiative and the flow of a round.
Resolution Mechanics — The Engine Room of the Game
A quick note before we start.
Resolution mechanics sit at the center of almost every tabletop RPG. They determine how uncertainty is handled, how often players roll dice, and what success or failure actually means in play.
Because of that, this post is a little longer than the previous ones.
The goal here isn't just to explain the system used in Threshold. It's to walk through the design choices that led to it. Resolution mechanics are effectively the backbone of a game system. Once they are set, many other rules grow out of them: attributes, skills, combat pacing, difficulty scales, and how tension appears at the table.
So before getting into the specifics of Threshold, it's worth stepping back and looking at what I needed the resolution system to do in the first place.
What Resolution Mechanics Actually Do
Every tabletop RPG eventually reaches the same moment.
A player attempts something uncertain.
Maybe a character tries to climb a crumbling tower wall during a storm. Maybe they attempt to stabilize a dying ally. Maybe they try to read the motives of someone whose intentions are carefully hidden.
At that point the game has to answer a question:
What happens next?
Resolution mechanics are the procedures a game uses to answer that question. They translate fictional uncertainty into mechanical outcomes.
The specific tools vary widely—dice, cards, tokens, towers of wooden blocks—but the purpose is always the same. They determine whether an action succeeds, fails, or produces something in between.
The shape of that system has a profound effect on the experience of play. Some systems emphasize unpredictability and dramatic swings. Others favor reliability and modeling competence. Some prioritize narrative consequences over tactical precision.
Changing the resolution mechanic often changes the feel of the entire game.
What I Needed From Threshold's Resolution System
When I started designing the resolution mechanics for Threshold, I had a clear set of constraints based on the ability score and skill systems I'd already committed to.
I needed a system where:
Characters could improve without becoming untouchable. Advancement should feel meaningful, but it shouldn't remove risk entirely.
Competence felt reliable without becoming predictable. Skilled characters should succeed more often, but uncertainty needed to remain present even for experts.
Failure produced momentum rather than dead ends. I didn't want binary pass/fail outcomes. Partial successes and failures with consequences needed to be built into the core system.
The math stayed visible and direct. Following the principle from the ability scores post, I wanted the numbers players saw to be the numbers they used—no hidden conversions or lookup tables.
Those constraints immediately ruled out some approaches and pointed toward others.
The Options I Considered
I spent a lot of time analyzing how different resolution systems behave, particularly how their probability distributions shape the experience of play.
Flat Distributions: The d20 Model
The most familiar approach is the d20 system used in Dungeons & Dragons. Every result from 1 to 20 has exactly the same probability of appearing.
I've played enough D&D to know what this feels like at the table. The flat distribution creates dramatic swings. Experts can fail spectacularly, and novices can occasionally succeed through sheer luck. That volatility supports cinematic moments, but it makes competence feel inconsistent.
For a game built around grounded protagonists who grow through experience, that didn't fit. I wanted skilled characters to feel skilled, not just lucky.
d20 distribution
Bell Curves: The 3d6 Model
Systems like GURPS roll multiple dice and add them together, often using 3d6. Because many dice are combined, results cluster toward the middle.
The bell curve produces something different. Skilled characters succeed more reliably, while extreme results become rare. This models competence well, but it has its own tradeoff: the math gets heavier. Addition slows down resolution, and modifiers pile up quickly.
More importantly, scaling becomes a problem. To keep difficulty meaningful as characters improve, you have to inflate both the target numbers and the bonuses. Eventually you're adding +15 to beat a target of 23, and the actual dice rolls start to feel ceremonial.
3d6 distribution
Dice Pools: Counting Successes
The third approach I examined was dice pools, where multiple dice are rolled and each die can contribute a success independently.
Games like Shadowrun, Blades in the Dark, and World of Darkness use variations of this pattern. The number of dice rolled reflects a character's competence, and results are interpreted by counting successes or selecting the highest die.
What appealed to me about dice pools was how they scale. Adding dice to the pool gradually increases reliability without requiring inflation. A character with 6 dice is meaningfully better than one with 3 dice, but they're still operating in the same mathematical space. The dice themselves don't change—just how many you roll.
This aligned with the horizontal progression model I wanted. Characters don't grow from rolling d6s to rolling d20s. They roll more dice, more reliably.
Expected Successes vs Pool Size
Other Models I Looked At
I also examined more unusual resolution systems to see what they prioritized.
Dread replaces dice entirely with a Jenga tower, creating physical tension during horror scenes. The tower's instability mirrors the characters' precarious situation, and every pull reinforces the genre. His Majesty the Worm uses tarot cards for action resolution, where the symbolic weight of each card adds interpretive depth to outcomes. Genesys uses custom dice with symbols instead of numbers, allowing a single roll to produce success, failure, advantages, and threats simultaneously.
What all of these systems have in common is that they integrate the feel of the game directly into the resolution mechanic. The dice aren't just producing numbers—they're reinforcing tone and genre expectations.
That's powerful, but it comes with a cost. Custom dice require learning a new symbolic language. Tarot cards demand interpretation. Jenga towers create physical tension but can't be used for every roll without losing impact.
For Threshold, I needed something that could handle frequent tactical decisions, environmental pressure, and long-term play without becoming unwieldy. The resolution system had to support the game's themes without slowing down adjudication every time someone climbed a wall or swung a sword.
Distribution graphs for 2d6 (PbtA, Traveller), 2d12 (Daggerheart), and 2d10 (M.E.G.S, Draw Steel) and 2d20 (Modiphius) systems, all of which I considered.
Dice pools offered the right balance. They could scale elegantly, they used familiar tools, and they left room for the fiction to reinforce tone rather than demanding that the mechanics do all that work alone.
Why Dice Pools Fit Threshold
Dice pools solved several problems at once.
They allow characters to improve by becoming more reliable, rather than by inflating numbers to extreme levels. Additional dice gradually increase the likelihood of success while still allowing unexpected outcomes.
They support the grounded protagonist philosophy. A character with 8 dice in their pool is experienced and capable, but they're not superhuman. They can still fail. They can still be caught off guard.
They also make partial success easy to model. Instead of binary pass/fail, the number of successes naturally creates gradations of outcome. That became the foundation for the outcome tier system I'll explain below.
How Resolution Works in Threshold
Once I committed to dice pools, the core resolution process came together quickly.
The flow is straightforward:
A player declares an action.
If the outcome is uncertain and meaningful, a roll is called for.
GM sets Target Number (TN)
The player builds a dice pool from their attributes and skills.
Dice are rolled.
Results are evaluated by counting successes.
The number of successes is compared to the TN.
The final result falls into one of four outcome tiers.
Why Four Tiers?
I settled on four outcome tiers after testing several variants. Three felt too binary—you either succeeded or you didn't, with only one middle ground. Five created too much interpretation overhead and slowed down adjudication.
Four tiers gave me enough granularity to make partial success interesting without bogging down play.
The tiers work like this:
Critical successes produce exceptional outcomes or avoid complications. Successes achieve the intended result cleanly. Partial successes accomplish the goal but introduce costs, complications, or delays. Failures mean the attempt doesn't work—but they often create new problems or reveal information.
This structure allows the system to produce more nuanced outcomes than a simple success-or-failure model, which was one of my core design goals.
Building the Dice Pool
Dice pools in Threshold are constructed from three elements:
Attribute Quality determines the number of base dice.
Domain determines the die size (d6, d8, or d10).
Skill ranks add additional dice to the pool.
Every die showing 5 or higher counts as a success.
The choice of 5+ as the success threshold was deliberate. It creates approximately a 40–50% success rate per die depending on die size (33% on d6, 50% on d10), which sits in a useful middle ground.
If the threshold were lower—say, 4+—dice pools would succeed too reliably too quickly, flattening the risk curve and making advancement feel less meaningful. If it were higher—6+—early characters would struggle to generate any successes at all, and the system would feel punishing rather than tense.
