Update: The Judge Two System

The blog is up and running and I am starting to pull material out of my giant mess of a word document and get it formatted for presentation. I have created and organized a lot of the pages I will be using to show off TWE's world and mechanics and have started to fill in the blanks.

Perhaps the most important thing that went up this week is TWE's central game mechanic, called the Judge Two System. So for my inaugural weekly development post, I figured I would spend some time talking about system and its goals.

The central game mechanic in TWE is called the Judge Two System, so named because a player always rolls two dice and has to make a judgement call about how best to use the roll results. The Judge Two System is a product of two primary design goals that I will talk a little about below.

1. Create a game mechanic that seems to fit with, and emphasize, the fictional setting of the game

My first goal was to find a game mechanic that felt at home in the particular setting of TWE’s biblically inspired world. Although there are a number of successful game systems that are setting agnostic, and can be dropped in and out of practically whatever environment the players would like, I wanted a game mechanic that put something unique about the game’s setting into the players’ hands. This is not to say that the Judge Two System could not be adapted for another setting, but rather that the system can be thought of as a manifestation of something actually happening in the game world of TWE.

Close readers of the Hebrew Bible may be familiar with one of the Israelite priesthood’s method of divination, which involved two, dice-like stones called Urim and Thummim, of which there are scattered references beginning in the book of Exodus. The words roughly translate to "light" and "innocence" and were used to generate answers to a series of yes or no questions, usually having to do with the guilt or innocence of individuals. In a famous incident in 1 Samuel 14, God has apparently ceased to direct King Saul in his war efforts against the Philistines, preventing the army from taking divinely sanctioned actions. Saul employs the Urim and Thummin to determine whose fault it is that God has broken off in his revelations. The objects eventually convict his son, Jonathan, though he escapes judgement because of the popular acclaim of the army. The story is used to show the breakdown in Saul’s relationship with the divine and the disorder in his military campaign, which amounts to a justification of his eventual replacement by David. The story gives us scant details about the Urim and Thummim themselves, but that they are employed to coerce answers out of the divine even when God himself appears silent, and that they are entrusted to make decisions of national import, are both extremely interesting facets of the ancient worldview.

Although the exact nature of the Urim and Thummim are unknown, I thought it was kind of fun to conceive of them as dice, and use them as an inspiration for TWE’s central game mechanic. The rolling of two dice to determine the fate of characters, and the naming of the dice as Light and Truth, and the results as innocent, guilty, and glorious, all come from this biblical origin.

2. Create a game mechanic that allows for a maximum amount of information to emerge from a minimum amount of rolling and math

I am not very good at math, as my PhD in some esoteric humanities subject evidences. Rolling a lot of dice and doing a lot of math can have benefits in a roleplaying game though. The more dice and math heavy a game is, the more nuance in action resolution you can easily model. If you are willing to roll three times and do some algebra for every attack roll, you can accommodate a whole host of combat related circumstances. The more dice and the more math, the more information you have available to you to tweak and to interpret and to plug into charts. On the other hand, roll and math light games have the advantage of speed of resolution, ease of interpretation, and absence of reference charts. If most of the players’ collective energy is spent calculating roll results, then the energy is not going to telling compelling stories. Unobtrusive game mechanics mean the flow of storytelling is never broken for long.

I wanted to design a game mechanic that allowed for a lot of information to be taken out of a minimum amount of rolling and math, to at least partially preserve some of the advantages of roll and math heavy games, while leaning towards the advantages of roll and math light games. The Judge Two System aims toward this balance. When the two dice, Truth and Light, are rolled in the Judge Two System, a lot of information is conveyed without much math at all. Can the action be successful? If yes, at what cost? If no cost, then what advantage is gained? If yes cost, then how much of one? If the action cannot be successful, then what can be salvaged from it? The best part is, it is the player who answers most of these questions. While the roll of the dice are important for action resolution in TWE, no action is truly resolved until a player makes a choice, a judgement, about how it will be resolved, and they make that choice on the basis of all the information that the dice convey.

A single die roll in TWE could communicate a player defending against an attack by half a dozen bandits and knocking them to the ground for an ally to finish off. The same single roll in TWE could communicate a player intimidating half a dozen bandits and compelling them to make way for the character. The same single roll in TWE could communicate a player at the head of a column of a thousand spearmen repelling the charge of a thousand bandits on horseback. Each of these rolls would involve choices and a range of possible outcomes for the players to narrate.

I wanted dice rolling in TWE to be something that revitalizes and propels the narrative forward, rather than something that pauses the narrative while math and abstract interpretations were done. Only time and copious playtesting will tell if that goal has been yet, but in the meantime, I am very happy with the system and cannot wait to share it with people.

- ABH