I’ve owned Starforged for a while, but have never really read it because I had read Ironsworn and Delve, so I figured I was mostly covered. However, I’ve been considering running a 1 player game with my kid, and the Ironsworn system is one of the really good options for that. As a result, I decided to refresh my understanding of things by giving Starforged a read.

I have a lot of thoughts about this game. Most of them are positive, and the ones that are less than positive are more in the realm of thoughtful disagreement, so there’s a good chance I’ll be writing about it more as I go on. However, as I was reading, I was absolutely reminded of something that stood out to me strongly on my first exposure to the system and which stood out just as strongly this time: the dice are weird.

For the unfamiliar, the system works as follows: the player generates a number from 1 (or less) to 10 in a couple of possible ways, but the main one on my mind is by rolling a d6 and adding some sort of modifier to it. Technically, this can result in rolls over 10, but those are discarded (for reasons we’ll get into in a second). Generally, that modifier is +1 to +3 from the appropriate stat, plus other possible bonuses based on the situation.

That is, you may observe, just about as straightforward as a dice system can get: roll d6 and add a modifier. What’s the weirdness?

The weirdness comes in the difficulty. There are no fixed difficulties or targets – rather rolls are made against two separate d10 rolls. If your roll is:

• Less or equal to both d10s: you miss
• Roll higher than one and fail to beat the other, you get a weak hit
• Roll higher than both, you get a strong hit

Rolls are also made more extreme if the 10’s match, so there’s a standing 10% chance your result will, effectively, be a critical success or failure, but we’ll set that aside for now.

The results themselves are going to be familiar to anyone familiar with PBTA, FitD or similar games with a three-result model. The specific nuances of a weak hit in the Ironsworn system are different than they are in PBTA or FitD, but the idea is pretty clear.

There’s also a specific mechanical lever here that relies on the need for the player to beat the dice and ties back to results capping at 10. The main upshot of this is that there’s always a chance of failure, even with the maximum possible bonuses.

It’s all straightforward enough on paper, but it feels complicated – probably more complicated than it is. Short of memorizing the percentages, it’s very difficulty to intuit your chances on a given roll, because the math is a matrix of randomness. Put differently, it’s very easy to read the results of a roll, but holding all the variables going into a roll in your head is a frustrating exercise.

To be clear: This doesn’t hold up to strict mathematical scrutiny. If you sit down and crunch the numbers, this is not noticeably more complex than a Blades in the Dark result, and from that perspective it’s a little odd to speak about how a die roll mechanic feels. More, as with all matters of feeling, it’s highly subjective, and it won’t feel the same to everyone, but I feel comfortable saying that for most players, the dice are going to feel more opaque to players (at least until such a time as they’ve played long enough to develop a new intuition).

So, as I said, I find this weird, but I think it’s deliberate (and if it’s not, it’s a fascinating accident). Specifically, when a player has less confidence in their intuition in the dice, the dice generate a greater amount of tension (especially when the system is weighted in a way that there is ALWAYS a chance of failure or a weak hit). It makes dice rolls feel more significant, which pretty much aligns with the game as a whole. I would go so far as to say that the game is at its strongest when it’s making fewer rolls and giving them the power they need.

Anyway, it’s possible that the opacity is accidental. The specific dice mechanic might have just been a clever way to generate a three-band result without mimicking PBTA or FitD. No harm if so. But even if accidental, it’s an effect I find very powerful, and it helps keep the Ironsworn system feeling like something very distinct from other games it shares DNA with. Other factors (like asset cards) contribute to this sense of distinction, and as someone who has read more generic systems than I can remember, I really appreciate it.

Now, all THAT said, I have only played a little Ironsworn – certainly not enough to have developed any intuition of my own. I was curious, so I asked a friend who has played a lot how the experience has changed with that experience, and it seems like the dice mechanic itself (especially that chance of rolling 10s to torpedo anything) managed to sustain the sense of uncertainty. If anything, it suggests that the initial complexity does more to establish expectations than anything else, and that is a pretty cool trick.