Silent Archaea :: Objective and a specific problem

Well, the week has gone by. A lot of activity here at HQUnicron.

Let´s give a general view of the purpose of Silent Archaea, and then onto my specific problem.

I´ve been reading some stuff since uploading SA to Game Chef.
I read lots of design journals, publishing tips and procedures. I also read some great games like Donjon, Puppetland and My Life With Master. I like the way those games work, and the way they are written.

Now, I´m not seriously considering publication for SA. It just way too early to even think about it. It´s my first design, and I plan on treating it like that.
However, I like the design process. I would like to make the best game possible. This is a hobby for me, so I´m not afraid of spending a decent amount of time on the game. (Hobby time, that is)
Besides, if GC games were published all the time there would be too many games and not enough gamers :) And playing is what´s important, not text and art.

That´s the idea. I will work on it as professionally as possible. In fact, I plan on doing quite an amount of art for it, since art is what I´m trying to do with my life.

Now onto other things.

The original problem:
I won´t ask anyone to read a draft or anything. I´ll try and explain everything here.
The characters on the game have four attributes: Specialization, Martial, Sanity and Health. Every one of those is given a type of die (d6-d8-d10-d12)
Now, the Health and Sanity attributes had points attached to them. The higher the die type, the more points the character got.
The problem was the Sanity roll mechanic. When a character used a dose of drug, he gained an advantage (scene changing mechanic, basically)
After that he would roll his Sanity die against a target number (8)
Passing the roll (equal or higher) carried no consequences. Failing it, the character lost a Sanity point.

As you can see this made the Sanity attribute doubly important. The higher die type meant more points, and also a higher chance of passing the roll. This was the problem, for I didn´t want an attribute to be stronger that the others.

First solution was this: make the character roll the highest number on the die to pass the roll. Two seconds later I could not find a sensible reason for this (higher Sanity characters having a harder time passing the roll) so I discarded it.

Second solution was having a different target number for each die type. For example: 4 for a d6, 5 for a d8, 7 for a d12, etc. This meant more text, confusing target numbers with only metagame reasons, and overall quite inelegant mechanic.

Ok, stay with me. Now comes the fun part.
I needed a way to give every character the same chance of passing the roll. I didn´t want to change the points table, since I wanted characters with different amounts of Sanity points.
So I decided that the player would roll his Sanity die against a variable difficulty. Specifically, a “difficulty die” of the same die type. This means the d6 Sanity character would roll a d6 for his attribute against another d6. Equal or higher roll, he passes the test.
This would give everyone the same chance of succeeding, since a d12 Sanity character would roll against a d12, and so on.

I thought this was what I was looking for. But there was no need for a completely different mechanic, no matter how important Sanity rolls were. So I decided to mutate the whole system from a fixed target number, to a variable target number.
Now every attribute would roll against a difficulty (still set by the GM) that would be another die roll.

Now, I set the attributes to be variations of this die types: d6, d8, d10, and d12. A d20 just went over the charts as far as progression.
The thing is I know crap about probabilities and stuff. I´m thinking of a difficulty die table such as this.

Automatic action – no roll
Easy action – d4
Average difficulty action – d6
Hard action – d8
Very difficult – d10
Almost impossible – d12
Impossible – no roll

This means an attribute with a d12 is actually very powerful. But I made the limitations so it was possible to have a d12 on an attribute, but a d6 was necessary.

So, what do you guys think? You think I should keep this train of thought? Is this system viable. Is the table right or is it too difficult to do stuff? There is a mechanic for tokens which can modify rolls too. It is small now. But maybe I can increase it to give the players more tokens, or something like that.

Thanks for any and all comments. Sorry for the lenght.

Cheers!!