Pure Massacre
A downloadable game
In my life as a DM I sometimes struggle to get my players to tell the story of battle. they love the clink clink of the dice. But focus on that and the math more than the story of slicing and dicing and flips.
Using a set of dice as the enemy, players get rewarded when they describe the battle, seek out the weaknesses and put together great sequences.
Still testing it. Would love some feedback. Does this actually work, or are there rulesets out there already that do this better.
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I gave this a quick read (Dec 04,2024 version), it definitely needs some formatting to be easier to understand.
From the description I thought the point was that this would help players describe battles instead it's basically a simple combat system and you get extra dice for describing your attacks or taking a risk.
This mimics things like Exalted's combat system where you can do a "stunt" to get bonuses, which is effectively just a description of your action which
the storyteller gets to judge on a 1-3 (the value of the bonus the description is worth) scale.
Sadly there is no help or direction on what makes a good description in the
author's opinion.
This system also talks about the GM being able to add weaknesses to dice
types, but what these do or how players are supposed to engage with them
is not explained. Again from the description I had the impression that
looking for these weaknesses was a bigger part of 'Pure Massacre'.
What I thought this project would be is of course purely subjective to
myself but I do think in any case this needs more work to be usable and stand out from similar attempts to reward better narration of
combat scenarios.
Holding my thumbs for the author, would totally be willing to give it
another read if it got an update.
This is one of the most honouring pieces of feedback I have received in a long time. Pure Massacre was a night that I spent by myself at my dinning room table trying to figure out how to encourage players to lean on the description of their fight more than the clink clink of the dice. Then I posted it hoping to come back to it. Play test it. Etc. Your feedback makes me want to do that even more and the fact that you cited some other systems that could do this better is super helpful. I am slowly leaving the DnD space and still out of my depth with how I want to proceed. :D
So thanks. I will attempt to have a look at it in the next week.
Also the expression "holding my thumbs" is one that I like without knowing what it means. What is it?
And thanks!!
I am glad I could help motivate you :)
Exalted might not be the best to leave DnD behind if you are looking for suggestion, it's basically what if the dudes behind the World of Darkness made DnD, but it did have a similar idea to yours, sadly it is still very mechanics forward.
My bad on the "holding my thumbs" xD, it's a German expression that I failed to translate, its basically like "crossing my fingers"
and just means I hope you succeed or I wish you well in something you are doing.