At 5+, a small pool of 2–3 dice feels uncertain but not hopeless. A larger pool of 6–8 dice feels capable but not guaranteed. That's the reliability curve I wanted: competence matters, but it never removes risk entirely.
This approach creates a balance between specialization and flexibility. Skills increase the number of dice rolled, while attributes influence the quality of those dice.
The result is a system where characters improve primarily through greater reliability, not through exponential scaling.
Target Numbers and When Rolls Actually Matter
Once the dice pool is defined, the system needs a way to interpret the results. That role belongs to the Target Number (TN).
In Threshold, most tasks fall into the following difficulty bands:
However, the numbers themselves are only part of the system.
A common pacing problem in tabletop RPGs is rolling for actions that should never meaningfully fail. Dice are rolled simply because rolling dice feels like participation.
That instinct is understandable, but it weakens the resolution system.
The outcome tiers only produce interesting results when all four outcomes are genuinely possible and distinct.
If failure carries no consequence, or if a critical success wouldn't change anything meaningful, then the roll isn't doing useful work.
The principle I kept coming back to was this: only call for a roll when all four outcome tiers are plausible.
If success is guaranteed, resolve the action without rolling. If failure is unavoidable, the attempt simply fails—no need to touch the dice.
Because of that principle, tasks with TN 1 rarely require rolls during normal play. They exist primarily for situations where a character is impaired, disadvantaged, or working under extreme pressure. Most meaningful rolls occur at TN 2 or higher, where uncertainty actually matters.
This keeps the dice focused on moments of tension rather than slowing the game with unnecessary checks.
Example: Two Approaches to a Locked Door
Two characters encounter a locked door blocking their path. The door is sturdy wood, and the lock looks a bit rusty. One character wants to pick the lock quietly. The other wants to break it down.
The Thief (Finesse specialist, precision approach)
This character relies on Wit (Mind Domain + Finesse Quality) and has trained extensively in Skullduggery.
Finesse Quality: 3 = 3 base dice
Mind Domain (Primary) = d10s
Skullduggery rank 2 = +2 dice
Final pool: 5d10
The GM sets the Target Number at 2 for picking the rusty lock. The rust makes the mechanism less precise and easier to manipulate.
The thief rolls: 6, 1, 7, 3, 3
Counting 5+: two successes (6, 7)
Result: Success. The thief meets the TN exactly and opens the lock cleanly and quietly.
The Barbarian (Force specialist, brute force approach)
This character relies on Might (Body Domain + Force Quality) and has some training in Athletics.
Force Quality: 3 = 3 base dice
Body Domain (Primary) = d10s
Athletics rank 1 = +1 die
Final pool: 4d10
The GM sets the Target Number at 3 for breaking down the sturdy wooden door. It's solid construction and will take real effort.
The barbarian rolls: 2, 7, 5, 4
Counting 5+: two successes (7, 5)
Result: Partial Success. The barbarian has successes but falls short of the TN. They break through the door, but it takes longer than expected, makes a tremendous amount of noise, or splinters the door frame badly enough to alert anyone nearby.
What This Shows
Both characters rolled similar pool sizes (5d10 vs 4d10) and got the same number of successes (2). But because they approached the problem differently, the outcomes diverged.
The thief's method had a lower TN because picking a rusty lock is relatively straightforward for someone with the right skills. Two successes were enough for a clean result.
The barbarian's method had a higher TN because breaking down a sturdy door requires significant force. Two successes got them through, but with complications.
This is how the system rewards different approaches. The choice of how to solve a problem matters as much as raw capability. A character optimized for precision can accomplish things quietly that would be loud and messy for someone relying on brute strength—even when both characters are equally competent in their own domains.
Player-Facing Rolls
Another structural decision in Threshold is that players make all the rolls.
When characters attack an enemy, players roll to hit. When enemies attack them, players roll to defend.
I tested both approaches during early playtests. Having the GM roll for enemies felt more traditional, but it consistently created dead air—players waiting to see what happened to them rather than actively responding. Player-facing rolls kept everyone engaged, even during enemy turns.
There's also a narrative reason. The story ultimately follows the characters. Their decisions and reactions drive events forward. Structuring the system so that players make the rolls reinforces that perspective.
An additional benefit is practical. Because players handle the rolls tied to their characters, the GM can focus on describing the world, portraying NPCs, and managing the broader flow of the scene.
What Comes Next
With the resolution system established, the next question is how characters actually interact with the world mechanically.
What can characters do on their turn in combat? How do attacks and defenses work in practice? How does the environment create pressure beyond just raising target numbers?
The next post will focus on combat structure and action economy, showing how the dice pool system translates into tactical decisions at the table.
What I Worked On
This stage of design focused on refining how actions are resolved at the table.
Much of the work involved stress-testing different probability models and evaluating how dice pools behave. I built spreadsheets comparing expected success rates across different pool sizes and target numbers. I ran sample combats on paper to see how often partial successes occurred and whether the four-tier outcome system actually produced the variety I wanted.
The biggest challenge wasn't the math itself—it was figuring out when the system should be used at all.
What Went Wrong
Early drafts encouraged rolling too often. If players constantly rolled for trivial tasks, the outcome tiers lost meaning and pacing suffered. More fundamentally, it trained players to expect dice for every action, which made it harder to establish narrative flow.
The other issue was target number calibration. Too many tasks defaulted to TN 3, making difficulty feel samey. I needed better guidance on spreading tasks across TN 2, 3, and 4.
I also tested different success thresholds (4+, 5+, 6+) to find the right reliability curve.
What I Changed
The biggest shift was reframing when rolls happen at all. The system now explicitly treats rolls as tools for resolving meaningful uncertainty—not routine procedures. Only call for a roll when all four outcome tiers are genuinely possible and distinct.
That principle reshaped how the TN table works. TN 1 exists primarily for impaired or disadvantaged situations. Most meaningful tasks start at TN 2 or higher.
Testing confirmed that 5+ as the success threshold created the reliability curve I wanted—small pools feel uncertain but not hopeless, large pools feel capable but not guaranteed.
What I'm Testing Next
The next step is observing how these mechanics behave in actual play with real groups.
Specifically, I want to test:
How quickly players internalize the dice pool system without extensive explanation
Whether target numbers feel intuitive during play, or if GMs struggle to calibrate difficulty on the fly
Whether the "only roll when all outcomes matter" principle holds up in practice, or if groups drift back toward rolling for everything
How the system performs across different play styles—tactical groups vs narrative-focused groups
Paper testing and spreadsheets can only tell you so much. The real test is whether the system supports the kind of play I designed it for when people actually sit down at a table.
Questions
When you play RPGs, do you prefer resolution systems that emphasize dramatic swings or consistent competence?
How often do you find yourself rolling for trivial actions at the table? One of the design goals of Threshold is making each roll feel meaningful rather than routine, and I'm curious how other groups handle that balance.
Have you played games with player-facing rolls? Did it change how combat felt, or did you find it awkward?
Skills as the Interface Between Character and World
When I first planned this series, I assumed I would move directly from ability scores into resolution mechanics.
Once I started outlining the dice system, it became clear I was skipping something foundational.
Ability scores describe what a character is. Resolution mechanics describe how uncertainty is adjudicated. But neither of those answer a more immediate question:
What is the character actually doing?
That's where skills live.
Skills are the interface between character and world. They are the means by which capability becomes action. Before talking about dice, it's worth asking what role skills are supposed to play in a tabletop RPG at all.
What Skills Are Actually Doing
Like attributes, every skill system makes quiet assumptions about what matters.
How specific should competence be? Should experience broaden capability or deepen it? Does advancement change who your character is, or how reliably they perform?
In many class-/level-based systems like D&D or 13th Age, skills are secondary. Your class defines your identity and growth curve. Skills fill gaps. They resolve uncertainty in social scenes, exploration, or downtime, but they rarely drive the core progression of the character.
In those systems, skills are often tightly bound to attributes. If a build prioritizes Strength, Intelligence-based competence becomes harder to justify mechanically. Certain combinations feel natural. Others feel mathematically discouraged.
