I know. I know. I know I shouldn’t be thinking about a new RPG system while I’m still working on a half-dozen other projects. But it’s November, you see. And that means National Game Design Month. I’ve had no time to participate in it this year, but the game design itch remains, begging to be scratched.
It’s not much of a system. Not even much of an outline, really. But here’s what I’ve got…
- Dice and Successes: The game uses six-sided dice. If you roll a 5 or 6 on a die, that’s a success. More successes = more better.
- Dice Pool: Each player has a pool of dice to spend on doing actions each turn. The size of this pool is a rough estimate of your general “character level” (to put it into D&D terms).
- Multiple Actions: On your turn, you can split this pool of dice up between multiple actions. For instance, with a dice pool of 5, you could spend 2 dice to chase a bad guy over the rooftop, 1 die to jump over the gap to the next roof, and 2 dice to take a punch at him. Of course, if you fail to get even a single success on any of these rolls, you probably lose all your subsequent actions.
- Skills: Your character is ranked in various skills. When using that skill, you can’t roll more dice than you have in that skill. For example, if you have the “Athletics” skill at 2, you can’t spend more than 2 dice when trying to jump across a gap between buildings, even if you have more dice in your pool.
- Tactics: The multiple actions aspect is the risk/reward element of the system. You can split your dice up at the start of the turn in order to (hopefully) accomplish many things, or spend them all on one action in order (probably) succeed well at a single thing.
- Etcetera: …And the rest of it. You know – skill lists, merits, flaws, kewl powerz, a hundred situational modifiers… I’m sure it will exist and will be very lovely, but for now I just want to get these ideas written down before I lose them. I might need them again, come next November.
