Cold City and Hot War are live now on Kickstarter!
Let’s talk a bit about the core mechanic.
When it comes to resolving conflicts in Cold City and Hot War, both the players and the GM have access to groups of dice to roll, and they gamble on how many to use in a given conflict.
The GM’s dice pool is drawn from groups representing different thematic elements of the setting. The players help allocate dice into the groups at the start of play.
The players build dice pools based on the things on their character sheet.
The things drawn upon to add dice to a pool are put at risk in a conflict.
“I once heard someone say morality was method.”
Before a conflict is resolved, the GM offers the players a choice to make it easier, harder, or more complicated. Accepting or refusing this deal has an outcome for the pools about to be generated.
The outcome of a conflict might restore one side’s dice, and the engines used to provide those dice.
Or it might take dice away, and for characters, potentially hurt those engines, preventing dice being provided in future.
“Survival…is an infinite capacity for suspicion”
Each side states their goals for the conflict, they roll their pools. Highest single face wins.
How many dice in the winner’s pool show a number higher than your opponent’s highest die? That gives the number of successes.
The winner then spends all their successes on a menu of consequences which affect the access to future dice for one or both sides.
If the GM loses, they lose the dice they rolled. If they win, they might add more dice to their groups.
“There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
When a number of the GM’s thematic dice groups are entirely exhausted, that act of the story is coming to an end, and the act is wrapped up.
At the start of the new act, the GM replenishes their dice groups, the player characters don’t replenish their resources.
“The world” as represented by the GM’s groups of dice always restores itself each act to its full strength, and indeed grows in strength as acts progress. If things go poorly for the players, they will have to spend their successes to recoup any lost resources and protect against future loss, pushing them to act and enter into more conflicts just to hold in place.
“Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided”
In this brief summary, we’re really showing you the bare bones of the system. The details of how all of these mechanics express themselves in the game world, how outcomes and consequences affect characters and the scene, are really flavourful and “juicy”. Where dice come from, and the options for spending successes create a varied and lively set of meaningful outcomes, both in the fiction and mechanically. There’s lots more to this, with negative traits, hidden agendas and trust in particular all adding a lot of texture to play.
This way of doing things weaves together motivations, stakes, strategy, and the events of the fiction, with each of those things pushing and pulling and delivering meaningful information for your story.
The big change from 1e is that, to do this to an even greater degree, the game now doesn’t use prewritten conflicts with statistics for enemies or challenges to provide the adversary dice. The GM doesn’t have to write all that mechanical stuff beforehand, and adjust it on the fly in response to arising events. It all happens at the table.
In this second edition, the power and influence of adversaries and obstacles, across an act made up of several scenes, is represented by the thematic groups of dice, managed by the GM, and the flavour and weighting of those resources is initially decided on by the players.
The core mechanic of rolling pools of negotiated dice, counting success and then spending them remains the same. Around that is a new framework that tells us where these dice come from, and what they represent, significantly lightening the prep work for the GM. They can still design an overall plot and a series of likely events that occur in different directions, but things like writing stats for monsters or NPCs, or deciding precisely how many dice a locked door rolls is cunningly integrated into a wider scheme of collaborative and strategic play.
It’s extremely evocative of the themes of each game.