That bundling makes characters easy to read and progression easy to pace. It also narrows how they can express themselves.
Skill-based systems take a different approach.
In games like Cyberpunk or Genesys, skills are the primary investment. Advancement is granular. What your character becomes good at is shaped by repeated choice rather than predefined packages.
This allows competence to emerge unevenly. Two characters can begin similarly and diverge based on what they practice. Growth feels accumulated rather than unlocked.
That flexibility introduces its own tension. Freedom of investment can create uneven builds. Some skills may prove situational. Without structural guidance, expressive choice can become accidental fragility.
Neither model is inherently superior. They produce different kinds of play.
For Threshold, the question was which model supported the kind of long-term play I wanted.
What Skills Represent in Threshold
In Threshold, skills represent refinement and reliability, not permission.
Characters can attempt almost anything that makes sense in the fiction. Being untrained doesn't mean you are incapable. It means you are inconsistent.
Training a skill doesn't unlock the ability to act. It increases the likelihood that your action produces the outcome you intend.
That distinction matters for tone.
In some systems, skills answer: Can you do this? In Threshold, they answer: How reliably can you do this under pressure?
Improvement deepens competence without redefining the character's nature. You are not becoming a different category of being. You are becoming practiced. That's what supports the grounded protagonist design I talked about in the last post.
Structure, Not Math
Skills in Threshold are organized into four categories: General, Knowledge, Combat, and Magic.
General skills cover practical interaction with the world. Knowledge skills represent accumulated understanding. Combat skills represent proficiency with different categories of weapons and defensive equipment. Magic skills align with the Forms I'll discuss when I cover the magic system in detail.
Each skill progresses through five ranks, Untrained>Trained>Expert>Master>Paragon. Advancement is incremental. Improvement is steady rather than explosive.
Currently, skills are structured as Broad + Specialization. A character may invest broadly or refine focus within a narrower expression of that skill. This allows identity to emerge through practice.
Permanent Investment
Skill investments are permanent.
That decision was deliberate. Growth should matter. Direction should matter. A character's history should shape their present.
At the same time, permanence increases the stakes of choice. In a skill-driven system, misaligned investment can have lasting consequences.
Why Skills Carry So Much Weight
Because most progression in Threshold lives in skills, they are the primary way characters grow over long campaigns.
Attributes establish baseline capability. Skills refine that capability. Over time, growth expresses itself as consistency and depth rather than scale escalation.
Characters don't become untouchable. They become prepared.
That distinction is subtle, but it's central to the tone of the game.
What Comes Next
With skills positioned as refinement and reliability, the remaining question is how the game resolves uncertainty when those skills are tested.
How do attributes and skills combine at the table? What determines difficulty? What distinguishes success from partial success?
That's the focus of the next post.
What I Worked On
This phase of design focused on clarifying the role skills play in the overall structure of the system.
Up to this point, I had a working list of skills and a progression framework, but I hadn't fully articulated what skills were supposed to represent. The distinction between attributes, skills, and techniques needed to be made explicit, especially since so much of character growth lives in skills rather than in large attribute increases.
I also spent considerable time adjusting the scope and structure of the skill list itself. The current framework includes 14 General skills, 8 Knowledge skills, 8 Combat skills, and 5 Magic skills—35 broad skills total before specializations. That's more granular than something like Blades in the Dark (12 actions) but much more consolidated than systems like GURPS or Rolemaster. Some skills that initially existed separately were collapsed into broader categories. Others were split to preserve meaningful distinctions. The question wasn't just what skills to include, but how many—too few and characters blur together, too many and progression fragments into increments that don't feel meaningful. These numbers may shift as I test different levels of granularity, but the current structure aims for meaningful differentiation without excessive bookkeeping.
At the same time, I was reviewing whether the current Broad + Specialization structure was supporting identity or simply adding complexity.
What Went Wrong
The biggest issue I ran into was granularity.
Allowing both broad skills and specializations creates strong identity and clear expertise, but it also makes extreme specialization possible. In some cases, characters could accumulate very large dice pools in narrow areas while remaining weak elsewhere. That isn't inherently bad, but it raises questions about balance, progression pacing, and long-term sustainability.
The other concern is cognitive load. More specialization means more decisions at character creation and advancement, which can slow onboarding and make early choices feel riskier.
What I Changed
I haven't made a structural change yet, but I have reframed how I'm evaluating the system.
Instead of asking whether specialization is realistic or expressive, I'm now asking whether it produces better long-term play. That shifts the focus toward sustainability and meaningful differentiation rather than simulation.
To address the investment risk that comes with permanent advancement, I've started outlining an archetype framework—not rigid classes, but structured guidance that signals which skills work well together and what kinds of characters the system supports. Think of them as proven templates that show you how the pieces fit, without locking you into a single path.
What I'm Testing Next
The next step is to test different levels of skill granularity in parallel.
One version keeps the current Broad + Specialization structure. Another collapses skills into broader categories. A third limits specialization primarily to combat, where differentiation has the most mechanical and narrative impact.
At the same time, I'll be evaluating how skill progression interacts with the resolution system. Since skills increase reliability rather than raw capability, the exact scaling matters.
The next post will focus on resolution mechanics and how attributes and skills combine to produce outcomes.
Questions
When have you felt most satisfied with how your character developed in a skill-based system? Was it when you had complete freedom, or when the system provided structure?
In systems you've played that allow specialization, when has narrow expertise felt rewarding versus when has it created problems? I'm curious whether deep focus tends to work better in certain types of campaigns or genres.
If you've played skill-heavy systems with permanent advancement, how did early investment decisions feel? Did you wish for more guidance up front, or did figuring it out through play feel like part of the experience?
Ability Scores: Deciding What a Character Is
I originally planned for this post to be about dice resolution. Once I started outlining it, though, I kept running into the same issue: the resolution system only makes sense if you understand what the game thinks a character is. What counts as capability, how growth is expressed, and what kinds of distinctions actually matter all get decided before you ever roll anything.
So before talking about how actions are resolved in Threshold, I want to step back and talk about ability scores.
Not just the ones I ended up with, but the role ability scores play in tabletop RPGs more broadly. If you only know them through the lens of D&D, it's easy to assume they're a fixed structure rather than a design choice. They aren't. They're one of the clearest ways a game communicates what it values.
What Ability Scores Are Actually Doing
In most tabletop RPGs, ability scores are treated as a given. Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and so on show up so often that it's easy to assume they're a universal solution rather than a specific design choice.
But ability scores aren't neutral. They encode assumptions. They're a statement about what the game thinks matters.
At a basic level, an ability score system answers a few core questions, whether the designer intends it to or not:
What kinds of competence does the game care about?
How granular should those distinctions be?
Are abilities descriptive, prescriptive, or both?
Do they define who a character is, or how well they perform?
Different games answer those questions in very different ways, and those answers ripple outward into progression, challenge, and tone.
The Kind of Characters I Wanted
Before I could decide what the ability scores in Threshold should be, I had to be clear about the kind of characters the game was meant to support.
I like heroic fantasy. I enjoy games where characters grow into figures of myth, where power scales dramatically and the stakes escalate until reality itself is on the line. That can be fun.
It just isn't the fantasy I wanted to design around here.
I'm more interested in games where characters remain recognizably human. Competent. Skilled. Dangerous in the right circumstances. Games like Blades in the Dark, Star Wars, or Cyberpunk tend to frame characters as people operating inside larger systems rather than standing above them. You learn. You adapt. You gain leverage. You survive longer. But you're never a one-person army.
That difference matters over time.
In traditional heroic fantasy, power growth is often vertical and exponential. Characters gain access to abilities that fundamentally rewrite the scale of the world. At higher levels, it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge players without resorting to equally absurd threats. The fiction starts to strain under the weight of the mechanics.
For Threshold, I wanted something else: grounded protagonists.
Characters who grow through experience, skill, and technique. Characters whose influence expands even when their raw power does not. Characters who remain mortal throughout the campaign, even at high tiers of play.
