Game Dev Journal | Building an RPG from scratch

[The Shoeless]

Hi there,

to be completely honest: This is the second draft of this post. While proofreading my first draft, I noticed I spent about 3000 words on why I am creating this thread instead of what I am doing. An unreadable mess. Instead, I will cut right to the point:

• I have a specific type of game in mind I couldn't find a fun way to play with existing systems or houserules.
• We will homebrew a RPG system. This will not be the recreation or modification of an existing system, but instead we are going to analyse every step of creating a new system, make decisions, and discuss these decisions.
• This will be in journal form so you can chime in if you want, or draw inspiration if you are trying to make your own system.
• After this project is finished, there will be a rules PDF if you want to try the system for yourself, and hopefully one or two ready-to-play adventures.
• I will at least update this project every other day, probably more often in the beginning.

So why should you care for another home-made RPG by some random person on the internet?

Spoiler: Because...

Show

• ... this should be a lot of fun.
• ... I am not sure this is doable on my own and I might need your help. Or I might not. I don't know yet, to be honest.
• ... there may be some invaluable insights into game development for you.

And what is this awesome game you want to make?

Spoiler: Read me

Show

I want to create a RPG system which supports the following things:

• The game will avoid big numbers to make it easy for new players and keep the late-game in a nice flow.
• I want to make dungeons, but the Zelda kind. The ability to make platforming a thing in a tabletop RPG without throwing a million dice and fail or succeed.
• The least amount of throws possible (but maybe with a big hand of dice?)
• You know the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Aragorn fights a bunch of Uruks atop Amon Hen? At one time, he stops swinging his sword and kicks one of his opponents instead. To this day I need to find a system where this move is sensible. I want to make this something that works in our rules.
• The stories in this game can be enjoyable even if you play a pacifist character, or an explorer who is not able to hold their own in combat.
• It is equally satisfying and fun to completely avoid combat as it is to do battle.
• There is a social pillar which can be equally satisfying for players who can talk and quiet people who just want to play a charismatic talker.
• An inventory/encumbrance system that is no pain to play but makes a nice mini-game to make finding the way to the dungeon interesting.
• No rolling on tables. I plain just don't like it.

Points on this list may get scrapped or expanded upon. Let's see where this goes.

Project planning and timeframe

Spoiler: Project timeline

Show

This is a todo list as well as a progress report for the project. I will update this as development happens.

Todo

• Dice mechanics / Random outcome generation <- 27 May 2020
• Character mechanics <- Target: 28 May 2020
• Crunchy, Fluffy, Rules-light, Rules-heavy
• Basic rules
• Holding the GMs hand
• Tableside playing: Etiquette of the game
• Bookkeeping in game

Obligatory Disclaimer: English isn't my first language. I will proofread everything before posting, but I apologise in advance for any goofy mistakes.

Now to actually developing a game!

27 May 2020: Dice mechanics / Random outcome generation

Spoiler: Behold the Wall of Text

Show

Obviously, when making a roleplaying game, we need some mechanic to determine success or failure of specific actions. I have played a few games which had different approaches for determining outcomes of actions. These games had a strong focus on the player characters failing forward, and this is not the way of an action-platformer. If you take an action where there is a chance to fail, you will need a chance to fail spectacularly. So we will need a way to determine random outcomes to determine success/failure states in the game. There are some ways to do this, amongst other things:

• Drawing cards from a deck
• Coin toss
• Playing mini-games
• Throwing dice (of course)

I like the idea of drawing cards from a deck. I made games (though not RPGs) in the past that had some kind of deck building and drawing mechanics. Cards can do things dice can't. You can control when cards get reshuffled into decks, limiting drawing the same card. This can be used for once-per-day or once-per-scene outcomes and can help customising character abilities in a very fun way. However, a big drawing point of RPGs is player freedom. As a player and as a GM you can work with your imagination to do things the games designers may not have foreseen. Cards need to be general enough to work with everything the players can come up with, or we are running the risk of designing a very complicated board game instead. The strength of cards lies in the specificity however. I don't think I will explore deckbuilding with cards any further (at least in this project).
Coin toss is, from a mathematical viewpoint, either equal to throwing dice (when you don't account for the coin edge) or a very complicated mess. I don't want complicated messes, and to have any degrees of freedom on how to handle actions we will not often be able to apply just one coin toss to make decisions, which contradicts our plan to make one roll for any action. No coin tosses.
To be honest I have no real ideas for cool mini games, I was just brainstorming when I wrote the above list. I guess the player could play a quick round of mikado against the GM, but I don't see this as a good decision to go forth in developing an action RPG.

So dice. I guess you knew we would end up with dice. These train of thoughts you will need to endure when you want to make a game from scratch. But just knowing we will throw dice to determine random outcomes will not suffice. We will really need to take a look at die mechanics.

Dice!
There is no obvious way to go from here, so we will need to establish some goals, maybe take a look at how other RPGs handle dice, and go from there. When you compare early RPGs with modern ones there is one evolution I really like: The standard die roll. The standard die roll means you have a fallback when doing something not foreseen by the game designers. D20 systems are one of best known representatives of this phenomenon. If you don't know D20 (which is rather unlikely in this forum): you roll a twenty-sided dice, add and or subtract situational modifiers to the rolls outcome and try to beat a target number. If your roll plus modifiers is equal or higher than the target number, you are successful. If not, you're not. There are some variations on these, but this is the quintessence. Other systems have other standard rolls. The Storyteller system goes with a number of ten-sided dice, each of which need a target roll, and you count the number of dice to reach that target number to determine degrees of success, which more complex task need more of. The X-slayer games need you to roll as high as you can but not higher than a target number determined by the characters skill with a d20. Sometimes, the dice change, but the specifics which die to roll and the outcome stay the same (see: Savage Worlds). The specifics are not as important as the realisation that you can count on every roll taking the same form instead of having to roll low a percentage dice to succeed in climbing a wall, a high d20 hit a thing and roll high with 2d6 to be the first to act. That may all be well and fun but is more complex than what we want for this game. If every course of action can be simulated by the same die roll, we are happy.
This is not pure gut-feeling either, but rather to support a few of the design goals for this RPG system. If we want to have sword-fighting, socialising and sneaking being of equal fun, we need a balance in the rules. If the fighting part of the game receives unseemly more attention than other forms of conflict resolution we are creating a fighting game. If we want to have an easy time staying balanced, we need to have everything under the same system.

