How do you spell?

Magic is a ludicrously tricky topic in RPGs. I've talked about it here before. (Actually, due to some strangeness, I've actually talked about it twice.) I also presented a couple options for my Seven Kingdoms setting, version one and version two, which attempted to mitigate some of the issues I'd brought up previously.

I'm looking at the magic system for my Charovnye d20 game, and I want to make the system evocative but still simple. But, wow, is that difficult.

Can I battle innumeracy?

For my d20 variant (and likely for Seven Kingdoms as well, with significant tweaks) I am working on a gear system. I came up with it a couple years ago, when working on my d20 Rifts conversion. A brief outline is below.

My problem, though, is that it is based on some "advanced" arithmetic. I can do this stuff reflexively, but I was a math major. Apparently, people really freak out when asked to do anything more complex that adding. Do you think this is too hard?

Social chase mechanics

Last week, I started to dive into some thoughts on creating a social combat mechanic. Combat seemed like a good place to start, because it is an iconic type of conflict. We definitely ran into some problems, though. Combat sees a give and take, with the roles of attacker and defender shifting each round. Social encounters typically have the attacker (we were using the term "bidder") and defender ("mark") determined at the encounter level instead of the action level. Also, combat typically only ends when one side is either dead, or sees death as his only alternative to surrender. Social conflict should have easier thresholds for "tapping out."

There is another classic conflict mechanic that might address these issues. When you have a chase, you have a relatively constant predator and prey. You can also have the chase decided by fatigue, in which one side or the other simply decides it's not worth the fight anymore. That sounds pretty close to what we are looking for as a model.

Social combat mechanics

I am continuing to tinker with game design. I have to come to several conclusions recently. First, I want to do a fantasy heartbreaker, just to get it out of my system. And, specifically, I want to use as a test bed where I can get everything wrong without really regretting it. To that end, I am not using my 7 Kingdoms setting as that fantasy heartbreaker. I really love 7 Kingdoms, and would regret defiling it with a terrible system. Also, I have determined that d20 is really the wrong system for swashbuckling supers, but it is a great system for a heartbreaker.

My new game is set in a world I'm calling Charovnye. It is going to use the d20 system, but one that will bear little resemblance to standard D&D. The setting is your basic late medieval/early Renaissance culture, with a feel that ranges from high fantasy to dark fantasy (but really never low fantasy) depending on where you are and who you interact with. I have an Obsidian Portal page set up, but all the information on there is still very much in flux.

What I want to discuss today is the concept of social combat. I really, really want a system to be present that allows for some level of diplomancy. However, it needs to strongly avoid both the simple binary success/failure of a single roll and the heavy level of mind control that is seen in many current d20 rule sets. How can we do this?