OVERKILL DICE

Here's a good mechanic I'm cutting from Pb.

OVERKILL. If you outnumber your foes when FIGHTING begins roll

a d6 and tick it down by 1 at the end of each player’s TURN.

When the OVERKILL DIE hits 0, your foes act, and the OVERKILL

DIE is rerolled.

WHY'S IT GOOD?

-It makes solo/small group combatants viable when a party is high on resources. With how Pb initiative works, the table gets a turn before the monster has a chance to act- this could easily mean getting wiped before getting the chance to use one attack. A good roll on the Overkill Dice means the monster has a chance to act before the party drops them.

-It builds a timer into the mechanics. Timer dice, where players watch some catastrophe get incrementally closer and make choices according to how many turns they have left, rock insanely hard. Making such a mechanic a default part of solo combats eases the burden on the DM to come up with diegetic time limitations for every combat.

WHY'S IT GETTING CUT?

-As I'm switching towards a low HP, automatic hit, infrequent rests game-running mindset, I'm finding in play that when in an adventuring day the party encounters a threat is deeply significant. A solo combatant can be deeply threatening when a party is low on resources, and in such cases, I forsook using an OVERKILL DIE just to give the party a fighting chance. Given that, I'm alright with a high resources party being very capable of handling most solo threats. If you've got, like, murderers and wizards just getting ready for their long day of pillaging, and you're one dude, you're gonna get creamed.

-I'm a stickler for keeping related rules on a given page, and recording the minimal viable information necessary for a functional game. Getting three lines back means I can write in some information on MOVEMENT that'll be helpful to explain a few magic items on the LOOT table.

SHOULD YOU USE IT?

If your game doesn't feature much combat, and your players are frequently walking into solo combat with a lot of resources, this mechanic is a good (and table-tested functional!) way to ensure that you won't have to artificially inflate the challenge of your monsters to make them threatening while outnumbered.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.