The TTRPG Consequence System That Killed the Retry Loop

Your character fails a lockpicking roll.

In D&D, the GM says: “You don’t manage to open it. Do you want to try again?”

In Sol Fracta, the GM says: “Your pick snaps in the lock. The alarm trips. You lose 1 EV as the adrenaline hits.”

Both are failures. Only one of them is a story.

That gap, between a failure that freezes the room and a failure that detonates the scene, is the entire reason Sol Fracta’s consequence system exists. And it took a lot of bad rolls at the design table before we understood what we were actually building.

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The Problem We Were Trying to Solve

Every TTRPG designer runs into the same wall eventually: binary success/failure is narratively dead.

D&D’s version of the problem is obvious. “You fail. Retry?” isn’t a story beat, it’s a toll booth with no road on the other side. The narrative parks itself. Everyone stares. The GM improvises something tepid. You move on.

PbtA games tried to fix this with their 7-9 partial success bracket, and they were right about the direction. But in practice, at least in our experience, the “hard bargain” or “messy success” can start to feel arbitrary after a few sessions. The GM has infinite latitude, which is liberating, but it also means consequences can become abstract and detached from the fiction. And “you succeed, but something bad happens” repeated ten times starts feeling like a tax, not a story.

Blades in the Dark pushed this further than almost any other game, and it’s a direct inspiration for Sol Fracta, especially for the colony sheet and how we think about consequences structurally. The position/effect matrix (Controlled / Risky / Desperate crossed with Limited / Standard / Great) is genuinely brilliant design. It forces the GM to pre-commit to what’s at stake before the dice come out, which is exactly the discipline we wanted to build.

But at our table, it created friction. Negotiating position and effect before every roll, even with experienced players, interrupted the flow. The conversation before the dice was sometimes longer than the resolution. And the grid felt rigid in ways that were hard to escape gracefully: you’d find a situation that didn’t cleanly fit any of the six cells, and you’d spend time arguing about where you were rather than playing. We wanted to keep the spirit: structured consequences, pre-committed stakes, no improvisation from nothing, while finding something lighter. Less a grid you navigate, more a vocabulary you reach for.

We wanted something more structured. Not rigid, structured. There’s a difference.

The question we kept returning to was: what should a failure actually cost?

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Three Outcomes, Not Two

Sol Fracta runs on a roll-under d10 system. You have a threshold — your Essence degree plus your Competence degree, adjusted by GM difficulty — and you roll trying to land at or below it.

The result space breaks into three:

Total Success (roll a 1, no doubles): You get what you wanted. Zero EV cost, zero complication. Clean.

Success with Consequence (roll ≤ SR, or even doubles): You get what you wanted, but it costs you. That cost can be –1 EV, and can layer in additional consequences depending on context.

Failure with Consequence (roll > SR, or double 10s): You don’t get what you wanted, and you still pay a price. The failure isn’t free.

That last part is the design principle that everything else hangs on: there is no such thing as a sterile failure in Sol Fracta. You roll dice, something happens. Every time.

This also forces a discipline on the GM side that I’ll come back to, but it’s worth naming upfront. If there are no stakes on a roll, you don’t roll. The dice only come out when consequences are already decided in principle.

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What “Consequence” Actually Means

Here’s where a lot of systems go vague. “Something bad happens” is not a consequence system, it’s a prompt.

The TTRPG consequence system in Sol Fracta organizes outcomes into ten categories, and the GM chooses one or two based on what makes sense in the moment:

Narrative. Someone noticed. “Not sure that group’s going to leave you alone after seeing it was you raiding the reserves.” This one branches the story sideways: new complications, new enemies, new debts.

Personal EV. You fall, you get hurt, you lose Énergie Vitale. Since EV is simultaneously your health, your stamina, and your willpower, every point lost has weight beyond the number.

ND Gear downgrade. Your multi-tool twists during the repair attempt and drops from D6 to D4. Equipment degrades along a dice chain, functional but fragile, then barely functional, then useless. Wear accumulates.

Project EV. The action had ripple effects on the automation systems or the workers. The project itself loses D4 EV. This one connects individual failures to the colony’s long-term survival, personal mistakes have structural consequences.

MC Resource consumption. More resources burned than planned. That party should have ended earlier. The supply line has less margin than it did before you rolled.