Next is the scope. To not unnecessarily intimidate new players, we want to keep the numbers low. I think it is best to aim as low as possible, and not exceed sums of 100 on any roll. 100 may not seem low, but it is. Many people have no problem to add or subtract numbers up to 100, but get in dire straights above. There are rather successful and elegant standard die rolls that exceed these numbers, e.g. World of Warcraft, which applied a beautiful hit table with a 1d10000. Worked well, but this is not for us.

A few eternities later
I hit a wall at this point in the decision making process. Thus I decided for a few other things I wanted to apply to the standard die roll:

1. We want to roll several dice per roll.
2. We want the roll itself to show success or failure.
3. The character skill should have more weight than the numbers shown on the dice.
4. Even unskilled characters should have a chance to succeed at very hard tasks (albeit a low chance).
5. Even skilled characters should have a chance to fail at easy tasks (very, very low).

The first bullet is a fun decision. If all we do is rolling this, we want to cater to the players to roll handfuls of dice. This is just a cool aspect which makes a fun game. The second bullet point is to help game flow. With target number rolls we have the following exchange now and then:

Player: "I try to balance the rope over that pit."
GM: "Okay, make a roll for success."
Player: "I rolled a 17. Do I succeed?"
GM: "You needed a 19. You manage a few steps but then you misstep, afterwards you..."
Player: "Hey I forgot to add the +3 from my Gnome Boots!"
GM: "Then you make it to the other side. Good job!"

I don't want that. The roll should show success or failure. I know of some systems that do this with custom dice, but as we want to have a playable PDF at the end of this journal, we want to steer clear of gimmicks and gadgets that are needed to play this game.
This first two points fit neatly into the third if we go for a success mechanic like in the Storyteller or Shadowrun systems. But these will have a problem when we take into account bullet points 4 and 5. I took these in for there is a sometimes overlooked Golden Rule Of Throwing Dice In RPGs:

When a character doesn't have a feasible chance of success with their course of action, don't let the player roll. When the character has no chance to fail or failure isn't interesting, don't let the player roll.

It is not a good feeling for the player to roll perfectly and fail anyway (e.g. DC20 checks in 5e with a -1 modifier. The DM can't keep everything in mind all the time), and it is not a good feeling for the GM when the player rolls perfectly and now has to succeed at something stupidly impossible. Same for rolling abysmal, nobody should fumble at tying their shoes in the game without a very good reason. So for every roll there must always be a failure state and a success state. So we need a success engine that doesn't rely on degrees of success. The dice pool should always be in a manageable state for every character.

And now we have an idea were to go. We play a mini-game with dice. We play Yahtzee!

The standard die roll
Let's decide using standard 6-sided dice. Every character has 2 to 6 dice for specific skills. The player rolls that many dice and needs to have at least two dice show the same number. That would be a success. Everything else is a failure.

This gives us a 0.16 success chance for untrained characters and a 0.98 success chance for trained characters. Also, we have an information dense die system, which I love. We can deduce so much more info than we need from these rolls:

• Triples or quadruples or second pairs or full houses could be critical successes should we need them.
• Straights get less probable with more dice. Should we need a fumble/critical failure state, this could be something to look into.
• We can look at the specific numbers which make up the pairs for degrees of success or damage rolls.
• We can sum up the unused dice for things we don't know yet.
• But most of all: We can just keep it this simple if we want simple, too.

If the GM wants to signify special difficulties at a certain task, they can forbid certain numbers. This is pretty straightforward: Discard ones, twos and threes to half the chance of any character. Never disregard everything, so there is always a chance to succeed. So this could be an exchange our game:

Player: "I try to balance the rope over that pit."
GM: "Okay, make a roll for success, discard ones and twos because of the smoke making everyone dizzy."
Player: "Two fives! I succeed."
GM: "Nice. Good job!"

Much better, and with room to expand upon.

I hope this has been fun for you, too Next time we will take a look at how Link from the Legend of Zelda differs from Regdar the Fighter and what we want our character mechanics to look like.

28 May 2020: Character mechanic outline

Spoiler: Let's get started

Show

Maybe it would be a better idea to nail down the basic rules first before diving in the specifics of character rules, but I'd like to use this to decide us for a few design goals what playing the game should feel like for the players.

sandmote and Evoker already started to go here in their posts. sandmote had the idea of a feat mechanic to deal with difficulty levels in dice rolls, while Evoker had a few observations about characters getting more dice for specific rolls during either character creation or development. I like both ideas and will try to incorporate these into our new system.

REMEMBER: We are trying to build a RPG system from scratch, so let's not take anything as a given.

We want to play to characters strengths and weaknesses, so having a thief picking a lock is not always the same chance, but there are thieves good at picking locks and thieves good at snatching pie from window sills.

So we know we want characters have a different number of dice for the same task and have special abilities to modify secondary mechanics of dice rolls. Different RPGs take different approaches to this. More often than not, there will be a mix of general talent, general training and specialised training, i.e. Attributes/Abilities/Statistics are generally the least dynamic with a broad application base, Skills/Training are dynamic with narrow applications and Feats/Boons/Talents/Perks/Knacks/etc are special abilites which change how you can engange the game in broad or narrow circumstances.
Even purely skill-based systems often use an attribute system to get a certain outlined character - Character A is smart and strong, but slow. Character B is a charmer and quick on his feet, but very weak, and so on. This seems to be a staple so much even games that don't want to employ attributes end up employing attributes, e.g. in Diablo 3, at least what I remember from a few years ago, a stat is ups your damage, increases your hitpoints or does nothing relevant for you depending on your class pick. Intelligence for a Witch Doctor does nearly the same as Strength for a Barbarian, so it would have been (from a mechanic perspective, mind you) the same to just unify Strength and Intelligence into a "Damage" stat (from a grinding perspective, it makes sense, but we don't want to build a grind). Pillars of Eternity did just that and changed the classical Strength, Intelligence, and so on into a Damage stat, a Defense stat, a Attack Speed stat and so on and named them so they still felt like they define a character. Nice idea. But wanting to make a game with a valid non-combat theme this will get us into the realm of having fighting stats, stealth stats, social stats, mind stats, which in the end will bring us full circle to attributes, just many, many more then Strength and Intellect and Charme.
Or we make a list of every abstract attribute we think we could need and try to fuse them until we have a list we like. Which brings us to interesting parts of

1. Which attribute should apply where
   
   and
   
   
2. Whether they should work together or alone.

The first point is a question simple and complex systems struggle with. If the Craft skill keys of the Mind attribute, does this mean my 6 Strength weakling can hammer and bend steel with ease? Are they only strong enough when they are in a smithy? If I want the holy men in my setting to be healers, I should key of healing from their high attributes. But isn't learning how to apply pressure bandages and how much demonroot you can eat before poisoning yourself a thing of dextrous fingers and intellect more than of Holy-Wisdom-Faith-Attunement?
And if I say "Why not both? Let's make Brain-Space AND Fingerbendiness AND Godpower be part of a Medicine check (like the Dark Eye games, which I very like) we are back at rolling from tables, because only a very few special people can flawlessly remember whether Climbing was two parts bravery and one part brawn or if there was some nimbleness in there somewhere.
Of course we can make this a judgement call on any roll, but why are creating a system then?

