As many of you may already have noticed, I like writing books and systems. It’s my yum. Some people relax by baking. I relax by arguing with probability curves.

Over the years I’ve written complex systems (the original ERIS system) and simple systems (most of my smaller games). I’ve also been a fan of the Year Zero Engine for quite a while, particularly the Step Dice variant. Yes, I know there are other Step Dice games out there. They exist. They also have their own problems. I’m always on the lookout for ways to make things run more smoothly, or at least fail more interestingly.

Recently, though, something finally snapped.

I was running the ALIEN EVOLVED Starter adventure with my face-to-face group and we hit a familiar wall: enormous dice pools. At a certain point every roll effectively becomes two rolls. First you roll the dice. Then you scan twelve of the bloody things for successes. Then you have the ritualised debate about whether to Push. Then you roll again. Then you scan again. Then someone asks what just happened in the fiction because everyone’s been staring at plastic instead of the table.

It’s slow.

I understand the argument that dice rolls are inherently immersion-breaking. Fine. But the process of handling large dice pools in YZE was actively strangling game flow. Not gently. With intent. Something had to give.

First up: Pushing.

A lot of people misunderstand Pushing. It’s not a re-do of the action, it’s just a re-do of the roll. I get that, intellectually. In practice, though, especially with large dice pools, it’s clunky and immersion-breaking. The moment becomes procedural rather than dramatic, and nobody ever remembers why they’re pushing, only that they’re allowed to.

Second: the Target Number of 6.

This does two things. One, it makes d6 pools wildly swingy. Two, it quietly murders one of the best dice ever made: the d4. We’ve been using the d4 as a “debilitated” state in several games already (yes, we hack things, you’ll live), but under standard YZE assumptions it’s barely usable as a real step. That always felt like a waste.

So. Solutions.

• Dropping the target number to 5 immediately makes the d4 viable. Yes yes, I’ll get there.
• Removing Push and replacing it with a result modifier both speeds play up and, again, allows the d4 to function properly.
• We’ve aligned step-dice success thresholds to 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 rather than the 6 / 10 of Twilight: 2000 or the 6 / 8 / 10 / 12 of Forbidden Lands.

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• We added the Nudge to replace the Push. Whether itt’s a moment of clarity or a karmic intervention, Players will have a limited resource to change the results on a dice roll; nudging a possible failure into a success or a catastrophic fail into a normal fail.

Mathematically, this all shakes out to roughly the same place. Functionally, though, it opens the d4 up as a legitimate die rather than a design afterthought. That expands our usable dice range from four dice to five. That’s a 25% increase. Which is either a meaningful improvement or a very convincing way to justify more design work. Possibly both.

So yes, we’ll be producing some systems using this approach. There’s other changes but that’s the big change.

On the surface, nothing really changes. Everything remains 100% compatible with YZE Step Dice. But if you use our version, you’ll be happier*, wealthier*, and admired by your superiors*.

*results not guaranteed