ND Resource downgrade. A cargo ship took collateral damage. Those resources aren’t arriving. Scarcity just got a little sharper.

Faction influence. A faction’s standing shifts, because of reputation lost by others. A character embarrasses themselves publicly, loses 1 influence for their faction. Politics moves whether you’re paying attention or not.

Building control. Someone, a person, a faction, made a move to lock down control over a structure while you were distracted. The board shifted.

Money (Thune). The negotiation, the recruitment, the social roll, it didn’t land clean. The NPC wants more credits. Or more credits than you have.

Environmental consequence. You lost control of the tool and hit the stone too hard. You can see a crack spreading through the rock. The world reacts to what you did.

The GM picks from this menu based on what the scene has already established. There’s no improvisation from scratch, you’re selecting from a vocabulary you’ve already defined before the dice hit the table.

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The GM Template

This is the piece I’m most proud of, and the one that gets the most use at our table:

“If you fully succeed, [X]. If you succeed with consequence, [Y] but [Z]. If you fail, [W] and [V].”

That’s it. Before any roll happens, the GM answers this template internally. If they can’t answer it, if the blanks are empty, the dice don’t come out.

This sounds like overhead. It isn’t. After a few sessions it becomes instinct. And it does something important: it forces the GM to pre-commit to consequences before the emotional weight of a failure kicks in. You’re not improvising while everyone stares at you. You already know what failure looks like. You just narrate it.

Going back to the lockpicking example:

“If you totally succeed, the door opens silently and you’re through clean. If you succeed with consequence, you get the door open but your multi-tool takes a downgrade, it scraped something internal. If you fail, the pick breaks in the lock, the mechanical alarm trips, and you lose 1 EV as the panic hits.”

Now the roll means something. Now failure has a shape. Now when the dice land on a 9 against a threshold of 6, the room knows what just happened before the GM opens their mouth.

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The Character Layer

Here’s something we didn’t fully anticipate: this system does something to how players relate to their characters.

In Sol Fracta, your EV bar is simultaneously your health, your stamina, your willpower, and your currency for pushing beyond your limits. Losing 1 EV on a failure isn’t just mechanical damage, it’s the fiction saying this cost you something. The character felt the slip of the lock pick, the rush of alarm, the flood of cortisol.

And that means players start making decisions from inside the character rather than from the player seat. “I’m already at 4 EV, I can’t afford a consequence here, I need to approach this differently.” That’s not min-maxing. That’s roleplaying. The mechanics create the pressure, and the pressure creates character.

James Fay, one of our playtest characters, has a trait called Maîtrise son Ombre, he gains 2 XP on a critical failure because he’s someone who’s made peace with loss. That trait only becomes interesting in a system where failures have teeth. If failures are sterile, James Fay is just a guy who fails sometimes. In Sol Fracta, James Fay is someone who bleeds and learns.

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What We Gave Up (And Why It Was Worth It)

I want to be honest about what this design costs.

The GM has to do more prep, not in terms of encounters or plot, but in terms of thinking through consequence spaces before rolling. Some GMs find this constraining. I find it clarifying, but I understand the reaction.

It also means you run fewer dice rolls per session. Because every roll has to mean something, you can’t throw dice at trivial situations. Picking up a box, climbing a normal ladder, remembering your character’s home address, no roll. This is fine. This is better. But it requires GMs who are comfortable narrating forward without mechanical validation.

The tradeoff: when the dice do come out, every roll lands with weight. Nobody checks out while someone spins their dice. The table is watching.

That’s the trade. We made it deliberately.

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One Rule Underneath Everything

No roll without stakes. No failure without cost.

If you’re running Sol Fracta and you find yourself saying “you don’t manage it, do you want to try again?” — stop. Either the failure has consequences you haven’t defined yet, and you need to define them before the dice come out. Or the task doesn’t actually warrant a roll, and you should just say yes and move forward.

The dice are not a randomizer. They’re a story engine. They generate material. But they only generate material if you’ve loaded them with something real before you roll.

Your character’s pick snaps in the lock. The alarm screams. You drop 1 EV.

Now what do you do?

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What does your TTRPG consequence system look like, and how do you make failure feel like a story instead of a stop sign?