So what is the best way to have attributes in a rules light system? Don't.
I don't think we need them. Not even the little nod of "Body|Mind|Speed" or the classic six, or the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system or something. Let's just try to go along without attributes.
We now have a conundrum of verisimilitude. If a character is very strong, shouldn't they be good at lifting stuff, hitting people and climbing instead of learning everything independently? I think we can make this work even without attributes. To be honest, it could be even a better shot at simulating our world if a strong bruiser character can't jump as far as a lightweight long-legged character without special training, but a generally fit character has a better chance to jump over a pit than an unfit one. And this is by getting rid of skill points to.

If this is a leap in my reasoning, I apologise. I will try to make myself clear shortly.

To my experience, skills are either at the core of the system or an afterthought. A skill-centric system like Rolemaster or Shadowrun have an intrinsic benefit at training specific skills high and leave the rest alone unless you have good reason to learn them. If your skill resources are limited, it is better to be good at a few surefire things than to be moderately skilled a few more things when you know you can turn every obstacle into a nail with your Hammer skill at dice pool 14 or OB +122.
If you have a combat-centric system like AD&D, skill proficiencies are more of an afterthought, in the vicinity of "Oh yeah, I guess sometimes you don't want to slay someone, so sure, you can sneak just fine." which, thanks to holy cows, has more or less held over until 5e. You have a box checked next to a word to be slightly better at one thing. Which is great, but some day I will compare the number of pages with rules to kill things in PHB, DMG and XGtE with rules that handle everything else. I like stylish fights in RPGs, but come on! How many ways do I need to deal 1d8 damage?

So, we want to make the social, stealth, mobility and exploration game parts of the game on par with fighting. We can't make skills an afterthought then. But skillbased systems get away with pushing specialisation because they have attributes ensuring baseline competence in things you didn't spend skill points for, and I don't want to row back. We could just hand out a lot of skill points large enough to ensure some competence in everything, but I fear this will contradict the "Let's not overwhelm players" sentiment I didn't write out until now but would like make an official part of the project now.

We still have feats. Or boons. Or knacks. Whatever. These will do. Let's just kick skill points out of the window. We don't need them if we don't have attributes.

3.X had a nice skill point to feat ratio which only came up in a specific build. You could spend a feat for a +3 bonus on one skill or a +2 bonus on two skills with the added bonus you could break the rank maximum for your level. And some weird feats did away with this form, but you get what I mean. Of course, these skill feats weren't widely used because you had skill points already and other feats could make you let cool fun things like run and hit things at the same time or have your hands free while casting spells. But there was a conversion rate from feat to skill. And we can do this too. Without attributes and skills, we can just hand out packages:

1. Do something cool and new (Special moves)
2. Do something slightly less cool and get more dice for specific things (Special training)
3. Get a few dice for a whole bundle of things nobody would take and get some incentive boon on top (Making bad choices less bad)
4. Get a few dice for a whole bundle of things (General training)
5. Get a lot of dice for one specific thing (Specific training)

This looks like it could work. So a character can be quickly build by picking a few knackboonfeats out of a list. Or several lists. We will revisit this later in more detail.

Classes or no
So we have a general idea how a character sheet could look, but we still don't know what characters we want to come up in the system. We could, of course, just make a freeform point-buy system, where players choose their talents free-form and start playing. I am not opposed to that. But let's compare to the alternative of a profession/role/class-system.
Classes have the benefit of showing a new player which roles the game expects to being played, and a good class system lets them having enough choices in those roles to make all kinds of characters possible. As one of the design goals for this RPG system is making diverse non-combat scenarios viable, playable fun, we should have classes excelling in one or several of these game parts (the game may strike a balance, but that doesn't mean characters can't specialise). Shadowrun does even find a middle ground of introducing roles and telling players how to build them, but then let a player choose all skills free-form (more or less; SR5 has some issues with Magic Users standing out of the crowd in many ways several people dislike). I like that, but if I introduce roles, I would like to protect niches for everyone to make sure there are no all-rounder choices overshadowing everything else. So maybe have the role of choice unlock some talentknacks that other roles can't access, have some more recommended boonfeats that fit the role but can be taken by other roles as well (Dualclassing! Whoohoo!) and some general free-form abilities as well. This makes sure we have plenty of character options while still guiding new players where to start.

What do characters and groups do?
So we want to have Fighters, Sneakers, Talkers and Explorers going into Zelda-like dungeons with puzzles, jumping challenges, social interaction and fun, action-laden fights. If we decide to make the core of the game for a pleasant group size (let's say a GM plus 1 to 5 players, aiming at two to three players - no reason, I just want this game playable by standard gaming groups ) we need to plan for overlap as well as not every role being filled. So every part of the game should be playable regardless of character build. So the roles should be generalists with strong suits in their fields of expertise, or rather, the build system should gently shove the players in that direction. This means that a group of characters will not depend on each other but rather can try to support each other with different roles taking the lead for different tasks. I like how that sounds; I hope we can build it.

To incentivize generalist builds we need the numbers to stay at a more steady than in, say, the modern D&D Editions, where character indurance multiplies with every level and damage output doubles every few levels. This is a domain were specialists excel. A generalist has several ways to tackle a problem and has to pick the one which seems the most promising depending on the circumstances (sneak, run, fight, think; punch the orcs instead of stabbing them). So character vertical character advancement must stop pretty early so even min-maxers get a chance to quickly broaden their portfolio. Coincidentally, I think the dice mechanic work according to this design. Nice.

