My latest thoughts on a Dark Silver game system

[Kindling]

Although I don't exactly have the sharpest mind for rules and the probabilities of dice rolls and so on, I do, like any gamer, enjoy looking over and tinkering with game systems. Every so often, that results in the urge to come up with my own, and this is a foray of mine in that direction. As usual the world of Dark Silver is the likely arena for play, and as such the system's intent is to lean towards the kind of tone that requires.
It has its basis in a set of core ability scores, much as in traditional dungeons and dragons type games, but with these abilities chosen to achieve, right at the outset of character generation, a particular aesthetic and communicate certain genre traits to the player through the very fact of which aspects of their character are deemed to be important to the game.
They are as follows...

Mind – Perhaps the most self-explanatory, this is the generic mental statistic, representing both cunning and wisdom.
Loins – With a name like that it would be easy to assume this is the "sex stat" and while, yes, it does represent sexual physicality and allure, it also represents physicality in terms of vitality and life force.
Heart – An abstraction of both empathy and strength of personality, in essence this represents those elements of the "social stat" that do not directly concern physical attractiveness.
Instinct – Representing awareness, a perceptive nature, rapid reaction times and quick reflexes.
Chivalry – Essentially the combat statistic, this represents not only skill at arms and familiarity with weaponry, but also martial bearing and knowledge of the warrior way of life, how to act the part as well as just fight.
Courage – Almost as obvious as Mind, this represents the ability to overcome fear and the willpower to resist negative psychic influences.
Honour – A somewhat nebulous term to represent a mixture of self-discipline, determination, and dedication to either a cause, a set of laws or a strongly regimented lifestyle.

At first level a character would have 15 points to split between these 7 abilities, with a minimum allotment of 1 point going into each. At every even level 1 extra point would become available with which to increase a chosen ability.
The other two statistics are Lifeblood, a hit point analogue whose value would be 5 plus the character's level, and Initiative whose value would be 5 plus 1d6 per character level, rolled after each night's rest, with 1d6 being left out of the roll for each night without sufficient sleep and/or provisions. More on Initiative later.
So a level one warrior-type character might have the profile Mind 1, Loins 2, Heart 1, Instinct 2, Chivalry 5, Courage 3, Honour 1, Lifeblood 6, Initiative 9.

The basic resolution mechanic would be that for any action the character attempted, the player would describe the way in which they go about it and why this makes the ability of their choice relevant. The GM then either decides if they are convinced by the description that the ability the player has chosen could feasibly be used to accomplish the action being attempted or not.
If yes, the GM then decides on a target number based on the difficulty of the action and the player rolls a die and adds the chosen ability score to the result.
If no, the GM has two choices. If they believe the ability score chosen by the player has absolutely no relevance to the action being attempted, they ask the player to choose another and describe the relevance of the new choice, starting the action resolution again. Alternatively, if they feel the ability score chosen by the player has some relevance to the action being attempted but wouldn't represent the majority of what the character would have to put into the action to succeed, the GM could still allow the player to roll using their first choice of ability score, but set a higher target number to represent to increased difficulty of relying on a slightly inappropriate ability to see them through.

An example of how the different abilities could be brought into play for a similar type of action...
Let's say the character is trying to intimidate someone. The player could say that, as they are making physical threats, the Chivalry or Loins abilities could be the most relevant, for obviously displaying the character's capability to make good those threats.
Or, if the character's particular style of intimidation takes the form of logically spelling out why, because of this, that and the other factor, the consequences of non-compliance will be very very bad for the person being intimidated, the player could argue for Mind actually being the relevant ability in this situation.
Then again, if the character is just relying on pure tone of voice and body language, then Heart, or maybe at a stretch Instinct, could be said to be the most important ability in this case.
Another option would be for the player to describe the way in which the determined, fanatical, relentless nature of the character is what is intimidating about them, and so it's actually their Honour that is most relevant for the roll.
So, we see how almost any ability could be argued for for this action! The only one we haven't covered is Courage, and there's not much courageous about bullying people anyway...

