Homebrew System [PEACH]

[Howler Dagger]

I have created a homebrew system, Fist Full of Dice. It is very early in its developement. You can find it here (http://sidsrpgs.wikispaces.com/)(click the link on the left). PEACHes would be apreciated. It is intended to be universal, though i will be providing sample settings and skills.

[erikun]

Huh, adding dice pools. Not my favorite generation method, but okay.

There isn't really much here. You have three "combat statistics", an unknown number of skills, and wealth. It is rather hard to tell how valuable the starting statistics are without some idea of what skills would be used. If we're going with the "GM decides skills to be used" method from Fudge, I'm wondering why we wouldn't just use Fudge.

The DRs are incredibly vague, just giving us an idea of what an "untrained" (that is, 1 die) character would need to complete it. Most characters, I would hope, aren't going to be doing everything untrained, so some idea of how well various skill levels perform would be good. Knowing that something with a DR of 5 is very very very difficult for an untrained person isn't that practical.

And that's it. The biggest critique is that there isn't much actually here. It is little more than an idea of "Roll dice equal to your skill level, and compare them to dice rolled equal to the difficulty." Do we have exploding dice? (reroll 6's and add together) Do we have a set of 'critical' dice? Are there any mechanics to add dice? To remove? What penalities would we see due to a poor environment, or bonuses due to friendly aid? These are some basic questions even if we are focusing on just the dice rolls, and even they aren't adequately covered in the ruleset.

[Dryad]

I have three things to say on the topic, and all of them are based on preference:
1: The amount of dice added up will mean that chances of success on low dice are extremely small, and get smaller quite dramatically. An 'untrained' person would only have a 50% chance to scale a ladder, for instance, and with the fence, that chance becomes a mere 25%. The way the DR increments work (per die) means that without an equal or higher skill than DR, the player doesn't have much chance of succeeding, and due to the rather volatile way the random number generation works, things will always continue to be rickety.
2: The eventually huge amount of dice you need to throw means that you spend most of your time counting, meaning actually playing the game takes a back-seat.
3: Experience is vast, and easily abusable. You could make a character with a lot of low skills, and continue training in those skills to gain lots of general EP to gain more skills. Skills also train extremely fast, meaning that after even a single session, you may see quite high dice-pools in some areas, while other dice-pools remain pretty much neglected. This is a problem when someone wants to specialize in important things that don't see much use; each round of combat, for instance, will increase the divide between her actual speciality and the attack skills.

Then there's also HP. Increasing HP by 6 for a single die is quite drastic. It's too easy to get a ton of HP, while other characters, who really need to invest in other things, will have only very few HP. A character with two dice in Health would have twelve HP, whereas a character with four dice would have twenty-four. It's all a bit too exponential for my liking.

At this point, that's really all the PEACH I can give you... I'm sorry; it's not much, and not terribly helpful since so much if mere preference.

[erikun]

Experience through usage can be very tricky to balance properly, because there isn't anything you can reasonably do to prevent the character from spending all their time practicing and re-practicing a check. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does result in highly increased skills, and the larger the divide between "trained" and "untrained" skills, the harder it is to introduce challanges for both kinds of characters.

Let's say that a character wants to become good with swinging swords. As such, they set a routine each day to swing a sword 100 times - a perfectly reasonable number. Under your system, this would provide 100 EP, enough to raise the skill from rank 1 to rank 8 in the first day. (84 EP to 8th skill rank, with 16 EP left over.)

One week gets us 20 skill ranks. One month gets us 42 skill ranks. Taking an entire year off for sword practice will give us 155 skill ranks. Heaven forbid we have a character who has spend a decade practicing sword skills; that works out to 492 skill ranks.

Somehow, I don't think this is quite the scale you had imagined for your game. Especially if we are talking about a psudo-medieval setting, having characters starting with 400-500 skill ranks in something they've trained as children isn't that unusual, and note that we've only covered swinging a sword 100 times a day; there is plenty of other daylight to spend on learning stuff. However, unless you are assuming DCs in the 400s for daily skilled labor work, you will likely begin to find discontinuity between what you assume to be difficult (based on assumptions now) and what actually turns out difficult after a few sessions.