At last, let's define some classes and roles to have something to work with in the future. These may change or get thrown out the window when we progress further. Also, classes carry setting flavour, and we didn't even begin to think about settings. So let's just keep with Zelda. For now, let's set the flavour to whimsical, early 90's Nintendo weirdness with a splash of JRPG. Could be fun. Maybe we keep it. Maybe not. So what roles would be interesting? I would just make something up out of thin air and be done for now. We will polish these after we took a look at basic rules:

1. The Brave (Link, Ness, Crono...): You are a hero. You inspire friends and strangers. You can learn a wide number of things, from fighting with your weapon of destiny to mastering magic spells and employing tools to help you on your journey. But your defining feature is your unfaltering hope which shines like a beacon and makes the world a better place.
2. The Bruiser (Wario, Kirby, ...): You are a power to be reckoned with. You are the tower of strength your friends can take shelter behind when things get rough. You are a close-combat specialist, and once you get to your opponents, you can all but guarantee that you will still be standing when the dust settles.
3. The Polymath (Lucca, Dr. Wiley, ...): There is nothing you can't repair, no dead language you won't be willing to learn when given the chance, no tool that you can't use to reach your goals. Your science and inventions may seem like magic to the uneducated, but you know better! You can build crazy inventions and use them with utmost effectiveness or give them to your friends to increase the teams success.
4. The Acrobat (Mario, Shiek): You are fast. You are smart. You employ every advantage to your... advantage. If you don't want them to, they will not get to you, and if they do, you let misdirection and your supreme agility decide what happens to those who stand in your way.

Well, there is still room for improvement. Next time, we talk about how the game really works. I will start right away and maybe finish later, or tomorrow.

[sandmote]

I like the idea a lot. Two minor quibbles:

Aragon knocks that opponent back, and they then fall back. This gives Aragorn a gap in which to run the rest of the way up the stairs. 5e d&d calls this a shove and pathfinder and 3.5e d&d call it a bull rush. Its more useful than a sword attack when you're goal is to stall the enemy force's movement instead of necessarily killing as many individual enemies as possible (as Aragorn is doing).

The example from game flow is mostly a problem of remembering bonuses. This can be solved by asking for the modifier before the roll until the player gets used enough to the system to add it in automatically. Comparing dice is probably faster than if you were adding them up, but it could still slow the game down a lot more if you need to read the faces of a lot more dice.

---

However, rolling more dice and looking for matching results is a really good idea.

I would however phrase the language as "disregard X or lower," instead of listing out all the numbers individually. That way you can make abilities that read "When you disregard numbers becuase of Y, you can still include the highest number you would otherwise disregard," or however it might fit best.

For instance:
GM: "Okay, make a roll for success, discard number two or lower because of the smoke making everyone dizzy."
Player: "My pyromaniac can still include twos because of his Firesight feat."
Gm: "okay, then just disregard numbers below two."

A bit like flat bonuses in a d20 system.

[Evoker]

However, rolling more dice and looking for matching results is a really good idea.

I would however phrase the language as "disregard X or lower," instead of listing out all the numbers individually. That way you can make abilities that read "When you disregard numbers becuase of Y, you can still include the highest number you would otherwise disregard," or however it might fit best.

For instance:
GM: "Okay, make a roll for success, discard number two or lower because of the smoke making everyone dizzy."
Player: "My pyromaniac can still include twos because of his Firesight feat."
Gm: "okay, then just disregard numbers below two."

A bit like flat bonuses in a d20 system.

Building onto that, it would be interesting (if a bit complex) if all penalties were grouped into one of five groups, each tied to a number. That way, you don't have to design character abilities around "fire related" but you could instead say "all penalties related to physical positioning (too close, to far, high up, low down, etc) make 3s not succeed" and then you could have a fighter get an ability "disregard penalties that would make you discard threes". This might help it to flow better, per the earlier comment about flow. It's easier (to me) for the GM to decide "what number does this fall under" than have the players just have to remember "I always count threes" than it would be for the players to have to remember "I count an extra number in all aspects resulting from fire". I'll admit that this way has problems (what if the GM wants some sort of penalty that doesn't clearly fall into one of the buckets, or what if they want to represent a more serious penalty than -16.66% chance to succeed from just one environmental aspect.)

EDIT: a problem that I might see with this dice rolling concept is that the roll for pairs thing enforces a really huge jump of returns. 2 dice is 16%, 3 is 61% (almost 4 times the chance to succeed), 4 is 72% (a MUCH more modest jump, in terms of success rate), 5 is 90%, and 6 is 99%. So you'll see a LOT of people putting lots of skills to three, rather than one skill to anything higher, unless they really want to succeed at that thing all the time (and they can't even guarantee *that* because of environmental factors hitting highly skilled character's odds of success more heavily, percentage wise, as the fall from 60% to 30% is less than from 100% to 50%).

[sandmote]

Building onto that, it would be interesting (if a bit complex) if all penalties were grouped into one of five groups, each tied to a number. That way, you don't have to design character abilities around "fire related" but you could instead say "all penalties related to physical positioning (too close, to far, high up, low down, etc) make 3s not succeed" and then you could have a fighter get an ability "disregard penalties that would make you discard threes". This might help it to flow better, per the earlier comment about flow. It's easier (to me) for the GM to decide "what number does this fall under" than have the players just have to remember "I always count threes" than it would be for the players to have to remember "I count an extra number in all aspects resulting from fire". I'll admit that this way has problems (what if the GM wants some sort of penalty that doesn't clearly fall into one of the buckets, or what if they want to represent a more serious penalty than -16.66% chance to succeed from just one environmental aspect.).

This would, in turn, make it harder to scale the difficulty of different types of events. If the 3's are physical, then you've got three difficulties of jumps:

• No penalty
• Discard threes
• Can't attempt it

Compared to the eight difficulties (including "no penalty" and "can't attempt") you'd have by discarding the lowest numbers first.

And yeah, the math is a little awkward here because you're starting at the bottom of a curve and then crossing the peak. Although if +1 die in one place inflicts -1 die (to a minimum of 2) somewhere else you might be able to manage it so that both a jack of all trades and a hyper-focused character each are mechanically okay but subpar.

In this case, I'm assuming a +/- die is an inherent aspect of the character, but that the penalty still applies to temporary dice added to the roll. So if you take -1 to, say, jumping you'd need the system equivalents to both a Ring of Jumping and a Jump spell before you can roll a third die (or any other combination of two jumping bonuses).

