A toy game from the 2016 game design advent calendar.

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This game is about dying, and transformation. The whole butterfly chrysalis thing (I know it's a moth, and pupates underground) was inspirational, and the moth's name being so closely associated with death (the Death's-head hawkmoth).

In this game, you're gonna die a lot. You come back to life, but to advance and grow you have to die.

Note that this game lacks the tension that comes from wanting to avoid your character's death; it just doesn't exist here, so we find other things to focus on.

Requires:

• Bunches o' d6's
• GM + players
• Paper and pencils

Rules:

You have some defining things. We'll call these Defining Moments. Write down one, a significant moment in your past, and give it one d6. You'll also gain moments as you play, temporary versions without dice.

When you tempt fate and risk life and limb, roll all dice belonging to relevant Defining Moments. The GM will set a number for you to beat. Compare it to the highest number your rolled:

• If you roll the GM's number, it's a mixed success. The GM will say how it goes. You won't die, but it'll probably suck.
• If you roll more than the GM's number, note your success as a moment on your sheet. Say how it goes.
• If you roll less than the GM's number, note the miss as a moment on your sheet. The GM will say how it goes. You might die. It will suck.

When you do kick the bucket, roll all your dice in all Defining Moments; the GM will roll a die for each moment you've noted since you last passed away.

• If your highest roll is equal to the GM's, you may add one of your gathered moments to your sheet as a Defining Moment, but it gets no dice.
• If your highest roll is less than the GM's, you get a new die; you can give this to a new Defining Moment taken from your moments, or just give it to one that already exists.
• If your highest roll is more than the GM's, you're going to lose a die. Take it from a Defining Moment most similar to your gathered moments.

In any case, cross out your gathered moments and start over; return to life, greater or lesser than you were.

GM:

When a player tempts fate, you have to set a number for them to reach. Choose a number from 4-6, depending on how significant the event is; 4 for small moments, 6 for highly significant moments.

When they miss, kill them if it was reasonably-well telegraphed. They'll come back to life, so really don't worry about it.

This whole dying and coming back to life thing -- come up with a good fictional reason for it. Better yet, just ask the players why death doesn't stick.

Notes:

This game may be fundamentally broken. It has the weakness of requiring the GM to manually set a difficulty -- common, I know, but it's a bit ugly to require manual tuning of a system -- and that difficulty isn't very tunable. Regardless, the core of the game here is the dynamic creation of new Defining Moments, also known as skills/aspects/attributes/stats. I did this in Toms on Toms as well.

"Toms on Toms" is a bit different; there, the gaining of new Things is unbounded, and accelerating (very much by design). Here, the gain of of new Defining Moments is also unbounded, but the number of dice you have available stabilizes. I'm not sure around what number, but a player's number of dice will start to orbit around a number, likely 10 or so.

So perhaps not the best written game, mechanically, but another exploration into dynamic skill creation. There's something here worth exploring further, and an interesting opportunity for injecting some self-organization into the field.

--Karaktakus the Undying and Ever-Reborn

Prompt/cover photo: Wikimedia Commons