That goal shaped every decision that followed.
Familiar Approaches (and Their Tradeoffs)
The most recognizable model is the traditional six-ability framework popularized by D&D. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma cover a broad range of physical and mental capability, and they're intentionally generic. That generality makes them flexible, but it also means they carry a lot of historical baggage. Over time, they've accumulated assumptions about class roles, optimal builds, and "dump stats" that often matter more than what's happening in the fiction.
Different games give ability scores different jobs. Understanding which job your game needs them to do is the first step toward choosing the right approach.
Ability Scores as Physical and Mental Traits
The most familiar approach is to treat ability scores as fundamental traits of the character's body and mind. Strength represents physical force. Dexterity represents coordination. Intelligence represents reasoning ability.
This model is intuitive and easy to explain, and it maps cleanly to real-world concepts. You can usually look at a character sheet and immediately understand what the character is supposed to be good at.
The tradeoff is that these scores tend to do a lot of work at once. A single number often determines what a character can attempt, how often they succeed, and how effective they are when they do. Over time, that can collapse distinctions between characters and encourage optimization around a small subset of "important" traits, especially in combat-heavy systems.
Ability Scores as Broad Competence Bands
Other games use fewer, broader stats instead of six or eight narrow ones. Instead of many attributes, you get a few that represent general modes of action.
Games like Savage Worlds or Cortex Prime often take this approach. Characters are broadly capable, and the system relies on context, skills, or situational modifiers to differentiate outcomes.
The upside is speed and flexibility. Characters are rarely hard-locked out of an action, and the game can move quickly without referencing many separate stats. The downside is that it can become harder to express how characters differ in meaningful ways unless additional layers are added elsewhere in the system.
Ability Scores as Roles or Modes of Action
Other designs move away from physical traits entirely and define abilities around what characters do in the fiction. Instead of Strength or Intelligence, you might see attributes tied to aggression, caution, empathy, authority, or adaptability.
This is common in narrative-forward games such as Fate Core, where abilities help determine not just whether an action succeeds, but what kind of story that success produces. A character isn't just "strong"; they're effective when acting forcefully, decisively, or boldly.
The strength of this approach is clarity of intent. The ability score tells you how a character tends to solve problems. The limitation is that these systems rely heavily on shared understanding at the table. Without that, the boundaries between abilities can feel subjective or inconsistent.
Ability Scores as Resource Interaction
In some systems, ability scores primarily determine how characters interact with resources—stamina, stress, luck, momentum, or narrative currency—rather than how likely they are to succeed at individual actions.
Games like Blades in the Dark use attributes to govern stress, resistance, and long-term pressure more than moment-to-moment task resolution. Your abilities tell you how much strain you can absorb, how often you can push yourself, and what kinds of consequences you're best equipped to handle.
This approach works particularly well for games focused on attrition, risk management, or emotional endurance. It shines in longer campaigns where pressure accumulates and characters are defined as much by what they survive as by what they accomplish.
Ability Scores as Fictional Permission
Finally, some games treat ability scores less as numbers and more as permissions. Having a high score doesn't just make you better at something—it establishes that this is a space where your character belongs.
You can see this in games influenced by Powered by the Apocalypse design, such as Apocalypse World, where attributes determine which moves you have access to and how reliably you can trigger certain kinds of outcomes. In these systems, the numbers matter, but the fictional positioning often matters more.
This model is excellent for reinforcing character identity and spotlight protection. The challenge is maintaining flexibility without erasing meaningful differences between characters.
The Question Beneath All of These
All of these approaches work. They fail in different ways, and they excel at different things.
The real question isn't "Which ability scores are best?" It's "What job are these scores doing in this game?"
Are they there to gate access to actions, differentiate characters, shape narrative tone, manage pressure over time, or reinforce genre expectations?
Once you can answer that honestly, the actual list of abilities becomes much easier to reason about.
That question is what kept pulling me away from familiar models and toward something more specific for Threshold.
The Problem I Kept Running Into
For Threshold, the usual models kept breaking in subtle ways.
I wanted a game where:
Capability felt contextual rather than absolute
Characters could be broadly competent without becoming interchangeable
Growth was meaningful without turning into numerical inflation
The environment and situation mattered as much as raw aptitude
Traditional ability scores tended to collapse too many ideas into a single number. Either a character was "good at Strength things" or they weren't. That worked fine for combat math, but it didn't do much to support the kinds of decisions Threshold is built around.
On the other end of the spectrum, systems that flattened attributes too much made characters feel less distinct than I wanted. Everyone could attempt everything, but it became harder to express how they were different beyond narrative description.
What I needed was a way to separate what a character is capable of from how refined or reliable that capability is.
Progression Without Becoming Untouchable
One of the biggest pressures on any attribute system is how it handles progression.
I wanted advancement to feel meaningful and rewarding, but also sustainable over the lifespan of a long campaign. The game is meant to be played for years. That means the system has to support continued growth without turning the characters into something the setting can no longer meaningfully respond to.
That ruled out a few things early on.
I didn't want ability scores that inflated endlessly. I didn't want a system where higher numbers alone solved problems. I didn't want challenge to depend on constantly escalating threats just to keep pace with the characters.
Instead, I wanted progression to be mostly horizontal, punctuated by occasional moments of vertical growth. Players should gain more options, more reliability, more ways to approach problems. They should become better at navigating complexity, not simply overpowering it.
Ability scores, then, couldn't just be a measure of "how strong you are." They needed to express how a character engages with the world.
The Core Idea Behind Threshold's Ability Scores
The solution I kept circling back to was splitting ability into two related but distinct parts.
In Threshold, ability isn't a single value. It's expressed through Domains and Qualities.
Domains describe where a character is broadly capable. They're intentionally coarse. They answer questions like: what kinds of situations does this character meaningfully operate in? What spheres of action are within their reach?
Qualities describe how that capability manifests. They represent refinement, control, resilience, or precision within a Domain. Two characters can share a Domain and still feel very different because their Qualities shape how reliably or effectively they act within it.
This separation let me avoid a lot of problems I kept running into elsewhere. Domains establish scope. Qualities establish depth. Neither one has to do all the work alone.
What I kept running into was the need to separate two different ideas that are often collapsed into a single number:
Where a character is capable of acting, and
How they express that capability
In Threshold, those ideas are represented by two intersecting axes.
Domains describe scope. They answer the question: what part of existence does this character meaningfully operate in? Body, Mind, and Spirit aren't skills and they aren't traits. They're arenas of interaction.
Qualities describe expression. They answer the question: how does this character apply themselves within that arena? Force, Finesse, and Essence represent different ways of acting, not different power levels.
Neither axis works on its own. It's the intersection that matters.
Why This Fit the Setting
This structure also aligned cleanly with the kind of world Threshold is set in.
In a setting where magic, ecology, and environment are tightly linked, raw capability isn't enough. Context matters. A character might be powerful in one region and constrained in another. They might be broadly capable but lack the control to use that power safely.
By separating breadth from refinement, the system leaves room for:
Environmental pressure to matter
Consequences to scale naturally
Growth to feel earned rather than automatic
It also avoids tying identity too tightly to early decisions. Characters can expand into new Domains over time or deepen existing ones without locking themselves into a rigid progression path.
Threshold is a world defined by tension: between nature, technology, and magic; between tradition and progress; between preservation and exploitation. Those tensions aren't just political or philosophical. They're embodied in how people act, what they value, and how they apply power.
A character might have the strength to act, but not the restraint. Another might have deep internal conviction but limited ability to express it physically. Those distinctions matter in a world where consequences ripple outward and power always leaves marks.
Why I Wanted Scores to Matter
There was another pressure shaping this system, one that might sound mundane but turned out to matter: I don't like modifiers.
In a lot of games—especially ones descended from D&D—the number written on your character sheet isn't the number you actually use. Your Strength might be a 16, but what matters at the table is the +3 next to it. The score becomes a lookup value, rather than a decision-making tool.
I've always found that awkward.