[The Shoeless]

Aragon knocks that opponent back, and they then fall back. This gives Aragorn a gap in which to run the rest of the way up the stairs. 5e d&d calls this a shove and pathfinder and 3.5e d&d call it a bull rush. Its more useful than a sword attack when you're goal is to stall the enemy force's movement instead of necessarily killing as many individual enemies as possible (as Aragorn is doing).

There are a lot of ways this action can be interpreted in game turns (e.g. in 5e it could be a shove or a disengage action, in 3.5 we could look at a very desperate two-weapon fighting attempt), but it never is a good action for what Aragorn is trying to accomplish and what we are shown about the Uruks behaviour. They clearly are engaging him and aren't trying to bypass, else him going up the stairs would be detrimental to his tactic. On the other hand, exchanging one of his attacks to cost one of the one-hit-point wonders 5 to 15 feet of movement is rather bad offensive or defensive maneuver. The best scenario is him really wanting to kill that orc and his sword wasn't fast enough. But that is not the important part.
I have taken this example scene more as a stand-in for a whole phenomenon in action: there are lots of scenes in media where swordfighters punch or kick each other between strokes, change places, jump onto tables, destroy furniture, etc.

The example from game flow is mostly a problem of remembering bonuses. This can be solved by asking for the modifier before the roll until the player gets used enough to the system to add it in automatically. Comparing dice is probably faster than if you were adding them up, but it could still slow the game down a lot more if you need to read the faces of a lot more dice.

Even with the bonus remembered, there is declaring the roll, then asking if that's good enough. If we want to create something resembling action at the table, we want to shave this half a second off the essential proceedings. Furthermore, you are right. I played at tables where the DCs are communicated openly before the role and really liked that idea for action scenes, but I get the impression most people have a hardline stance against transparent DCs in D20 games. Thus, this is not a dice problem as much as a communication obstacle. We need to make sure the rules make it clear and feasible to streamline communication of obstacles and thresholds.

However, rolling more dice and looking for matching results is a really good idea.

I would however phrase the language as "disregard X or lower," instead of listing out all the numbers individually. That way you can make abilities that read "When you disregard numbers becuase of Y, you can still include the highest number you would otherwise disregard," or however it might fit best.

For instance:
GM: "Okay, make a roll for success, discard number two or lower because of the smoke making everyone dizzy."
Player: "My pyromaniac can still include twos because of his Firesight feat."
Gm: "okay, then just disregard numbers below two."

A bit like flat bonuses in a d20 system.

I was thinking of just keywording this. How about "Difficulty 3" to disregard everything up to three? We now leave spans of numbers and make simple mathematical operations with Difficulty (yeah I like that) intuitive. I.e.:

A roll that would have Difficulty X from one source and Difficulty Y from another source adds up to Difficulty X+Y. Difficulty can never be greater than 5.

I don't know about abilities yet. I think they will be a thing, but remember we want to build from scratch. But theoretically skills, feats, talents, knacks or whatchamacallits would also be streamlined to "Lower the Difficulty for basket-weaving rolls by 1".

Building onto that, it would be interesting (if a bit complex) if all penalties were grouped into one of five groups, each tied to a number. That way, you don't have to design character abilities around "fire related" but you could instead say "all penalties related to physical positioning (too close, to far, high up, low down, etc) make 3s not succeed" and then you could have a fighter get an ability "disregard penalties that would make you discard threes". This might help it to flow better, per the earlier comment about flow. It's easier (to me) for the GM to decide "what number does this fall under" than have the players just have to remember "I always count threes" than it would be for the players to have to remember "I count an extra number in all aspects resulting from fire". I'll admit that this way has problems (what if the GM wants some sort of penalty that doesn't clearly fall into one of the buckets, or what if they want to represent a more serious penalty than -16.66% chance to succeed from just one environmental aspect.)

Uuuuh... I like that flavour. But the complexity going to be even larger than it may seem at first. You have to clearly define the penalty groups for this to work, so there is no ambiguity whether the stormy weather would be a physical penalty or a distraction penalty or a morale penalty and so on. Else you would quickly have a problem in the likes of "Perception vs Investigation" (which isn't really a problem but I see a lot of people struggling with this).
But if you make clear cut penalty categories, you run the risk of having categories that way more on one aspect of the game than others. Physical penalties are very rarely a thing in Knowledge rolls. Does this mean knowing things is generally easier than climbing things? So maybe we need different penalty categories for different success rolls and BOOM we have tables again.

EDIT: a problem that I might see with this dice rolling concept is that the roll for pairs thing enforces a really huge jump of returns. 2 dice is 16%, 3 is 61% (almost 4 times the chance to succeed), 4 is 72% (a MUCH more modest jump, in terms of success rate), 5 is 90%, and 6 is 99%.

Can you show me your calculations? I get to 0.16 | 0.45 | 0.72 | 0.9 | 0.98

So you'll see a LOT of people putting lots of skills to three, rather than one skill to anything higher, unless they really want to succeed at that thing all the time

Yes. I don't see a problem, the sum of everyday things you can do rather reliably is much greater than the skills you have mastered. We don't need to make artificial caps or limiting skills if spreading your skills out is interesting in itself. Maybe we need to keep an eye out for the "get everything to three dice"-minigame and just make three dice the baseline from the beginning.

(and they can't even guarantee *that* because of environmental factors hitting highly skilled character's odds of success more heavily, percentage wise, as the fall from 60% to 30% is less than from 100% to 50%).

Beatiful, isn't it? Hard things stay hard. We can even go to 7 or 8 dice, which always show a pair, and make them failable with this system. Difficulty 3 hits everyone the same: It halves their chances of success.

This makes classifying difficulties really easy, as Difficulty 4 is a task that hinges more on your luck than your skill, and Difficulty 5 (the highest feasible) about has the same chance of a 6-dice character succeeding as a 2-dice character has with a Difficulty 0 task. I like the symmetry.

In this case, I'm assuming a +/- die is an inherent aspect of the character, but that the penalty still applies to temporary dice added to the roll. So if you take -1 to, say, jumping you'd need the system equivalents to both a Ring of Jumping and a Jump spell before you can roll a third die (or any other combination of two jumping bonuses).

This! This is important. Dice are the character, difficulty is outside forces. If the character is hindered or boosted, they gain or lose dice. Penalties are factors that make the task harder, not the character less able to do them.

