I'm noodling on a system idea where you cannot get critical successes if you're doing a thing alone, and you cannot get critical failures unless you're doing a thing alone.
It's a loose system family that's roughly a GMless and diceless drift away from PbtA, where character playbooks have moves they can do any time, moves that earn tokens (which are usually vulnerable or open story possibilities), and moves that cost tokens (which are usually strong or story-resolving).
I also have a far-too-complicated idea about building dice pools during downtime which get rolled to define the features of the next episode, but I really need to shut that down because while I like it, it doesn't match my design goals.
That's the complication, indeed. There's a lot of possible answers, and different systems have tried different ideas.
Spending more tokens to get a better success, or determining that an action is so difficult that a single token doesn't produce a satisfactory outcome.
Or simply leaving it up to the players to determine when critical outcomes are desired; Wanderhome says "You can choose to fail whenever you'd like," but points out that failure means something perhaps unexpected because of that game's context.
@BESW It sounds like the general idea doesn't require dice, it just requires "you can only access the best results when you're working together" (and "you stand to lose more when working alone" is an optional symmetry)
In a diceless system that lets you choose how the action resolves, teamwork unlocks options you couldn't choose otherwise.
Looking at the questions posted, they all slightly suffer from not showing research (ie. why do they think this should or shouldn't/would or wouldn't work) which is making it a bit shrug. These questions would probably be fine, closed as a dupe or not. If we get many and/or messy dupe pointers, we could maybe look at making a signpost, but I don't think that's really warrented
@Akixkisu We have some tools to investigate that. Is there a particular concern?
i also downvoted the one that said "you should work on your assumption that [D&D DMs do the thing DMs are famous for doing across the entire game of D&D going right back to gygax and the very beginning of the game]"
Ann Leckie wrote a twitter thread about the issue of suspense often being thought of as "concealing information from the reader" which I think is relephant to TRPG choices as well.