It adds a small but constant layer of friction. When I want to do something, I have to mentally translate my character's ability into a different number before I can even think about the roll. Over the course of a long campaign, that translation happens hundreds of times, and it never gets more interesting.
More importantly, it disconnects the fiction from the mechanics. If my ability score doesn't participate directly in resolution, then it stops feeling like a measure of capability and starts feeling like bookkeeping.
For Threshold, I wanted the number you see to be the number you use. Fewer conversions. Fewer derived values. When you look at a stat, you should immediately understand what it means in play, without consulting a table or remembering a formula.
That preference pushed me away from systems where ability scores are largely ceremonial, and toward a structure where the score itself is the thing being used.
This also reinforced the decision to cap stats at a human scale. If the number you see is the number you use, it needs to stay legible. Six means something. One means something. There's no hidden math smoothing it out behind the scenes.
This emphasis on direct use fed naturally into the Domain and Quality grid. If stats are going to be used as-is, they need to describe how a character engages with the world, not just how large a bonus they provide.
Seeing the Structure
Once I stopped thinking about ability as a single value and started treating it as the intersection of two ideas, the structure became easier to reason about visually than verbally.
I sketched the system as a simple grid: Qualities running vertically, Domains running horizontally. Each stat lives at the intersection of where a character acts and how they act.
I've included the grid below. It's rough, but it captures the core idea more clearly than a paragraph of explanation ever could.
How I ended up drawing my stat grid.
The Attribute Grid
When you combine those two axes, you end up with nine derived attributes.
Force applied to the Body becomes Might. Applied to the Mind, it becomes Will. Applied to the Spirit, it becomes Presence.
Finesse expresses itself as Agility through the Body, Wit through the Mind, and Attunement through the Spirit.
Essence becomes Vitality, Clarity, and Resonance depending on where it's applied.
Each stat is rated from 1 to 6, with 6 representing peak human capability rather than superhuman extremes. Everyone has some baseline ability. No stat ever drops to zero. Characters aren't defined by what they can't do so much as how they choose to engage.
What matters more than the numbers is what the grid allows the system to express.
Two characters might both be capable in the same Domain, but express that capability very differently. Another might share a Quality but apply it in entirely different arenas. This lets characters feel distinct without forcing them into narrow archetypes or rigid class identities.
This caps-at-six approach reinforces the grounded protagonist goal: influence grows faster than raw power. You don't become untouchable. You become experienced.
What This Sets Up Mechanically
I'm intentionally stopping short of mechanics here.
What matters for now is that this ability score structure directly informs how the dice system works. It affects how pools are built, how success is measured, and how failure creates momentum instead of dead ends.
In the next post, I'll talk about how Domains and Qualities feed into the resolution system, why I chose a dice pool approach, and how outcomes are structured to support fast play with visible consequences.
What I Worked On
For this phase of design, I focused on pressure-testing the Domain and Quality grid conceptually.
I mapped it against the kinds of situations the game is meant to handle, compared it to earlier drafts, and checked whether it could support long-term play without collapsing into a single dominant approach.
What Went Wrong
Early versions either flattened distinctions too much or pushed too much weight onto a single axis and reintroduced the same problems I was trying to avoid.
Some drafts made Domains feel like reskinned attributes. Others turned Qualities into disguised power stats. In both cases, the system drifted away from the grounded feel I was aiming for.
Finding the balance took longer than expected.
What I Changed
Once I clarified that Domains handle scope and Qualities handle expression—and that stats emerge from their intersection rather than from raw power—the rest of the system stabilized.
What I'm Testing Next
The next step is integrating this attribute structure fully into the dice resolution system.
If the resolution mechanics don't reinforce this split—if they collapse it back into a single measure of success—then the entire approach fails. That's what the next post will focus on.
Questions
Do you prefer character progression that expands options over time, or progression that increases raw power?
At what point does "heroic" stop feeling grounded for you in a long campaign?
Making Environment More Than Scenery
Most fantasy games treat magic as something that happens to the world, then disappears.
A fireball explodes. A portal opens. Reality bends for a moment, and then everything snaps back into place. The spell ends, the numbers are updated, and the world itself remains fundamentally untouched. Magic changes the immediate situation without leaving marks.
That approach never quite worked for the kinds of worlds I've always been drawn to.
I'm more interested in settings where the environment isn't just a backdrop, but a system that responds to what people do to it.
Dune's full cycle shows ecosystems as layered transformations rather than static states. Arrakis wasn't always a desert: the sandworms created that. The Fremen's success in terraforming it green nearly destroys the spice cycle. There's no "correct" ecological state, only different configurations with different costs. Every solution reshapes the system in ways that create new tensions.
Dark Sun makes magical destruction mechanical and visible: defilers versus preservers as a fundamental choice where both paths have consequences.
Studio Ghibli films (especially Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä) refuse to create simple villains, showing instead how everyone believes they're doing what's necessary to survive. The tension between nature, technology, and spirituality isn't about finding the "right" answer—it's about recognizing that every choice preserves something while costing something else.
Even Sword Art Online: Alicization explores what happens when a world's rules are strained or pushed past their intended limits; systems under pressure behave in unexpected ways.
What all of these have in common is that the world itself feels alive. Not in the sense of having consciousness, but in the sense that it responds to what happens within it. The environment has momentum. It participates. And critically, none of them tell you the answer. They make you think about the tradeoffs.
Coming from a more science-y background, the alternative has always felt hollow to me. If magic really existed and had been used for generations, it wouldn't just create individual dramatic moments. It would reshape ecosystems and influence how societies develop.
But it's more than that.
Most fantasy games treat magic as something that exists on top of a mundane world—medieval Europe plus wizards. The societies function like historical Earth despite having teleportation. Economies work like pre-industrial markets despite conjured materials. Warfare looks like historical battles despite reality-warping power.
Magic is everywhere, but it doesn't fundamentally change anything.
I wanted the opposite. In Threshold, magic isn't cosmetic. It's inherent to how the world functions. Societies organize around it, and factions emerge as responses to it. Geography reflects its history. Even the people trying to avoid magic are defined by their relationship to it.
So instead of asking "What cool places can players visit?" I started asking "What kind of world would actually exist if this was how reality worked?"
That question led to Dead Zones, decay gradients, regions under different stages of ecological stress, and factions built around competing philosophies about how to survive in a world that's breaking down. The setting didn't grow out of a map. It grew out of cause and effect.
Which brings me to the actual design work.
Vision is one thing. Implementation is another. This post is about the gap between "I want environment to matter" and "here's how environment actually functions as a game system."
What I Worked On
The conceptual challenge: Make environment a core mechanical system, not just atmospheric description.
In Threshold, power doesn't vanish when the spell ends. It leaves marks. Magic alters the land and creates consequences that accumulate over time. The world is under strain: some regions are still functional, others are collapsing, and a few have been pushed past recovery entirely.
If that's the reality of the setting, then environment can't just be set dressing. The state of the land needs to affect what resources are available, what creatures live there, how magic functions, and what choices feel viable.
This meant creating a system that tracks environmental degradation in a way that's:
Visible to players (not hidden GM bookkeeping)
Mechanically consequential (affects gameplay directly)
Narratively meaningful (reinforces the themes)
Scalable (works from local to continental levels)
The result is what I'm calling the Threat Level system—a gradient from 0 (pristine) to 5 (“irreversibly” corrupted) that describes the ecological state of any given region.
Threat 0-1 regions still have healthy forests, clear water, and abundant wildlife. Threat 2-3 regions show visible decay: thinning vegetation and corrupted creatures appearing. Threat 4-5 are Dead Zones where natural life has been replaced by ecosystems that feed on death and corruption instead of sustaining life cycles.
Players experience this through travel, resource availability, encounter types, and the visible consequences of their own actions.
The mechanical challenge: Connect player actions to environmental change without making magic feel punishing.
Here's where vision collided with playability.
