-- ReginaldGusto - 08 Nov 2015

When dice attack

The system of dice for this game was one I had the privilege of beta-testing with its creator, my good friend Tim Dedeaux (pronounced “DEE-doe,” if you’re currious). I have proudly taken part in the evolution of this dice system over the last seventeen years, in his games, my own games, and under the auspice of the greatest GM I have ever known and likely the greatest ever to exist, one Sally Jane Black, author of the Shem setting. Originally, Tim Dedeaux developed the Tarafore system to mimic realism: fights would be short and decisive, a power level difference would be decisive in approximately seventy percent of rolls but an upset was still possible, and the stun and wound mechanics in a fight would mimic the wide variety of responses a Human body might have to trauma. It was play-tested extensively to ensure that the actual numerical results matched the conceptual definitions of the power-levels, in order to avoid the rather annoying phenomenon of your numbers saying you were, for example, an elite ballerina, but the actual dice rolls mean you can’t tie your shoes without falling over.
The system was not designed for anything but a real-world setting with no fantasy or sci-fi elements, so leave it to Sally and her fellow gods of Shem (we his players) to adapt it, adding stats and mechanisms for magic, faith, supernatural bonuses, and even giant monsters and super-powered gods and demons. Sally's methods were fine tuned over the course of fourteen years, ever adapting to the changing needs of the world of Shem. The system is simple, the concepts easy to master, and all you need for it is a set of d10’s.
My ambition, herein, is to further adapt the system to accommodate the epic scale of Kaiju vs. Kaiju when they are large, but also allow for Kaiju vs. Kaiju when one or both of them are small. I am also attempting to create a mechanic for the Tarafore system that allows for tracking and spending units of emotional energy.
Let’s see how good I really am.

Overview

The Tarafore system is a basic stat-plus-d10 system, where you have a statistical score in some trait or skill, and to it you add the roll of a d10 to determine the results of a particular action attempted. The scale for Humans ranges from 1 to 25, with 10 being average for traits and “journeyman” for skills, and every three points is a power level. There are six innate traits, and a theoretically infinite number of skills. It is also possible to take small situational bonuses or penalties within each stat.
The traits are as follows:

Prowess (PRO): Your raw physical ability and the fine tuning with which you control your body. This trait is your default stat for fighting and combat initiative, but might also be used to catch thrown objects, manually manipulate a complex object, or intercept someone who is immanently falling off an edge.

1: Barely able to move.
4: toddler, geriatric patient, very handicapped person.
7: young teenager, someone with a debilitating condition such as arthritis or a broken limb.
10: Adult average
13: Professionally trained, such as a boxer, law enforcement officer, or soldier out of basic training.
16: Elite fighter. Martial arts master, olympic fencer, Navy SEAL.
19: Best fighter alive. In his time, Bruce Lee or Miyamoto Musashi would have qualified. For a non-fighter example, Michael Jordan would have qualified.
22: Best who ever lived. Some say this about Miyamoto Musashi.
25: Supernaturally aided. Some theories place Achiles here during the siege of Troy.

Strength (STR): Raw exertion of physical power. How much can you lift, how easily can you maintain your grip, how hard do you hit. Your ability to deal and take damage is also housed under this stat. In some circumstances, strength might also be the measure of your weight, or be used to roll against the effects of poison or infection.

1: Infant strength
4: Small child strength or bedridden Human
7: Young teenager, inactive adult, or adult in need of Physical therapy.
10: Average adult
13: Active professional, such as a college football player or personal trainer, or adult who makes a point to work out regularly.
16: Body builder or Olympic weightlifter.
19: Winner of the World’s Strongest Man competition
22: Strongest man ever to live. Some theories posit Beowulf might be a contender for this title.
25: Godlike strength, such as the Old Testament judge Samson, or demigod Hercules. In this setting, STR 25 will also represent the maximum size of a Kaiju that can be defeated purely with mundane damage, and the maximum size that does not require the super power “Giant Size.” I’ll come back to that later.

Athletics (ATH): There could be some overlap between athletics and Prowess, but the general idea is that athletics measures your endurance, flexibility, and your ability to do things like climb ropes, leap ravines, sprint, and take part in athletic competitions that do not otherwise use prowess. Athletics is also your default stat for dodging ranged attacks.

1: Quadriplegic adult
4: Toddler or small child, geriatric patient
7: Sedentary adult, adult with a cardio-pulmonary illness or orthopedic injury.
10: Average adult
13: College track star or basketball player, fireman
16: Olympic gymnast
19: Shaolin master, star performer for Cirque Du Soleil
22: The heroic messenger from whom we get the legendary origins of the Marathon Race, the Fianna of ancient Ireland.
25: The Roadrunner.

