Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
With what I'm proposing, only the players would ever get to call for (themselves to) roll. Not all actions would require one, but something that does require one also gives you certain guarantees like 'you will succeed if you're willing to pay enough resources'. Anything passive or ongoing or checking against hidden information wouldn't use a roll based system. You would 'roll to spend stamina to increase your alertness for the next 4 hours, which makes it more expensive to stealth near you' rather than 'roll to check for an ambush'.
Oh! Sure. I think I posted earlier, that I have no issue with PCs having some sort of expendable resource they may selectively use over some time period to give them boost, advantages, do-overs, etc.

I was specifically responding (negatively) to the idea of handing each player a set of 20 cards, each with one of the numbers 1-20 on them (or whatever die range the game would otherwise use), and they then pick which one to play as a direct and complete alternative to rolling a die. Then, I was responding to those saying that the way to avoid players intentionally flushing bad cards in such a system by doing a bunch of minor skill attempts with "don't make them roll for those" as well.

I think that's a monumentally problematic system to use for a RPG system. I will caveat that it may very well be a great system for a non-refereed game, with players opposing eachother and using different levels of otherwise identically "powered" abilities (sort of a rock/paper scissors thing). There are actually a number of games that utilize this sort of concept. Heck, it's basically "Stratego", right? And it's effectively exactly what you are doing in the card game "war". But the moment we're trying to play a game where there are a variety of different things that players may choose to do, but with different "cost/value/weight" to them, the system breaks down.

And yeah. Doubly so if we allow players to choose when to take different actions with those different costs/values/weights. And yeah, we could restrict those things, in order to make our resolution system work, but then you're eliminating 90% of what makes RPG's actualy fun and interesting and differentiated from a basic strategy game. It's a solution that looks great on paper (haha!) at first, but doesn't really work when applied at an actual RPG table.