---

Thank you, all! I think I have a pretty good idea how to go about Basic Rules now, but character mechanics outline will come first, later today.

[Evoker]

Can you show me your calculations? I get to 0.16 | 0.45 | 0.72 | 0.9 | 0.98

Yeah, no, that's right. I miscalculated. Still a three times jump, so something to keep in mind, as you said.

[The Shoeless]

Okay, wow.

This got away from me for a bit. Once the rough draft was done, I went full focus and just wrote down what seemed right. Now we got to make a step back and retroactively analyse the game dev decisions.

Firstly, I wrote down the basic rules for the stuff so far.

Spoiler: Basic rules, part 1

Show

Resolving actions:
When a player wants their character to do something, the following steps should happen at the gaming table:

1. 1. The player describes what their character is doing, containing the following information:
   
   a. What the character tries to achieve with this action.
   b. How they are going about it.
2. 2. The game master decides whether this action is at all possible.
   
   a. If not, they should consider whether a small adjustment in the characters action would make the action possible and ask the player whether they would go about it that way. If not, the game master narrates the character to fail.
   b. If it is possible, the game master considers if the action not being successful being interesting for the game. If not, the game master narrates the player character being successful.
   c. If the action is possible but failure would be interesting for the game, the game master calls for a success roll.

Success rolls:
When a player or non-player character goes at a task that could fail, their player (or the game master) makes a success roll (or just roll) for the character. A success roll is made with between two and eight six-sided dice, which is decided by the type of action and the characters abilities. I.e., a character who is very athletic may use more dice in a success roll regarding athletic actions than a character that is weak and fragile. How the number of dice to be thrown is determined in detail is described below (see: Characters).
When a player has determined how many dice are to be rolled, they roll the dice and check for any dice showing the same number. When at least two dice show the same result, that is called rolling a success, and the action is successful.

Additional successes:
When a roll shows more than one pair of dice with the same result, or shows a triple (or quadruple, or quintuple, etc.) of dice, the roll has rolled additional successes. In general, additional successes do nothing, but some characters may be able to add beneficial effects to their actions when they roll additional successes. Every rolled pair beyond the first success is one additional success, while triples count as two rolled successes, quadruples as three successes, and so on.

Quality of an success:
When a success is rolled, the attemptet action was successful, but sometimes it is interesting to see how well an action was performed. The quality of a success is the numbers shown on the dice making up the success, e.g. two rolled 6s are a success of quality 6. The highest quality success on a roll is always the success of the action, additional successes can't have a higher quality than the main success.
Some effects may heighten or reduce the quality of one or more successes of a roll. Should the quality of a success is reduced below 1 by any effect, it ceases to be a success.

Difficulty and reduction:
Sometimes, a task is made especially difficult by outside factors. Before the success roll, the game master may determine a difficulty for the roll, which is a number from 1 to 5. Successes with a quality equal or lower than the difficulty are discarded.
Sometimes, the difficulty not only makes success harder, but also reduce the quality of all successes rolled. This special kind of difficulty is called reduction. All successes and additional successes qualities are reduced by the reduction.

Contested rolls:
Sometimes, two characters attempt actions that go directly against each other. In this case, both make relevant success rolls and compare qualities. The character with the higher quality success wins and is successful, while the other character fails.
Some special contested rolls are called hindering rolls in which the winner rolls quality is reduced by the loser rolls quality before being applied.
For the purpose of comparing qualities, a roll without success has quality 0.

Spoiler: Commentary

Show

So this part has been discussed in the original post already. The Difficulty idea from sandmote is included as proposed, with the addition of Reduction. This just naturally leans into the idea of a successes Quality being lowered and may be interesting at some point where the Quality is off mechanical importance. So we now have two possibilities for outside factor hindering an action:

• Things that make it less likely to succeed at an attempted course of action.
• Obstacles that make it impossible to be as good at an action as without them.

Examples being a jump being hard because a lot of distance that needs to be cleared (but not affecting how far you can jump) against a strong wind blowing into a jumpers face (which will have an outcome at the distance jumped). This may be a cosmetical difference for a lot of rolls, but it is not that much complexity we introduce in exchange for options at verisimilitude later.

Spoiler: On time

Show

Nothing inherently new up until here. Now we wanted to make an action RPG. Action is not only fights (or, more accurately, action isn't fights) but suspense, taking chances and things keeping in motion. So we need to talk about the passage of time. In a perfect world, we could just act at real time, but this is not something that lends too well to tabletop RPGs. We need some kind of round or turn to give everybody the chance to act and give the GM a chance to sort their thought. As rounds require us to define what can be done in one round, we have to talk about actions. It would be very easy to just let everybody do one thing when it is their turn, but this makes for a very streamlined and tactical feeling which doesn't lend itself well to action. Many things have to happen almost simultaneously. So more than one action is needed. Legend of the Wulin had a nice system not requiring actions but making you save dice rolls to later use for actions, reactions and the like, which was a very clever and fast paced system, but ultimately I can't see how to make this work with our dice mechanic and am not willing to throw that one out at this point in time. Then there are initiative tracking systems like in ShadowRun (or some very unpopular AD&D optional rules) which let people spend initiative for actions. In my experience, this will bog the game down tremendously as players try to figure out how to fit as many things into their initiative as possible. The 5e style "Main action and then some" approach is a nice way to go at this, but ultimately opens up to rules questions (e.g. "Can a Shield Master shove before taking the attack action?") which I would like to circumvent (and also bog down play). Let's take some pride in developing a fast, easy and rules-stable game. So let's take this approach and make it more approachable (haha). Each player has three actions to spend as they like. Period.
Well, not so fast. As for a round-based game to have some semblance of action, we need to give players choices what to do now and not being able to do later. We need to nail movement to actions. We keep the three action model (for now) and this includes any movement. The players trying to be at the right place at the right time feels right to me from an action as well as a tactical standpoint and opens up the possibility to include non-trivial jumping puzzles, fencing matches on rolling barrels, and general Zelda / Mario / Jack Sparrow tomfoolery.