Awareness (AWA): This stat is most analogous to a mental version of prowess. How quickly and efficiently and accurately do you process information? How fast do you think? How observant are you? How acute are your senses? Awareness can also be used as your default score for combat initiative instead of Prowess, or to roll to see if you know a random piece of information outside of a known skill set.

1: Vegetable
4: Brain damage but somewhat functional, a toddler, or a clinically demented adult.
7: “You know those people who don’t know anything? Well he doesn’t even suspect anything.”
10: Average adult
13: Police detective, political pundit, military officer.
16: Ph.D in science, advanced law degrees, or medical degrees, hired by NASA.
19: Sherlock Holmes, Chess player Kasperov, or Albert Einstein
22: King Solomon, as in “The wisdom of Solomon.”
25: A prince of Amber from Roger Zelazny’s writings

Willpower (WIL): This stat measures how well you exert mind over matter. It is used to resist as well as inflict mundane commands, social influence, intimidation, pain, psychic attacks, and your own emotional turmoil. In some circumstances, Willpower can also be used to measure your magical influence over the “real” world.

1: Automaton
4: Child, feeble mind
7: Submissive personality, someone who is easily frightened or cowed.
10: Average human
13: Natural leader, judge, coach, parent raising more than one child, professional hostage negotiator.
16: Special Forces operative, CIA interrogator.
19: John McLane as played by Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies, Sir Patrick Stewart’s Jean Luc Picard, or Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone.
22: King Arthur
25: A demi-god

Rogue (ROG): This stat represents your ability to lie, detect lies, read people’s emotions and intentions, engage in subterfuge, conceal your own intentions and emotions, convince others, and pass as something you are not. Also included in this stat is your stealth, ability to hide, ability to conceal items on or about your person, move silently, or pass without leaving a trace.

1: The Tazmanian Devil from Loony Toons. Let’s face it, he’s not exactly sneaky.
4: A hyperactive child.
7: A particularly obnoxious protestor.
10: Most people with even basic social skill.
13: An actor, politician, lawyer, cold-reader, or hunter.
16: A ninja, a presidential candidate, or someone with the personality of Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series.
19: Sengoku era spy and assassin Hattori Hanzou, Mossad founder Isser Harel.
22: Famed Mossad agent Eliyahu Cohen.
25: Satan, Loki, the Xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Traits are assumed to start at 10 and be modified from there. By having power levels every three points, the system allows some flexibility. For example, let’s say your concept is an MMA fighter who is just slightly better than professional, you can take a prowess of 14 instead of 13. Or, if he is almost elite level but not quite there, take a 15. This system also allows for specialization. If your concept is a swordsman, he might only be 13 Prowess in general, but elite with a sword. In that event, you take a prowess of 13, but a specialty of “Sword +3” which is only applied if he is doing his fighting with a sword.

Skills:

Skills, unlike traits, are not considered innate. A person is not born with knowledge of computer programming, politics, or cheating at cards. Skills are assumed to start either at 0, or 5 for culturally prevalent knowledge sets (for example, you can’t grow up in America without having some basic understanding of what a car is, what its purpose is, and the basic motions a person makes to drive it).
The scale below will use an alien technology as its example. The skills number scale is as follows:

0: No exposure whatsoever, such as Humans trying to deal with alien technology or innate magic.
1: You’ve heard that this skill set exists, and might have heard a one sentence description of what it is, such as “a Luxonaut is someone who can operate a Faster-Than-Light engine safely.”
4: You’ve done some cursory research, probably on the internet. “A Luxonaut operates an Artificial Singularity Pulse Engine for Faster Than Light travel. This is dangerous, because if he does not maintain a fuel to oxygen balance, the singularity could erupt and create a black hole.”
5: The cultural prevalence threshold. “Lots of people in my society have their Luxonaut license, and I’ll have to get one when I turn 16 so I can warp to school.”
7: Apprentice. You begin directed study under someone who has mastered the art. An apprentice often only does menial tasks in support of his teacher until he can be trusted with supervised operation. “Now, notice that I cut the oxygen a little here. I did that because the barometric pressure here is greater, and the oxygen is denser. Do you see?”
10: Journeyman. You begin supervised operation of the skill. “Sigh. Failure to clean the mix valve. Are you ever going to learn to do that?”
13: Professional. You are now good enough to make your living exercising the skill. “Wanted: professional and courteous Luxonauts. Apply within.”
16: Elite. Your voice in the art is respected and well heeded. You might even be a teacher with apprentices. “Conventional wisdom is never to cut the fuel with Uranium. Conventional Wisdom is wrong. I won the Alpha Centauri Invitational 3 times with this mix.”
19: Best alive, possibly a master of the guild. “He revolutionized the art of Luxonautics, and then he retired. No one knows where he is because no one can catch him.”
22: Best that ever existed. “Three technological revolutions later and his name is still legendary. No one has beaten his time yet.”
25: Divinely assisted. “I don’t even think he was Human. I think he might have been an alien, because no one has the mental flexibility to track as many Luxonautic variables as he did and still keep his eyes on the slipstream all while recording a voiceover for the latest production of Hamlet.”

