Ok, so Six Bullets seems to be on hold at the moment whilst I wrap my head round some of the issues with structure and narration. So Ordinary Angels has swaggered forwards to fill the gap. I know what I want the game to do, and I have a check list of rules that I want in it, but I'm having trouble piecing all the pieces together.

But first a bit more about the game, which is based on the film of the same name by my good friend, Todd Downing. It's a cop show or police procedural, thematically and stylistically similar to the Shield or the Wire, if you've seen those. Oh, except the cops are angels, the criminals are Fallen and the victims are souls caught between the two sides.

You play a cell of angels making hard choices between doing what's right (saving humans, killing the Fallen, trying to make the world better) and what's necessary (reaping souls for the War, making concessions and deals with the Fallen, and sacrificing humans in line with the Plan). Each session is a "day in the life" of your cell, as though being filmed by a documentary crew, a la Cops.

So here's what's in so far:

Dice mechanics

* 3 stats - humanity, will and belief - rated by a number of d6.
* when you make a roll you roll a combination of all 3 stats, although i'm not yet sure how or why you might want to.
* rolls are opposed, with 1-3 being good, 4-6 being bad.
* triple 6s are super bad, and triple 1s are super good. So the more dice you roll, the more likely you will be to get a triple in some capacity. Not sure what happens on a triple yet, but probably some sort of manifestation/narrative FUBAR.
* i'm toying with borrowing slightly from Don't Rest Your Head and having whichever stat rolls the most successes "colouring" the outcome in someway, or putting a restriction on the narration. So if your humanity comes up trumps, the narration will be grounded in mundane reality, whereas if belief dominates it's likely to appear full-on miraculous.

Faith & Duty

* on the next layer up you have faith, which is a pool of points that you can use to perform supernatural stuff with, either by spending some to create an effect or introduce a story element, or to add additional dice to a conflict.
* you get faith back by acting in line with your duties.
* Duties are very much like keys in TSoY, set responsibilities coupled with restrictions on what thou shalt and thou shalt not do. Acting in line with them gets you faith back, but obviously the more complicated the situation you end up in as a result the more faith you get.
* Breaking your Duties puts you on track to Falling, although I'm not sure if there should be a mechanical incentive for neglecting them too - perhaps bonus dice too?

The Plan

* The Plan is the spine of the game, a measure of opposition and progress, inspired by Agon's Strife mechanic.
* The various elements of the game are each assigned a number of points from the Plan, be they mysteries, Fallen opponents, plot complications or whatever.
* Whenever the angels solve or accomplish one of the elements from the Plan, those points are discarded. When all the points are gone, the angels accomplish the Plan and the adventure is successful.
* I'm thinking the angels can go "off plan" by burning faith, allowing them to ignore or overcome an element of the Plan in some other fashion.

Testimony

* The to camera monologues by Afriel are one of the best bits in Ordinary Angels, and I'm hoping to do something similar in the game, very much like Testimonials in InSpectres. I'm not sure what game effect this will have yet though.

So, there you have where I'm at at the moment, which is 4 separate mechanics that only tie loosely together. I'm hoping the Plan will tie neatly in with Faith and Duty somehow, and those in turn link in with the trinity of stats. Where Testimony fits in I don't know, but I think it'll be the players way to tweak with the Plan.

I don't think my dice mechanic is funky or interesting enough just yet though - am I missing something obvious I can do with 3 pools of 3 stats?

Is it too fiddly? Am I trying to squeeze too much into it at the moment?