The role of Initiative, as well as determining sequence of action during combat, is as a consumable resource. It can be spent to grant an equivalent bonus on any given action resolution roll (spend 1 Initiative for +1, 2 for +2 and so on), or for a cost of 5 Initiative it can be used to buy a re-roll of any die, with the player choosing the result they deem more favourable, or for a 2-for-1 cost it can be spent to reduce damage a character receives (spend 2 Initiative to reduce damage by 1, 4 to reduce damage by 2 and so on).

Characters can take damage down to 0 Lifeblood with no adverse effects and still function just as they would at full Lifeblood. However any damage dealt past 0 Lifeblood, rather than reducing it into negative figures, functions as a modifier to a roll on a table of wounds similar to the critical hit charts in wfrp, with lower results reducing Initiative and/or causing the character to lose an action or two from being stunned, and higher results causing temporary, then permanent, ability score damage. Very high results on the wound chart might also involve the loss of eyes or limbs, and from about halfway onwards most results would leave the character unconscious and bleeding to death, which would occur within a certain number of rounds unless an ally was able to reach them and spend an action staunching the flow of blood, after which they could be nursed back to health once the encounter was over.

Most decisions in "designing" this system were entirely aesthetic in nature, and I haven't given any time to playtesting yet so I'm bracing myself for one of you telling me it's horrendously flawed. I'm also aware that it's nothing terribly original, but because I like the aesthetics of it and its simplicity, I think it could potentially be a better fit for gaming in Dark Silver than any published system, and I'm curious to see if anyone agrees with me!
One thing I haven't considered yet is how, if at all, to have this handle magic so if any thoughts occur to you on reading it, please share.

[sparkletwist]

I haven't given any time to playtesting yet so I'm bracing myself for one of you telling me it's horrendously flawed.

It's horrendously flawed!  :P

The biggest flaw I can see so far is that nowhere do you actually state what kind of dice you roll when you roll dice.

Anyway, the mechanics remind me a bit of Fate Accelerated Edition (henceforth FAE), actually. Perhaps slightly more complex, but the general rules-lightness of it, the somewhat vaguely defined skills-- FAE called them "approaches"-- and the use of points to help boost your rolls are all reminiscent. So that might be somewhere to look for inspiration. Perhaps flavoring FAE for Dark Silver would work better than trying to create something from scratch.

Personally, I'm not too big of a fan of vague skills where it's not totally clear in-game tasks the skill is for. To be honest, while I like FAE, the vagueness of the approaches is one of the things I like the least about it. I do like the idea of multiple skills being relevant to any given action, especially important ones, because it increases build diversity and player options, so certain amount of diversity is good. However, I think certain hard lines should be drawn and skills should be a little more rigidly defined. The problem with being this vague is that it can lead to an inconsistent game. The GM may rule a skill is relevant at on point and not relevant at another point, and some players may not have as much chutzpah to try to get away with using their skills and those players will be inherently less powerful, and a GM that doesn't like confrontation has solely their own rulings and no rubric for using to skills to fall back on when trying to rein players in. It might also lead to disagreements at the table when some players are convinced that a skill feels relevant and other players and/or the GM are not.

[Kindling]

That's an interesting connection. Isn't FAE the system you used for that halloween one-shot you ran, the one where I played a cowardly aussie photographer/conspiracy theorist? If so that's been my only play experience of FAE (or in fact of any form of Fate) and my memory of it is that while the game was a lot of fun, I did find the vagueness of the rules a bit jarring at times so... Yeah maybe I should rethink this to give it some more hard lines, as you call them, while trying to keep the same aesthetic and simplicity.

[Ghostman]

I'd drop the part about allowing dubiously relevant abilities to be used at a penalty. I think it's complicating things unnecessarily and also tempting players to come up with BS excuses to always try and use their highest ability. So, for any particular action there should be just one relevant ability -- for example, in the case of physical intimidation, pick one of Loins or Chivalry and stick with that choise. You can still allow for alternative ways to intimidate someone, but each viable way maps to exactly one corresponding ability. Eg. physical intimidation always uses Loins, mental intimidation always uses Heart.