In my setting, magic drains life energy from the environment. That's thematically central—it's part of why the world is dying. But I ran headfirst into a fundamental design tension:
If casting spells damages the environment, and environmental damage is bad, then casting spells is bad. Which means players using one of the game's primary features are being punished for engaging with the system.
That's not a game about hard choices. That's a lecture with dice.
I needed mechanics that created meaningful dilemmas rather than moral scolding. Players should feel the weight of their decisions, not the weight of my judgment.
At the same time, I had to address a parallel problem: technology.
Magic isn't the only force reshaping the world. Alongside it, early industrial methods are emerging—tools, infrastructure, extraction techniques meant to impose order on a world already under strain. Sometimes this includes magitech hybrids. Sometimes it's purely mechanical.
Either way, technology isn't presented as a clean alternative to magic. It's another way of exerting control, and it creates its own pressure. Strip mining for resources damages land differently than draining it with magic, but the outcome is similar: stressed ecosystems and accelerating decay.
The game needed mechanics that acknowledged this reality without creating a false binary where ‘magic = bad’ and ‘nature = good.’ The actual tension is more interesting: all forms of power carry costs, and the question is which costs you're willing to accept.
What Went Wrong
Problem 1: The "Don't Play the Game" Problem
My initial approach was straightforward: every spell cast pulls life energy from the surrounding area. Small spells wither grass. Medium spells kill trees. Large spells create localized dead zones.
Simple. Thematically coherent. Catastrophically unfun.
The message players received: don't cast spells.
In a game where magic is supposed to be one of the core character paths—where Spiritualists, Magists, and hybrid approaches all rely on spellcasting—this was design suicide. I was actively discouraging players from using their primary abilities.
The system told players that using magic made them complicit in the world's decline, but offered no alternative except "don't cast spells." That's not a meaningful choice—it's a trap designed to make you stop engaging.
Problem 2: The "Healing Is Impossible" Problem
The flip side to that was restoration mechanics.
If magic damages the environment by pulling life energy out, then logically, healing that damage requires putting life energy back in. Which is expensive. Brutally expensive.
My first pass had restoration costing 10x to 100x more than the damage dealt. One spell might kill a tree; healing that tree required sustained ritual work over days or weeks, draining the caster's own life force in the process.
Thematically? Perfect. It reflects the real-world truth that breaking ecosystems is easy, fixing them is hard.
Mechanically? It meant players choosing the Spiritualist path (focused on environmental restoration) were signing up for a Sisyphean nightmare. They could heal small areas through exhausting personal sacrifice, but the scope of the world's decay was so vast that their efforts felt meaningless.
I imagined the perspective of players would be: "Why would I choose this path? I can't actually fix anything."
And they’d be right.
I'd created a game about futility rather than difficult decisions. The problem was too big to solve and the solutions were too costly to attempt. Futility isn't interesting—it's just depressing.
What I Changed
Solution 1: Make Environmental Cost Optional, Not Mandatory
The breakthrough came from reframing the question.
Instead of "Should players be punished for using magic?" I asked: "What if players could choose whether to pay the environmental cost?"
This led to a split-cost system:
Full Cost Casting:
Pay the spell's entire Mana cost from your personal pool
No environmental damage
This represents using your own internal life energy
Environmental Pulling:
Pay only part of the Mana cost (or none at all)
Pull the rest from the surrounding environment
Causes immediate, observable environmental damage proportional to energy drawn
NPCs (and possibly PCs) notice and react based on their philosophy
Suddenly, magic wasn't inherently destructive. It was a choice.
A character facing a life-or-death situation can pull from the environment to survive. That's understandable. Desperate. Human.
A character casually nuking their surroundings for convenience? That's a different statement entirely.
The mechanics now create actual moral weight rather than mechanical punishment. Players aren't being told "magic is bad." They're being asked "how much are you willing to cost others for your own power?"
That's the question I actually wanted the game to explore.
Visibility and Reaction:
When someone pulls from the environment, it's not subtle:
Grass withers in an observable radius
Nearby plants lose leaves or wilt
Small animals flee or die
The ground may crack or darken
And crucially, people see this happen.
A Naturalist witnessing someone drain life from the forest doesn't see "necessary magic use." They see violence against the land. A Spiritualist sees someone taking what they've spent years trying to restore. A Magist sees normal operating procedure. A Technologist sees vindication; why non-magical solutions are needed.
The same action generates different reactions based on philosophy, and those reactions have consequences: social, economic, and sometimes violent.
This turns environmental cost from an abstract penalty into a social calculation. Not "can I afford this mechanically?" but "can I afford the response this will provoke?"
Solution 2: Make Restoration Brutal But Meaningful
For the restoration problem, I leaned into the difficulty rather than softening it.
Healing environmental damage remains exponentially more expensive than causing it. A Spiritualist attempting to restore a dying region is making a genuine sacrifice—spending their own life force (HP and Mana both) over extended periods to give energy back to the land.
But I changed the scope and framing.
What Spiritualists Can Actually Do:
Threat 1 (Depleted): One person can stabilize and begin healing. Takes days to weeks. Exhausting but achievable. This is one Spiritualist maintaining a sacred grove or healing a battlefield scar.
Threat 2 (Withering): One person can maintain one area OR multiple Threat 1 zones. Takes weeks to months. Visibly draining—the Spiritualist ages faster, weakens, but the land responds.
Threat 3 (Barren): Requires multiple Spiritualists working together, rotating effort to avoid individual death. Takes months to years. Creates a small oasis in a larger wasteland.
Threat 4+ (Dead/Void): Requires generational community effort. Success uncertain. This is the work of lifetimes, sustained by communities who dedicate resources to supporting the Spiritualists attempting the impossible.
The key change: Spiritualists aren't trying to save the world. They're trying to save a place.
A Spiritualist can create and maintain an oasis in a dying region. A sanctuary where life still flourishes. That's not a global solution, but it's meaningful. It matters to the people living there. It's a small victory, but it's real.
And importantly, it creates interesting narrative choices:
Do you maintain three Threat 1 zones scattered across the region, helping more people with smaller efforts, or focus all your energy on healing one Threat 2 area completely?
Do you try to heal the ancestral land your people lived on for generations, knowing the effort might kill you, or do you preserve something smaller that you know you can save?
When a desperate community begs for help with their dying fields, do you spread yourself thinner, or do you stay focused on the commitments you've already made?
These are compelling questions. The answers depend on values, not optimization.
Parallel Pressure: Technology Isn't Innocent Either
One reason the split-cost system works is that it doesn't create a false binary where magic = destruction and nature = purity.
Technologists point to magic use and say "See? This is why we need alternatives." They're not wrong. Magic does drain the world when used carelessly.
But their solutions aren't cost-free either. Mining for metals scars the land. Factory runoff pollutes waterways. Deforestation for lumber and farmland creates its own form of ecological collapse.
The game presents this honestly: all forms of power apply pressure. Magic drains life energy directly. Technology extracts resources and creates waste.
The mechanics don't pick winners. They show costs and let players decide which they're willing to pay.
What I'm Testing Next
The system has structure now, but several pieces still need refinement:
Environmental Effects on Magic:
What happens when you cast spells in a Dead Zone? The environment there isn't providing life energy anymore—it's sustaining itself on corruption and death. Do you pull from that inverted cycle instead? Does that affect the caster? Create different spell results? Risk corruption spreading to the character?
Right now this is a gap. I know it should matter, but I haven't settled on how.
Corruption Mechanics for PCs:
Does prolonged exposure to Dead Zones corrupt characters? If so, what does that look like mechanically? A separate track that fills as you spend time in corrupted regions? Wounds that don't heal normally because your body is adapting to the inverted cycle? Stat degradation? Or is the risk entirely environmental (hostile creatures, toxic conditions, resource scarcity) without direct mechanical corruption?
This ties into the larger question of how much the game tracks slow degradation versus acute dangers.
The Restoration Math:
I have rough cost ratios (10x-100x more expensive to heal than to damage), but I need to run numbers to see if this creates the experience I want. Is a 10x multiplier enough to feel significant? Is 100x so brutal that even the small victories feel Pyrrhic?
