one of my favorites is the Death Box in Tenra Bansho Zero

when you take damage you allocate it into various pools of boxes, and there's always one Death Box you can put a hit in

doing so gives you massive buffs to all stats

and then at the end of the scene you die

Technically I think you can check it without dying, it’s just more you’re declaring “I am willing to kill my character for this” but yeah I love that mechanic so much.

The next game that same team localized, Shinobigami, actually has a cool one in the opposite direction where every fight before the one at the end of the story arc cannot end in death and is actually turn limited -- at a certain number of rounds some kind of narrative fiat will interrupt.

The example the book gives is two ninjas fighting over a magic item that one has; they can beat the hell out of each other and whoever had the better rolls will wind up with the mcguffin by the end of it but in like three to five rounds the local school lets out so they have to stop before they blow their cover and the winner is presumed to blend in and dip.

Or like the example in the sample play is at the end of the fight between two shinobi trying to kill each other one of them just bails by hopping on top of a passing train.

I'm not sure that I would want to play in the Fifth Season RPG's setting, but comm creation is so fucking cool

moondrinker: do tell!

so comm creation, the group makes the community that the PCs will be part of. the last step before character creation is playing out in a rough sketch the prior year

like the GM rolls for an event per season

For the record the mechanic I was thinking of when I made this Plurk was how Carved From Brindlewood games handle solving the mysteries, which is their core play loop.

and the players decide how to respond to said event and roll to see how well it works

Interesting.

so before character creation, you know what has just happened, the tensions the community will be coming into game start with, and you might even have some hooks to use for your PCs

That is actually sick as hell.

yeah

I really want to use it in other games

To continue my point: so all the Carved from Brindlewood games (Brindlewood Bay, The Between, Public Access, Silt Verses) are built on the idea of solving a mystery or stopping a threat via the same investigative mechanics.

They do not have set solutions.

Let’s use Brindlewood Bay, the cozy murder mystery game, since it’s the most straightforward.

Every mystery in Brindlewood Bay is solving a killing. The system is PBTA so you have moves for talking to people, doing things, etc that can generate clues.

Every mystery prompt comes with a list of clues, like fifteen to twenty of them. None of them paint a complete picture, some of them will be contradictory.

Solving the mystery is a roll of 2d6, minus the difficulty rating of the mystery (usually between 4 and , plus 1 for every single clue you either work into or explain away in your explanation of the case.

Which means by definition no mystery will ever have the same solution exactly.

that's really cool

I would love to play this someday

Hit me up on discord sometime I own so many games in this system for you to peruse.