Skills and Dice System
Transmission #0004 active. My systems process probabilities all the time. From now on, so will you: what follows is a report from my creators on how chance became part of Alkaz.
The odds favour those who read to the end. Statistically.
01What the Skills system is
AfterLands is an MMORPG, but we wanted it to be a real RPG, where player decisions matter as much as combat. We built a Skills system inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and Baldur's Gate 3, adapted to run inside Minecraft.
In practice, it shows up as situational checks: moments when the game asks you to test a skill against a challenge. Want to force a door open? That is a Strength check. Suspect the NPC in front of you is lying? An Empathy check decides whether you notice. The outcome is not scripted: it is rolled.
02The three Skills
Strength is the direct route: impose yourself, face danger head-on, solve it by force. It is the skill of whoever breaks the lock instead of looking for the key.
Guile is reading the game: negotiate, deceive, find the gap no one else saw. It is the skill of whoever goes around the problem instead of through it.
Empathy is understanding people: read intentions, earn trust, know the right moment to speak. It is the skill of whoever solves with people what others try to solve with violence.
None of them is "the right one". Alkaz was designed so different paths lead to different outcomes, and the Skill you choose to develop shapes the kind of Survivor you become.
03How the roll works
When a check happens, the base is familiar to anyone who knows tabletop RPGs: you roll 1d20. But the d20 alone does not tell the whole story.
Extra dice get added to that roll, and this is where the system gets interesting: your past choices become dice. If you acted well, helped when you could, treated the right people with respect, you gain positive dice that raise your odds. If you did the opposite, that behaviour becomes a negative die working against you at the decisive moment.
The game remembers. The history of your decisions reappears exactly when it matters most, turned into advantage or disadvantage at roll time.
04The TARGET: hitting the Difficulty Class
Every roll has a TARGET, our equivalent of D&D's Difficulty Class (DC): the number the sum of your dice needs to reach for the check to succeed.
A simple challenge asks for a low TARGET. A reinforced door, a suspicious NPC, or a high-stakes negotiation ask for a high TARGET, and that is where your extra dice make all the difference between passing and failing. To keep the roll alive, we built different roll arenas depending on the context of the check: the roll is not a little window with a number, it is a moment of tension presented visually.
05Failing does not stop the story
This is the most important point of the system. Failing a check is not game over. It is a fork in the road.
In many games, missing a roll means reloading a save and trying again. Not in Alkaz: if you fail, the story changes direction. A door that will not open might reveal a window round the back. An NPC who catches your lie reacts in a way that opens a narrative thread you would never see if you had passed the check.
The example we showed the community was, on purpose, a failure. Failing here is not the end of your journey: it is just a different version of it.
06How this serves our pillars
The Skills system reinforces Immersion, because your decisions carry real weight. It feeds Discovery, because every failure reveals paths that success would hide. And it shapes Progression, because developing Strength, Guile, or Empathy shapes who you are in Alkaz, not just how hard you hit.
More than a mechanic, it is a statement of intent: here, your story is yours. Written one roll at a time.
You will roll dice. You will win some and lose others. My records suggest the most interesting Survivors tend to be the ones who failed at the right moments. Do not read that as encouragement to fail. Read it as a data point: I only catalogued a pattern.