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Hi there,

I'm currently converting Forbidden Lands to use the step die mechanic, as I'm absolutely in love with how it works compared to the standard dice pool. Overall, the transition has been smooth—but the biggest challenge I'm facing is how to handle Willpower gain.

With the step die system, rolling 1s seems to happen far less often compared to the standard dice pool, which makes gaining Willpower through riskier rolls much less reliable. I’d love to hear how others have handled this. Have you developed or seen any good house rules for Willpower generation in a step die setup?

Also, to be honest, Willpower is one of my least favorite aspects of the YZE system. I’ve been thinking about adapting something closer to Dragonbane's approach, where characters have a fixed number of Willpower points that regenerate with rest (balanced appropriately for Forbidden Lands, of course). Has anyone implemented or experimented with a fixed-pool Willpower system like this in Forbidden Lands?

I’d really appreciate any thoughts or advice!

Thanks in advance!

The accumulation of Willpower in the regular d6 system mirrors the probability of success on any roll, meaning that the likelihood of a Bane is the same as it is for a success.
With the regular dice system you can have four possible outcomes to a roll of the attribute dice: success, success with Bane, Fail, and Failure with Bane. If you wanted the Willpower accumulation work at the same probability as in Forbidden Lands, you'd have to make sure these outcomes and the probability of Banes are reflected on the attribute step die.
For example:

d6: bane on 1 (17%)
d8: bane on 1, 2, 7 (37% vs. 31% at 2d6)
d10: bane on 1, 2, 7 (37% vs. 42% at 3d6)
d12: bane on 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 11 (50% vs. 52% at 4d6)

The base d6 dice pool in FbL can also "reward" multiple Banes per roll. The chances of these are too small for the increments on the step-dice, so you'll have to include a secondary die-roll if you want to get those as well.