Jul 5, 2026
After I had an initial draft of what was, essentially, a sci-fi re-skin of Four against Darkness, I gave it a playthrough and … I was bored. And, to be honest, I was also a bit put off by every interaction really resolving to combat. This science fiction I had created amounted to “meet new creatures and kill them.”
What I wanted was a game that was more about exploration and discovery. Also, I had this character, RSQb-103, who I liked and who I wanted to allow to grow. As a long-time advocate for the right to repair, I liked the idea of Qb, and thus the player, being on a mission to hack his own consciousness operating system.
With that in mind, I needed to develop a way for Qb to seemingly learn, which was a tall order if I also wanted to keep the overall game system fairly simple. What I eventually stumbled upon, and what I hope works, is a system which maximizes variation, thus keeping the feeling of novelty fairly high.
I maximized variability across a broad range of fronts: I started by increasing the number of human “types” to 11 — because initially they were the product of a 2d6 roll. (More on how this changed in a moment.) I then broadened the ways the player could engage the people they meet: they could seek to pacify them or suppress them—as well as, in the case of the worst humans (mercenaries) kill them.
In order to get the player not to risk pacification and go straight to supression, I needed a way to reward the player for attempting the peaceful option. That’s when compression gradient flux, called simply flux in the game, was introduced. Measured in “Kolmogorov units” (aka Ks), flux was an indicator of Qb having learned something. The player always received more flux for pacification versus suppression, and they got more flux as the opponents who were to be pacified got to be harder.
I introduced a new die roll mechanic to do this: for every member of a group Qb faced and tried to pacify, they added a die to a dice pool. The player then has to beat the product of the number of group members times the group’s difficulty level. So, for example, if they are faced with 4 scavengers who have a difficult level of 3, the player must roll greater than 12 with 3d6 to pacify them.
There is a greater probability of pacifying less difficult opponents than harder ones, but the rewards for doing so are also smaller—the rewards for pacification, however, is always greater than suppression—and killing actually costs a player flux.
But what is flux good for? It seemed important that it index learning in some fashion. I played with a number of mechanics, but, in the end (and for the time being), I have it available as something a player expends in order to modify a dice roll. If a roll is particularly important, the player is up against a difficult opponent or problem, then they can buy a +1DRM with a K of flux.
One of the moving parts of this mechanic is that the flux must be expended upfront and it is used up whether the roll is successful or not. Right now, I have it so that there is no limit to the amount of flux a player can use. So, if a player is willing to “burn” 5K of flux, they can guarantee a successful roll against even the most difficult opponents.
Like a lot of things, the game will need a lot of playtesting before the proper weighting of such things is revealed.
Next up: increasing the variability of the spaces and introducing new kinds of events.
Jan 8, 2026
A fair portion of simulating reality is based in probabilities both because users need to have choices—there’s no need for probabilities in a novel because there’s only one path—and because games need to have variability if they are going to offer meaningful opportunities for replay.
Also, games are almost by definition a safe environment in which to take risks, and those risks must result in success, failure, or something interesting in between.
There are a lot of ways to generate probabilities, but rolling dice or drawing cards are the two with which most players are familiar and a good game harnesses that familiarity in ways that surprise, and delight, its players.
I have an example in a follow-up post to this one, but, for now, let’s take a look at the basics.
Dice Probabilities
A single die, whether it is 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, 12-sided, or 20-sided (just to name the most common dice), produces an equal probability of its outcomes: there is a 1-in-6 chance of rolling any number, 1 through 6, when rolling a 6-sided die.
But the minute you add a die and begin to create a dice pool from which you sum numbers, you have the beginning of a bell curve in which some outcomes are more likely than others. E.g., “lucky seven” is lucky by simply being the most probably outcome of rolling two dice, 16.67%, with all the other outcomes trailing off on either side of the curve, eventually diminishing to 2.78% for either 2, “snake eyes,” or 12, “box cars.” (AnyDice is a great website to check out possibilities and outcomes.)
But you need not sum a dice pool. You can also, for example, count the number of successes, often called “hits” in combat-oriented games or keeping certain dice, like producing various “hands” in Yahtzee.
One of the dice pool systems I am trying out in Metal Boxes is the d66 system, where you roll two die, usually of different colors (but you could just as easily read them left-to-right, if you like), such that instead of having 11 possible outcomes when summing a roll of two dice, you actually have 36 outcomes: (1,1), (1,2), (1,3) … (6,5), (6,6).
I am using such a system to generate spaces within a ship, with one die determining the width of a space and one its length. (Or X and Y for you cartesianists.) If either die is a 1, then a player has rolled a corridor, as opposed to fuller-sized compartments. I wanted to know what the probability of the player rolling a corridor was in such a system.
Probability of Rolling a One with Two Dice
Okay, so as noted above, when rolling two six-sided dice, there are a total of 36 possible outcomes. This is calculated as 6 outcomes from the first die × 6 outcomes from the second die for a total of 36.
To find the probability of rolling at least one ‘1’, we can count the possible outcomes in which a 1 occurs:
- Outcomes where the first die is a ‘1’: (1,1), (1,2), (1,3), (1,4), (1,5), (1,6) — 6 outcomes.
- Outcomes where the second die is a ‘1’: (2,1), (3,1), (4,1), (5,1), (6,1) — 5 additional outcomes.
This gives us a total of 11 possible outcomes in which a 1 is featured:
The probability of rolling at least one ‘1’ is calculated as 11 in 36 which we can calculate using simply math: 11 / 36 =0.306 x 100 = 30.6%.
30% is closer to one-third than I would have initially imagined. For my own use, that might mean more corridors than I want, or, maybe just maybe it means, given the likelihood of rolling a corridor, that I need to make corriros more interesting.
Dec 23, 2015
One of the outcomes of the success of the narrative games course was my own renewed interest in all kinds of games. In particular, I still have a number of the board games from when I was a kid. The ones I played the most were from Avalon Hill, but I was also quite fond of the games by Yaquinto. (And while AH features in gamer nostalgia, I have yet to see anything about Yaquinto. No love for Marine 2002: A Game of the First Lunar War?)
In addition to a number of solo games that are driven by writing—Starforged, Loner, Star Trek: Captain’s Log—I have also picked up a number of solo wargames. So far, the rules have been a little daunting. (How I played Squad Leader, I don’t know, but I think the designers of that game did a pretty good job of giving you the minimal viable rules and then slowly adding rules as you worked your way through scenarios.)
To shake off the rust, I decided to join the International Kriegsspiel Society, where I have been lurking for the past few months. And then, with the holidays looming, I decided to join a play-by-post game—which is actually done on Discord. So far, I’ve managed to miss my first turn deadline by a few hours and have my ability to lead my company questioned, but I think I’m back on track. I like the vignetted maps that the moderator posts into my “command” channel.