The goal is "difficult but achievable," and that's a narrow target.
NPC Reaction Depth:
I know NPCs should react to environmental damage based on their philosophy, but how granular should this be? Does a Naturalist attack you on sight for pulling from the environment, or do they give warnings first? How do different factions balance their ideological positions against practical needs?
A starving Naturalist community might overlook environmental damage if you're helping them survive. A prosperous one won't. How does the system track that nuance without becoming a social simulation?
These questions need playtesting to answer. Design in a vacuum only gets you so far.
The Broader Design Philosophy
Here's what I learned from wrestling with this:
The goal is reflection, not prescription.
This is where those influences converge into actual design philosophy.
In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi isn't wrong to want to protect her people through industry. The forest spirits aren't wrong to defend their home. San isn't wrong to fight for the forest. Ashitaka isn't wrong to seek peace between them. They're all right from their perspectives, and the tragedy is that they can't all have what they need.
That same principle runs through all the works that shaped this game. Dune doesn't tell you whether desert or garden is "correct." Dark Sun doesn't tell you defiling is always wrong—sometimes it's survival. None of them present simple answers.
I want players to have that same experience—not as passive observers, but as active participants making those choices themselves.
When you pull from the environment to save your party, you're not "playing wrong." You're making the same calculation characters in these worlds make: "What am I willing to cost the world to protect what I love?"
The system doesn't judge that choice. It just shows the consequence and asks: was it worth it?
That's where the reflection happens. Not from me or the GM telling you the answer, but from you deciding what you value and seeing the result play out in the world.
The world reacts to power because that's how systems work.
The original system was prescriptive—it told players "magic drains the world, restoration is brutally difficult" without giving them meaningful agency in that reality.
The revised system presents the same facts but frames them as forces within a larger system rather than moral judgments. The world reacts to power because that's how ecosystems work, not because I'm standing over your shoulder.
Hard problems don't need easy solutions, but they need achievable ones.
The world in this game is dying. That's not fixable at the scale of a single campaign, and pretending otherwise would undermine the setting's entire premise.
But individual characters can still make a difference in specific places, for specific people. That localized impact is enough to make the struggle feel worthwhile. A Spiritualist who spends years maintaining a single sanctuary isn't solving the global crisis, but they're preserving something real. That matters.
Visibility creates weight.
When magic leaves marks, when regions reflect their history of use, when NPCs respond to what they witness, power stops feeling abstract. The choice to pull from the environment isn't just a numbers trade—it's an act with consequences people can see.
That's what transforms "should I spend resources?" into "what am I willing to cost others?"
Mechanics should support multiple philosophies, not endorse one.
The system doesn't tell players whether Naturalists, Spiritualists, Magists, or Technologists are "right." It shows the logic behind each philosophy and the costs each approach carries.
Naturalists preserve what remains but struggle to keep pace with decay. Spiritualists heal through sacrifice but can't scale their efforts. Magists advance through power but drain the source of that power. Technologists innovate through industry but create different forms of destruction.
All of these are internally consistent positions. The game supports all of them. Which one players gravitate toward says something about their values, not about "correct" play.
Questions for Readers
On environmental cost mechanics:
When games give you the option to do something harmful for immediate benefit, what makes that choice interesting rather than just frustrating? What's the difference between a meaningful consequence and feeling punished for engaging with core systems?
On restoration as gameplay:
Have you played games where "fixing things" is a major mechanic? What made that engaging or tedious? How much visible progress do you need to see to feel like the effort matters?
Next post will likely dig into resolution mechanics—how the dice actually work, what kind of play the game supports, and why that matters. I'll walk through different systems and what I settled on.
- TTRPG Traveller
Vision & Goals: Designing a game for a world that’s ending (now)
This post is about the shape of the game I’m trying to make.
Not the mechanics (yet), nor the process behind them, but the assumptions everything else rests on: the tone of the world, the kind of play it’s meant to support, and the boundaries I’m deliberately working within. If future posts focus on how individual systems evolve, this one is about what those systems are meant to serve.
These goals aren’t immutable. They will change as the game is tested and revised. For now, they function as constraints. When something later breaks (and it will break) or needs to be reworked, this is the lens I’ll be evaluating it through.
A World That Hasn’t Ended Yet
This isn’t a post-apocalyptic game, but rather a pre-apocalypse fantasy setting.
The world hasn’t collapsed into ruin, but the cracks are showing that it’s about to fail. The crisis is present and uneven. Some regions are already scarred beyond recovery. Others are only beginning to show signs of strain. That means the world isn’t a ruined wasteland yet. Life still exists, and that’s part of the pressure—because you can still see what’s being lost.
The tone I’m aiming for is melancholic urgency. Time matters here. Decay is visible rather than abstract, and choices leave marks that don’t fade quietly. Hope still exists, but preserving it requires tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs are visible in the world.
This is more nobledark than grimdark. Mortality is real, but despair isn’t the point. Meaning still exists, and the world remains worth engaging with even as it deteriorates.
A Post-Divine Reality
The gods are gone.
There is no divine intervention waiting to correct mistakes or validate moral choices. Prayers go unanswered. Whatever happens next is the responsibility of mortals acting with incomplete information and competing values.
Magic exists, but using it leaves marks. Drawing on power affects the land and alters ecosystems. Those consequences are meant to be immediate enough that they can’t be ignored. Magic isn’t separate from the world’s decline; it is entangled in it.
Alongside magic, technology is emerging as another response. Not steampunk spectacle or modern machine hand-waving, but early industrial pressure. It represents an attempt to impose solutions on a world that is already strained. These approaches can alleviate suffering in one place while accelerating collapse in another, and the game is interested in that tension rather than presenting any option as clean or correct.
What Play Is Meant to Feel Like
This game can support short campaigns and one-shots, but it’s built to deepen with continued play. The longer a group stays with it, the more its systems begin to interlock and matter.
A full campaign, moving from Tier 1 through Tier 4, is expected to run somewhere between forty-five and seventy sessions, with around sixty sessions being typical. At the low end, that looks like about a year of weekly play. At the high end, it can stretch to several years for tables that meet biweekly.
That length assumption is intentional. The systems are designed to support accumulation and slow change, both in characters and in the world, without relying on runaway numbers to maintain interest.
The structure is tiered, but not exponential. Early play stays local and grounded, focused on understanding how the world works and where tensions lie. As the campaign progresses, decisions begin to ripple outward. The final tier isn’t about becoming untouchable; it’s about legacy. The question is no longer whether the characters matter, but what will remain because of them.
Within those arcs, individual sessions are meant to stand on their own. Players can miss sessions without collapsing the campaign, and the consequences of earlier choices continue to surface even when play is episodic.
What Players Are Deciding About
When players are deciding what to do, I want their attention pulled toward a specific kind of question.
The most important decisions are philosophical. Which approach do you support? What are you willing to sacrifice? Are you making things better, or just differently worse? These choices are reinforced through exploration—where players go, what they investigate, and what knowledge they decide is worth uncovering.
Resource tension sits alongside those questions. Power is finite. Relationships can fray. Land can be damaged or preserved. Deciding when to spend something, and when to hold back, is meant to matter.
Tactical play still has a role, but it is secondary. Positioning and choice should be meaningful, but combat is meant to resolve quickly. Fights are one way the world pushes back. They are not the center of the game. Character relationships, problem-solving, negotiation, and preparation are all expected to carry as much weight as direct confrontation at different stages of play.
The Role of the GM
The GM’s primary role is facilitator and arbiter.
They present the world and its problems without prescribing solutions. They adjudicate rules consistently and show consequences clearly. The GM is not playing against the table, and they are not guiding the group toward a predetermined story. The game is meant to be played to find out what happens.
Secondarily, the GM shapes the world in play. They establish regional texture, portray faction motivations, and make the state of the land visible. Everyone believes they are acting reasonably. The GM’s job is to make those beliefs understandable, even when they collide.
