Hard to believe my original posts on this were 2 years ago! And I still haven’t published this game. It’s been through a bunch of iterations in the interim, with a few small playtest campaigns, including some run by other DMs. The two primary iterations have been the original 3d6 roll-under system I presented here, and a dice pool rolling mechanic with 5s and 6s being successes. This included notions of difficulty, where you needed multiple successes, and opposed rolls. Two other DMs took these basic ideas and iterates on it themselves to run full campaigns in our home gaming group, and it went well. But, despite the core mechanics working well, and being super easy and flexible for running games where we were far more interested in the narrative than anything else, I haven’t been totally happy with it. So back to the drawing board it has been!
The current design is basically sitting in the Powered by the Apocalypse / Forged in the Dark space of game design. It’s a d6 Dice Pool system where 6s are Successes and 4s and 5s are Partial Successes. Characters have Stats, Traits, Playbooks, and Moves. The current documents, which are quite minimal, aren’t on any of my gift repos but they will be soon enough. Right now my focus has been on streamlining. I sometimes come up with an idea that seems cool and toss it in to the game, but after a bit of design work realize that it is adding some new mechanic to the game, or something that works a little differently. Just differently enough that I feel it can cause confusion or present a barrier to quickly understanding the system. One of my design goals is to make on-boarding for the core of the game as easy as I can. I want the core game and mechanics to be minimal but robust, and playable as is. Any other alternative or more complicated systems will get bolted on to that later as modules. For instance I have some loose ideas for maybe trying to design a tactical combat mini game that can sit with this PBTA style design. I’m not sure it will work, and my ideas for it are super rough. And I’m going to just leave them percolating away in the back of my brain because I want to make sure my core game design is really solid before I even consider adding anything else in. I need the core to feel harmonious. I hope it will seem elegant, but we will have to wait and see.
Stay tuned, I’ll throw some previews in this space soon.