Difficulty Spikes, a silly mechanic
A Difficulty Spike is a d4 that gets subtracted from a die roll. I had this idea a long time ago but I didn't have a blog back then and didn't care enough to write it down. I don't think it's a particularly good idea, but I do think it's funny. You just list like, "this enemy/location has a difficulty spike of 7", and then roll 7 little spikes to be subtracted from the next 5 dice rolls. They get to be there in the table, reminding players of the challenge they're facing, and as you remove them one by one they can feel the surmounting of whatever trouble is at hand.
I pictured this mechanic in the context of a hypothetical d20 game, but I didn't completely consider how the math would work out. If we were playing hypothetical Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard1, where you are generally rolling to beat a target of 10, the chance of success drops down from 55% to around 42%. If we were playing hypothetical Mörk Borg, where you are generally aiming for 12 or more, we would go from an average 45% success rate to 32%. I'd have to spend some more time averaging the modifiers that these games add to their dice rolls to actually grasp the impact, but since this is not meant to be a hack2 but hopefully a mechanic of its own, I'm not going to math out all of that until I write down the hypothetical d20 game with the silly Difficulty Spike mechanic.
I think it would make more sense if the game had degrees of success of some kind? It should be fine with just a success threshold, but in something like hypothetical Pathfinder 2e, a Difficulty Spike could transform a critical success in a regular success, which would make sense thematically. Speaking of hypothetical Pathfinder, maybe in games with a lot of numbers adding up to your roll, you could roll your Difficulty Spikes and then bundle them in front of players in groups, so that you could have more than one spike per roll... Or maybe successes that beat the threshold by more than one Difficulty Spike could use up additional ones.
I don't know, I just think the concept of rolling a little d4 and having that as a physical prop that means something in the game is really cool. It reminds me a bit of Index Card RPG, in which the target number is always set on a big d20 in the middle of the table. There's something really lovely about having the game rules live in the pieces that we're using to play it. The reason that makes me believe this isn't very hackable is that, well, most games already have ways to add difficulty to rolls - that unfortunately aren't based on wordplay.
Let me try and draft how the Difficulty Spike mechanic - and its adjacent parts - would work, in a vacuum.
Regular-ass d20 roll: When trying to decide an uncertain outcome, the player rolls a d20. If they roll 11 or more, they succeed. Otherwise, they fail.
Difficulty Spikes: When the players are in a particular difficult situation/room/dungeon/fight, you may roll 10 d4 in front of the players and leave them where they land. These are Difficulty Spikes. The amount of Difficulty Spikes rolled can be adjusted/listed in a module/based on a monster manual/etc.
Whenever a player rolls their d20, if there are any Difficulty Spikes on the table, they must take the one closest to their d20 and subtract their value from it, then remove the Spike from the table. If the result is still 11 or more, they may repeat this process once.
Is this usable? Maybe. Will I ever use it? I'd like to one day. I like the vibes, the props and all that, I wonder if someone could extrapolate this into a whole game.3 Maybe this already is a whole game! I just couldn't let a perfectly good pun go to waste.
anb
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