Rolling Dice for Fun and Profit

Hello. C J here. I'm actively preparing for running the first few sessions of Legend Elements. I've recruited some of my family to play and I'm also finding people on some of the Facebook groups I'm part of. This is going so well that I'm having a hard time keeping up.

One flaw that a lot of tabletop games have is that boss combat is long and boring. To get around that in Legend Elements I have a mechanic called Scale. A creature with Scale is exponentially more dangerous than one without. And the higher the Scale the higher the danger. I mean literally Scale is built out of exponents.

I finally ran a few sample combat encounters just by myself. I might have made the boss combat too dangerous. I am not fixing it. So here's how this went. I gave each side six dice in their pool. They both had five rounds to roll dice. Then they both made their final attacks for the encounter. Rolling dice pools and attacking are separate things in the engine I built.

The two combats I ran the player characters without Scale got 2-6 damage dealt each by the end of the five rounds. The boss at Scale 2 got 14-17. To point out something, player Health caps out at 10 at the end of the game's leveling system. That attack could have outright killed two player characters, while their 6 damage would not have killed the boss without a team doing it.

I have successfully killed two players and scratched the boss up a bit. So a boss in the game is appropriately lethal. You will need to work together as a team and play to your strengths to win. This is not a branding pitch. This is a mathematical constant of the dice engine. I've finally played one one of my main series games, even if just by myself. This is going amazingly well.

C J Mcpherson

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