Forms Dice System

ALRIGHT BOYS

In this game you play people  who have used a technique called Moulding to throw their 'essence' out of whack.  This enables them to harness great power when acting in a manner in line with their new 'essence', but they have sought power through a dangerous and brutal method, and if they're not careful their aggressive use of power will come back to bite them in the butt.

Think a combination of Mage: the Awakening's "Reality is punching you back" combined with LotW's chi mutations, combined with the whole idea of "sure you've managed to embed magic into your voice, but now you can't speak lest you casually tell someone to go die in a fire /and they do/."


Everyone starts with a number of d10, for this example 5.  Normally to make a test, you'd roll your 5d10, add skills, and compare to a target number.  Moulded individuals are different, they have the ability to harness their chosen affinity when doing things in line with that affinity.  This is represented by a pool of 'dice points' they have, which they can spend to swap in their specific combination of dice for one of the d10s they'd normally roll...but only when it makes sense for them to be able to do so.  They can also spend these points to power special abilities, like spells or whatnot.

Example: Jane has moulded herself to be earth-aligned.  Her form is the tetrahedron, so her special die is a d4.  The Anatomical System associated with the Tetrahedron is Mind (as it deals with facts and rapid, accurate processing of information).  She wants to shoot a target (A wine bottle) that is around the corner.  She fires her gun at the wall, calculating the necessary trajectory for it to ricochet and strike the target.  Since this deals with rapid and accurate processing of data, she can spend a dice point and instead of rolling 5d10, she rolls 4d10+4d4 (as an example, 1 dice point = 4d4), adding her Firearms skill value (as an example).

Difficulty for tests against the environment is handled by a number of d10s.  An easy task would require the player to roll against 3d10, while moderate might be 5d10 and hard 7d10.

Jane's GM rules that since she only knows the relative location of the bottle, it's going to be a pain to hit, even with her ability.  The GM rolls 7d10 against Jane's roll...hopefully she's got some experience with the gun in her hand.

The problem is that once a dice point is spent, it doesn't just disappear.  It goes into the GM's pool, where they can then use it against your character when they make an unaligned test.

Example: Jane hit the bottle, shattering it and impressing her friends.  Unfortunately, locals are not only upset about the wasted wine, they're convinced Jane is a devil for pulling off that kind of trick shot.  She's going to have to talk her way out of being run out of town, but since the Tetrahedron doesn't lend itself to speech craft, she can only roll 5d10 plus her speaking skill.  Even worse, persuasion and manipulation are governed by Wind, which is dissonant with Earth.  The GM spends the dice point Jane handed over earlier, and now Jane has to beat an angry mob rolling 4d10+1d12(or something like this...), plus whatever passes for their 'disbelieving' skill.
(Note that they might also roll 4d10+4d4, I've yet to decide on how this would work exactly.)