Further tracking of time will bog down everything else, so lets define vague instances of time to define "As long as you do this encounter" (for buffs and the like, should they be needed), "For a long time, but not indefinitely" and "For the whole game, but your character isn't ruined forever":

Time intervals in the game
The following time increments are relevant for the rules:

• One action
• One round
• One scene
• One day
• One adventure

One action is the smallest time increment the game rules. A character may try one thing during an action, be it running a short distance, climbing a ledge, swinging a sword or retrieving an item from their bag. Normally, a character may do three things when it is their turn to act, so a character may do up to three things before another character may act.
One round is the time between one characters action and every other character present in the game finishing their actions. It is not necessary to always follow rounds and turn order in the game, but when the actions of the characters in a scene are time critical or the correct order of who does what is of importance.
A scene is a part of the game usually bound to one short amount of time and a specified place. Navigating the cities sewers is a scene, as well as Fighting the demon spiders on top of the Temple of Void or Talking the mayor into selling us the towns stables. The dimensions of a scene are not always comparable. As a rule of thumb, if the game master says something in the line of „after X, your arrive at Y.“ or „Now that you did X, what is your next course of action?“ this marks the beginning of a new scene.
One day is not strictly dependent on the day-night-cycle as much as until the next chance to get a good rest (though these things coincide most of the time). A day usually contains a few scenes, but some low-action scenes may take several days (e.g. Navigating the Woodlands).
An adventure is one closed instance of the game. It is the games goal to finish the adventure. Sometimes, things affecting the game world or characters stay for the rest of the adventure. If the characters are used in another adventure, this effect will no longer be relevant.

Determining turn order
When the game master needs to determine who goes first when rounds are measured, every character (and maybe some non-character entities like natural hazards or machinery) make quickness rolls. This is a special contested roll where everyones success quality is noted and the characters achieving the highest quality (remember: non-successes have quality 0). When several characters receive the same quality, player characters always go before other entities, and the game master decides the sequence of non-player entities with the same result. Players that have the same result on the quickness roll decide the sequence between them.

Holding actions during rounds
Sometimes a character doesn't want to use up all three actions when it is their turn to react to things that may happen when other characters or entities act. That is possible even without the player specifying what they are waiting for. A character holding actions can only interject with one action at a time (nobody can spend two consecutive actions outside their own turn), and can't react before the other entities current action is resolved. If multiple held actions from different characters or entities would happen at the same time, fall back to each ones quickness to determine the order.

Held actions expire when the round ends for a character. No character can hold more than three actions.

So how long is a round in game time?
A round is only a few, nondescript, heated seconds of action. If it is absolutely necessary to track how much time has passed, 20 should average to about a minute of time.

Spoiler: Comment in a spoiler! Neat

Show

See what we did there? We packed the reaction mechanic into the three-action mechanic. Everybody has options to do now, or use later should the need arise. People don't need to know when to bonus action their spell or something. And it being your turn doesn't mean your opponents can't interject. You can wait for the floating platform to reach your level before jumping onto it, and so on. I like this very much.

So now we have a decent idea how the table will feel, but there is no crunch in the system as of yet. For suspense to be there, the player characters (and the players) must have a chance to fail. One of the easiest is getting too hurt to go on or dying. I am a sucker for wounding mechanics and critical hit tables myself, but I fear it is not a good action game if the characters are trapped in a death spiral after the first enemy, and even the genius Ripple mechanic for wounding characters will not lend itself to action. Players need to have a feeling what is able to kill them. This is a game that screams for a simple hit point mechanic, but one that allows for players to die easily if they don't act on counteracting dangers (for the action, see?). Also a good way to get the first real Zelda feel in here:

Spoiler: Dangers and combat

Show

Dangers and combat
In this game, many dangers await the characters. As they are adventurers and heroes, they have a multitude of ways to handle those and escape injury or worse.

Heart
Each character can withstand a certain amount of punishment before succumbing to exhaustion, pain or despair. This is represented in game by their Heart. New characters usually start with 6 Heart, but can earn more during play. Whenever something harmful happens to the character, their Heart is reduced. If a character is reduced to zero Heart, they can't participate in a scene anymore, as they are beaten, unconscious, dead or otherwise out of action, and receive the Wounded condition (see below, Other Dangers). When all player characters fall to zero Heart, assume the characters are beyond saving and the game is lost (although the game master may decide the game takes another direction from here).

Regaining Heart
As long as at least one player character is at one or more Heart when a scene ends, characters at zero Heart can start to act again, but they remain at zero Heart. There are certain items and effects that can restore Heart, and a character regains one Heart per day by their injuries and spirit healing naturally.

Losing Heart
Most of the time, a character will lose Heart through violence. Here are some of the more common forms this can happen:

Attacks
When someone or something attacks a character, they make a success roll. The target loses Heart equal to the quality of the success (this is called taking damage). Certain talents and protectice gear may give these success rolls difficulty or reduction, thus reducing the damage taken by a protected character.
Every attack roll with an additional success inflicts Forced movement (see below, Other Dangers), as long as it isn't dodged completely.

Dodging
When a character is the target of an attack or some other harmful effect, they may try to avoid it if they have an action left to use. They immediately move one meter away from the source of harm and make a success roll. They reduce the incoming damage by their rolls success. If they have no room to maneuver, are hindered in their movement or would have to move more than one meter to evade the effect, the success roll is made with difficulty.

Parrying
Some attacks can be met head on instead of being evaded. When a character has a melee weapon, shield or suitable sturdy object in hand, they can make a success roll to negate the attack completely by interposing the object. This is not a contested roll, so any success may negate the attack, but the object used to parry may be damaged if it is not build for such a task. Not all attacks are parryable, as noted in the attack or decided by the game master.

Fire
A character or object in flames takes one point of damage at the start of their round, and the fire spreads, dealing an additional damage next round. This is marked as Fire X, where X is the damage dealt to the victim at the start of the next round. Characters may use actions to lower the fires damage by one per action, or more if they have the suitable tools (buckets of water, blankets, sand). Fire damage can't be dodged or parried, but effects which would set a character on flame could.

Poison
Some effects may poison a character, dealing damage every round, ignoring most forms of reduction. An effect that deals X damage is noted as Poison X. Poison loses potency every round, dealing one damage less for every time it already damage, e.g. a character suffering from a Poison 4 would receive 4 damage in the first round, 3 damage in the next round, 2 damage in the round after that, and so on. Some poisons have additional effects on a poisoned character which usually end after a poison reaches zero damage. Poisons can't be dodged or parried, but effects which would set a character on flame could.

Lightning
Lightning is a danger which ignores most forms of reduction and usually can't be parried. Natural occuring lightning strikes attack with 6 dice and may use additional successes to hit additional nearby targets.