Design Priorities
At the system level, everything is filtered through a small set of priorities.
I’m optimizing for clarity under pressure. Rules need to remain usable when attention is divided and stakes are high. I’m comfortable with complexity when it produces meaningful decisions, but not when it exists for its own sake. Longevity matters as well. Mechanics need to hold up after dozens of sessions, not just during the opening arc.
Equally important are the things I’m deliberately avoiding. I don’t want grid-dependent combat pacing. I don’t want consequence-free magic or exponential inflation of numbers. I’m not interested in rigid class identities locked in early, or in bookkeeping that pretends to be realism. Moral binaries disguised as alignment systems don’t serve this project either.
Constraints I’m Treating as Fixed (For Now)
Some decisions are already solid enough that I treat them as boundaries rather than experiments.
Mechanically, the game assumes freeform spell construction rather than fixed lists. Using magic carries visible environmental cost. Combat is zone-based and resolves quickly. Health is split between stress and lasting wounds. Progression is skill-based rather than class-locked. Resources are abstracted to create tension without accounting overhead. Defense is active, requiring players to roll and make choices rather than hiding behind static numbers.
Narratively, the crisis is unfolding now. There are no evil races, and culture is not biology. Ecology is structural rather than decorative. Dead Zones represent drained and inverted environments rather than generic cursed areas. Regions exist along a visible decay gradient, and the absence of the gods is a permanent condition rather than a mystery waiting to be solved.
These constraints are what keep the game from drifting toward easier, more familiar solutions.
Inspirations and Cautionary Tales
Inspiration here isn’t about copying systems. It’s about recognizing patterns.
I’m drawn to worlds where ecological tension drives conflict and moral disagreements come from incompatible values rather than villains. I’m cautious of patterns I’ve seen repeatedly: magic treated as a consequence-free resource, combat expanding to fill entire sessions, scaling that turns the world into background noise, and lore that exists only to justify encounters.
This project is an attempt to hold on to what works for me while avoiding the irritating parts I keep running into.
Where the Design Is Right Now
The game is not a blank page, and it isn’t playtested yet.
Core systems exist on paper, including the resolution engine, the character framework, baseline combat, and the magic system. Other areas—advancement details, combat techniques, equipment catalogs, bestiary ecology, and GM tools—are still being built.
That unevenness is intentional. I’m focusing first on the systems that create the most downstream pressure, knowing that later revisions will cascade outward. The next major milestone is a playtest-ready Tier 1, with enough supporting material to run the first five to ten sessions without inventing rules on the fly.
Questions for readers
In long-running campaigns you’ve enjoyed, what tends to break first? (ex. pacing, tone, power curve?)
When magic carries visible environmental cost, what feels compelling at the table—and what crosses into frustration?
My christmas gift …
to myself and others: Beginning the design blog
Now that I’m on my Christmas holiday I’ve had time to think about things, and especially after reading Taron Pounds (Indestructoboy)’s Patreon post I’ve decided that this is a good time for me to get my feet wet. So before I start getting into the nitty gritty, I wanted to kind of go over my intent for this blog.
First and foremost, this blog is a design journal.
It isn’t a guide on how to design a tabletop roleplaying game, and it isn’t an attempt to present a finished philosophy. What I’m documenting here is the process of designing a single TTRPG from start to finish—MY TTRPG—including the parts that don’t work, the assumptions that turn out to be wrong, and the revisions that only make sense in hindsight.
The goal isn’t to arrive at clean conclusions. It’s to record decisions as they’re made, while the outcome is still uncertain.
Why This Project Exists
This project started for a simple reason.
Rather than continuing to mold my ideas into existing systems—compromising here, house-ruling there—I wanted to see what would happen if I designed the game I actually wanted to play. One built from the ground up around my own interests, sensibilities, and tolerances as both a player and a GM.
I’m not trying to make a “D&D killer.” I don’t expect this project to become widely popular, commercially successful, or definitive in any meaningful way. At its core, this is a selfish project in the most literal sense: it exists because I want it to exist.
If other people end up enjoying it, that’s great. If they borrow ideas from it, even better. But those outcomes aren’t the motivation. They’re side effects.
Designing without the pressure to appeal broadly frees me to be explicit about tradeoffs, to lean into ideas that might not be universally appealing, and to discard conventions that don’t serve my own table. That constraint—designing for myself first—is what gives this project its shape.
Why Write About It Publicly?
Most design write-ups are written after the fact. By the time they’re shared, the messy parts have already been edited out. The logic is clean, the narrative is linear, and the uncertainty has been resolved.
This blog is meant to capture the opposite.
Each post is written during the design process, while ideas are still in motion and outcomes aren’t guaranteed. That means you’ll see mechanics before they’re refined, changes that contradict earlier decisions, and solutions that introduce new problems instead of cleanly fixing old ones.
Writing publicly forces me to slow down and articulate why something feels right or wrong, not just whether it works. Even when a change doesn’t pan out, understanding why it failed tends to be more useful than the version that replaces it.
If there’s value here for anyone else, I expect it to come from that transparency rather than from any particular result.
On Notes, Drafts, and Process
A lot of this design work starts on paper.
I tend to sketch ideas, mechanics, and diagrams by hand first—often without a clear endpoint—before coming back later to translate them into something more structured on the computer. As a result, some posts will include photos of handwritten notes, margin diagrams, or half-formed ideas alongside more formal write-ups.
Those notes aren’t meant to be artifacts or conclusions. They’re snapshots of where my thinking was at a particular moment. In many cases, the ideas in them will change or be discarded entirely by the time they’re written out properly.
I’m including them anyway, because they’re part of how the design actually happens.
How These Posts will be Structured
Every entry will follow the same basic format (as best as I’m able):
What I worked on
The specific system, mechanic, or design problem I was focused on.What went wrong
Where assumptions didn’t hold, friction emerged, or testing revealed unintended consequences.What I changed
The adjustments I made in response, and why they seemed reasonable at the time.What I’m testing next
The next iteration or experiment, before I know how it will turn out.Questions
One or two focused questions, or occasionally a poll. Feedback is welcome and considered, but not every suggestion will be adopted.
This structure isn’t meant to be prescriptive. It’s just a way to keep each post grounded in concrete decisions rather than abstract theory.
On Feedback and Expectations
Comments and critique are encouraged. Disagreement is expected.
That said, this isn’t a community-designed game. Feedback helps surface blind spots and alternative approaches, but final decisions are filtered through the goals and constraints of the project as a whole—most of which are rooted in my own preferences as a player.
Sometimes a suggestion is good in isolation but doesn’t fit the direction I want the game to go. Other times it solves a problem the game simply isn’t trying to address.
When feedback isn’t adopted, that doesn’t mean its being ignored—it just means it didn’t belong here.
What This Blog Will Cover
Over time, this journal will touch on several broad areas:
Vision & Goals – What I want this game to do, and what I’m intentionally not designing for.
Core Mechanics – Resolution systems, action economy, and failure states.
Supporting Systems – Advancement, resources, and long-term play considerations.
Playtesting – How testing is conducted, what I’m paying attention to, and what surprised me.
Revision & Polish – Cutting, consolidating, and refining.
Release & Reflection – What worked, what didn’t, and what I’d change next time.
These topics won’t necessarily be addressed in order. Design rarely moves in a straight line.
A Final Note
Mistakes will show up here. Some will be obvious. Others won’t be apparent until much later. That’s part of the point.
This is a record of one person designing one game for their own table. If that perspective is useful to others, great. If not, the project still succeeds on its own terms.
The next post will start with the first real design question.
We’ll see where it goes from there. I hope you join me on this journey.
- TTRPG Traveller
What to expect
It all begins with an idea.
As those who have been following me in Discord or my Patreon may know, in the little spare time I have, I have been working on the concept of a new ttrpg. This is a new journey for me, and I expect many others find themselves wandering this same road. My hope is that by sharing this design journal, it will help others who are looking to start to see a process, just not the only process. Everyone’s journey is different, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help one another to our destination.