First up is Caltrop Core. It doesn't get much more basic than this. I don't remember exactly when I first encountered this system, but it's probably been a year or two. For those that can't be bothered to click and see for yourself, this system uses d4's to resolve questions that come up in a game. I have developed a marked dislike for the venerable d20 over the years, so giving some love to the oft-forgotten d4, even if it was just out of spite, appealed to me. You read each die as follows:
| 1 | Absolute Failure. You don't get what you want and things get a lot worse. |
| 2 | Partial Failure. You don't get what you want. |
| 3 | Partial Success. You get what you want, but things get complicated. |
| 4 | Absolute Success. You get what you want - and more. |
As presented, you can either make your Caltrop Core game stat-based or token-based, but either way, as a player, you want to be able to roll as many dice as possible and then use the best result. I liked this idea, but ultimately, the probability spread didn't work for me. I built a different matrix using d6's that looked like this:
| 1 | Critical Failure, and each 1 beyond the first amplifies the severity. |
| 2-4 | Failure. |
| 5 | Success, but there may be a complication. |
| 6 | Complete Success, and each 6 beyond the first amplifies the benefits. |
I wound up writing out a dozen pages of rules to support this idea, and I think what I have constitutes a fully formed system, but the way I determined how many dice to roll for each test was a little complicated in non-typical but still common enough circumstances. About the time I finished it, I found FU by Nathan Russell, which does very much the same thing in a way that is probably better. *sad trumpet sound*
But then I got distracted...