Rolling the dice:

Contested rolls: Say you attack your enemy and he seeks to defend. You both roll prowess (a d10 plus your prowess stat) and compare results. If your result is greater, you get a success. If you succeed by more than 4, you get a special success, which adds certain bonuses. If you win by more than 7, you get an exceptional success, which affords even greater bonuses.

Uncontested rolls: Say you wanted to pick a lock. The GM determined that this lock was made by the great locksmith Locke Steel, and that an elite thief might have even odds at succeeding. He sets the difficulty at 16 (literally, if your lockpicking skill is elite, you have a 50/50 chance of success). You roll your skill (roll a d10 and add your skill), and he rolls the difficulty (roll a d10 and add 16). As above, if your total is higher, you get a success, a special success, or an exceptional success (win by at least 1, 4, and 7 respectively).

Combat initiative: Roll initiative (a d10 plus your initiative stat, usually prowess or awareness by default). The character with the highest initiative goes first, and all other characters take their actions in descending order of initiative. When that round ends (everyone has taken their action), the next round begins and initiative is rolled again.

General effect rolls: This method was developed by Billy for certain kinds of rolls where either A) the variety of targets was too great to roll individually for all of them, or B) he didn’t want us to know what difficulty he was actually rolling for us. The method is simple: Suppose a player says, “I’m going to roll AWA to see if anyone is following us.” The GM then rolls 6 dice, one for each power level of difficulty between 10 and 25, and writes the results out like this:

10: _
13: __
16: __
19: __
22: __
25: _

Of course the blanks would be filled in with whatever number he rolled for each difficulty. So let’s say the character checking for being followed rolled a 21, and the GM rolled the following:

10: 19 (rolled a 9)
13: 15 (rolled a 2)
16: 21 (rolled a 5)
19: 23 (rolled a 4)
22: 29 (rolled a 7)
25: 32 (rolled a 7)

You would interpret the results as the following: No one of ROG 10 (Or Stealth specialty 10) is following us. There is a cop who is keeping a wary eye on us, but he doesn’t seem too perturbed, this is probably just his beat. You’re not sure if that man in the suit is watching you or not. If anyone more stealthy than that man in the suit is following you, you don’t know about it. They’re probably not there anyway, but there is that off chance.
You can use this technique to determine Area-Of-Effect effects on a crowd, basic social rolls against a crowd, and a number of other situations.
If you’re using it to not reveal who they are actually rolling against, just eyeball the results above and pick the nearest base higher than your actual target’s score, or lower, depending on the desired narrative effect. For example, if there had been an assassin in the crowd intending to assassinate one of the party, his Stealth might be 17, so pick the results for base 16 or 19 as desired.
If you want to make the results even faster, just roll one die, and add that roll to all 6 difficulties. Be aware, however, that this method does take some of the random distribution out of it if you rolled really high or really low. Alternatively, you might just “take 5,” assume a roll of 5 for all of them. It removes the randomness, but is less unwieldy than rolling dice. For my part, I would stick with one roll per difficulty level, because I like the results better, but each GM has his or her own style.

Variations:

As we adapted this system for high fantasy, urban fantasy, and sci-fi fantasy, we made a few tweaks that just slightly adjusted the dice results to our liking. The first of these was a modification that slightly normalized the d10 dice rolls by rolling three dice instead of one, and taking the middle result. For example, in the lock-picking example above, let’s say you have a lockpicking skill of 13, and you rolled a 2, 6, and 7 on your three dice, you would take the 6 because it is the middle number, and add that to your skill of 13 for a total result of 19. This modification made the rolls follow a more normal distribution curve, and cut down on extreme results without ever really eliminating them. This option might be open to more inquisitive GM’s and players if you felt you needed to ensure a bit more statistical order in your dice rolls.
In the process, this same modification made possible our favorite metagame mechanic: the “karma.” Karma was, at first, a token awarded by the GM for good roleplaying, and could be spent in one of two ways: Allow the player to take the high die instead of the middle, or force the opponent to take the low die instead of the middle. Later, when Karma became a function of the character’s personality mechanic, we started experimenting with using it as a narrative token, which is to say you could spend it to simply narrate a part of the action instead of rolling dice for it. The players and GM would certainly be welcome to implement such a mechanic, but I should point out that for this setting, I actually incorporated that principle already in how the Primal Energy stat is to be used.

So what’s new?

So now that you are somewhat acquainted with the Tarafore dice system (one might even go so far as to say, you now have a 4 in Tarafore, haha), let’s talk about the modifications necessary to apply this system to an RPG about Kaiju.

Primal and Celestial Energy:

The first and most important modification has to do with the very fuel by which a Kaiju operates: emotional energy. For this mechanic, I am going to step outside the Tarafore system and create two statistics that are not scalar with the traits and skills: Primal Energy, and Celestial energy. Primal energy is the fuel source of Kaiju, but also the very difficulty they have to overcome to avoid eruption, steer eruption, or come down from eruption. Celestial Energy is the complement to Primal Energy, offering it balance, control, peace, and sometimes even negation. It is also the fuel for Celestial Creatures.
In a normal Human, the maximum of each type of energy is three, and the minimum is one. With Kaiju, however, the maximum Celestial Energy is three, and the minimum is zero. Moreover, there is no maximum of Primal Energy anymore. The exact reverse is true of Celestial beings.
Events that cause an emotional backlash in the Kaiju (for example, events that make the Kaiju afraid, angry, sad, frustrated, agrieved, defensive, indignant, ashamed, etc) add one Primal energy to the reservoir. There are other ways to gain Primal Energy as well. Every primal energy in the reservoir adds +1 to the difficulty to resist eruption. The Kaiju will usually be rolling willpower to resist, steer, or come down. Upon eruption, the Kaiju will consume primal energy at the rate of one every five minutes, or one every round in combat. Upon running out of energy, the eruption ends. When that happens, the Kaiju retreats if summoned, is banished if in possession, transforms back into Human form if transformed, or is unconscious if permanent.
Primal energy can also be consumed for dice bonuses, to activate certain powers or effects, and can be recuperated during an eruption under certain circumstances. A Kaiju can use Celestial energy to either “burn” one Primal energy from the reservoir, to talk another Kaiju down, or as a bonus to rolls to steer or come down. Celestial beings can use Celestial energy for even more powers and abilities.

Epic Damage:

As I mentioned in the commentary on the Strength trait, 25 is the maximum strength that doesn’t count as “giant size.” Giant Size is a super-power you can take for your Kaiju that unlocks a strength scale above 25. It also both blesses and curses your Kaiju with everything you would expect of a power like “Giant Size:” You can’t fit inside your house, you might accidentally crush someone you are trying to handle carefully, your footsteps register on the Richter scale, you take a severe hit to your ROG stat, people are terrified of you, buildings don’t exactly step lively to get out of your way, and weapons that used to spell certain doom for you are now just really annoying to you.
If you shoot a Kaiju with STR 25 with a .357 Magnum, he will feel it. You might not do all that much more than make him angry, but you do still run the risk of killing or seriously injuring him, especially if you get a good vital organ shot. Any more STR than 25, though, and you’re just going prick him a little. All those little soldiers on the ground with their .50 BMG’s and grenades are just going to annoy the heck out of a sufficiently large Kaiju.
But what’s this? Here comes Mesquitor, the giant mosquito of Lansing, Michigan. With one thrust, he plunges his proboscis into your chest. That did some damage. And what’s this? The army called in an A-10 Warthog spitting 9000 degree SABOT rounds, and a tank just arrived firing 125 mm HESH anti-tank rounds. Your Kaiju goes down.
Humans, and anything with an STR less than 25, are very vulnerable to your normal, mundane weapons. A knife, some poison, a garotte, a gun, a landmine, or even a well-placed punch can send us right across the veil of death. But for something the size of the Cloverfield monster, you need something a little bigger. If you’re a Kaiju, you need to be able to dish out Epic Damage, damage that would normally cause buildings to collapse or tanks to be crushed. Needless to say, the Military could also field such hardware. As a general rule, if it isn’t used to destroy concrete structures, it won’t work on a Kaiju with Giant Size.
Anything that does epic damage will be assumed to have an STR or a damage rating of greater than 25. Anything that can absorb or reduce Epic Damage will be assumed to have a toughness greater than 25. The average STR for a Kaiju of Giant Size will be 35, with the scale ranging from 26 to 50, in three point power levels as normal. Buildings will be similarly scaled from an average 35 and ranging from 26 (a house) to 50 (a tall and sturdy skyscraper). The implication of this scale is that an average building has about a 50% chance of supporting the weight or impact of an average Giant without sustaining damage. Epic damage that misses its target will do significant damage to the landscape around, such as that skyscraper you were standing in front of.
That is not to say that mundane damage has no place in the fight. A Kaiju under attack by mundane damage will suffer a -1, -2, or -3 distraction penalty to attacks made while under this attack, depending on the intensity of the attack. Humans can effect this distraction with numbers, or skill (for example firing a flare gun into Mesquitor’s eye to distract him).