Sickness
Getting sick is most often no immediate danger, but can become very dangerous over time. A character being exposed to sickness must make a successful roll or get sick. Each day of sickness, a character receives one damage per day of sickness, ignoring most forms of reduction. After taking damage, the character may make a new success roll, reducing all subsequent damage dealt by this sickness by one when they are successful. When such a success would reduce the damage dealt by the sickness to zero, the character overcomes the sickness. Sickness is neither parryable nor dodgeable.

Extreme weather
Extreme weather or exhaustion comes in different severities and types, but follows the same basic rules. A character in extremely hot or cold environments must make a success roll every day, scene or round (depending on severity of the heat or cold) or receive one damage. Protective equipment or environmental effects may give bonus dice or difficulty to these rolls. Damage from falling is neither parryable nor dodgeable.

Falling from heights
A character or object falling from great heights may suffer damage equal to the height fallen in metres. A character jumping of a ledge or otherwise initiating a fall by themselves may make a success roll, reducing the damage by the quality of their success. Damage from falling is not parryable.

Drowning/Suffocating
Each character may hold their breath for 20 rounds if undisturbed. When a character loses Heart while holding their breath, they must make a success roll or lose the remaining rounds of air. When a character is out of air, they must make success rolls every round or take one damage. This damage can't be parried or reduced in any way.


Other dangers
Not everything dangerous for a character negatively affects Heart. Some of the common examples for such dangers are listed below.

Stun
A character affected by stun loses one of their actions. If a character holds one or more actions, Stun is resolved immediately and one of the held actions is lost. If the stunned character holds no actions when they are stunned, they have one less action in the next round per instance of stun on the character.

Hindered
A hindered character is entangled, distracted or otherwise hampered by an outside force. While a character is hindered, they receive one additional difficulty on all success rolls.

Wounded
A wounded character rolls one less die per success roll than they normally would. If a character would only roll with two dice normally, they automatically fail the roll.
The wounded condition remains for the adventure or until an effect removes the condition.

Spoiler: Comment

Show

These damage types and conditions just happened in a brain-storming session. We could add a lot of damage types, but the most important things are there. There is damage over time that you have to be clever about, damage over time that you have to be quick about, a damage mitigation system, damage that armor isn't doing a good job protecting against, being knocked around, losing speed, losing actions, a healing mechanic and some different ways for the game master to threaten the player characters. Also there is a condition punishing players to rely on the healing yoyo effect everybody is talking about, but not too much so it hopefully won't end anybodies fun.

So now we have to put the movement part in and have a working if a bit flavourless system ready. As movement is going to be tied to actions, we have the freedom to define it anyway we want. There shouldn't be too much counting involved, so let's do a 1-to-1 conversion where possible and don't force the players and GM not memorise too much info. This is the part of the game which has too be effortless. But jumping will need some love (so we can make platformer levels )

Spoiler: Movement and such

Show

Time critical movement and speed are an important part of this game, and exact positioning in action scenes is very important. The game expects the players to play out these scenes on a hex grid with character tokens representing player characters, non-player characters and other entities moving or acting in the vicinity. Each hex on the grid represents about one metre of distance. Other grids or maps may be used with some tinkering.

Walking and running
Usually, characters moving during game rounds may move 1 metre per action on their feet. Many characters have options to move quicker in certain ways.

Climbing, swimming, crawling
When other modes of movement are available to a character, they may move 1 metre per action. The game master may call for relevant success rolls when characters are under duress when moving in one of these ways (e.g. maintaining hold while climbing a wall, or swimming against a strong current). Changing the movement mode usually requires one action (i.e. a character may move for one metre while walking with their first action, start climbing with their second action, then climb one metre with their third action).

Jumping, flying and hovering
When a character tries to avoid an obstacle by jumping over it, they may make an attempt to jump it with an action. For every metre in height and length they have to clear, the roll gets one Difficulty. When a character moves immediatly before the jump, they can reduce the jumps difficulty by one per metre moved during the same round.
Failure may result in the character hurting themselves, landing prone or jumping too short (with possibly very dire results).
Characters who can fly don't have to worry about jumping. They can fly in all three dimensions as easy as they can walk. If an airborne character doesn't have the ability to hover, they need to spend their first action each round to move or immediately fall to the ground.
A falling character with the ability to fly may spend any amount of held actions to reduce the falling damage by one per action.

Hampered movement
If any effect would slow a character down without locking them in place, they can at least move 1 metre by spending two actions.

Simultaneous movement
Usually, a character moves or does something else with the same action. If a character is allowed or required to move one or more meters when performing another action (e.g. when they use their action to dodge) they always move after the action was successful unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Forced movement
Some effects may move a character by one or more metres against their will. This movement does not benefit from movement bonusses or penalties and doesn't require the moved character to spend actions on that movement.
When forced movement would move a character into an obstacle, the character as well as the obstacle receive one damage per metre of forced movement blocked by the obstacle.

Spoiler: Comment

Show

So everybody can move now. And we've build in some staples so we have options for later. The hex part I am not sure about but I never made a game with hexes so I want to try now. This feels like a very weak reason, but I don't see any harm in it for now.

Can you feel it building up to some nice action scenes? We could now make a fight scene at the top of a skyscraper. Or a chase through the jungle. Or the showdown in an active volcano. Hiding from alien monsters in an antarctic listening post. This comes together nice.

I have some stuff ready on equipment and classes and character progression, but I want to regain control over the journal format I had planned so I will add that one later.

[sandmote]

If we want to create something resembling action at the table, we want to shave this half a second off the essential proceedings.

I like your idea, but I'm pretty sure your multi-dice method is adding in several seconds of time to shave off that half a second.

A roll that would have Difficulty X from one source and Difficulty Y from another source adds up to Difficulty X+Y. Difficulty can never be greater than 5.

... But theoretically skills, feats, talents, knacks or whatchamacallits would also be streamlined to "Lower the Difficulty for basket-weaving rolls by 1".

... This! This is important. Dice are the character, difficulty is outside forces. If the character is hindered or boosted, they gain or lose dice. Penalties are factors that make the task harder, not the character less able to do them.

I'm putting these together because I think they should be clear. I think you're going in the same direction I'll be describing, but would like to explicitly check.

Allowing difficulty greater than 5 is perfectly fine. A difficulty greater than 5 simply means you require an ability to lower the difficulty before you could possibly succeed. The common example here is a character attempting to fly by simply flapping their arms. In this case, you would simply say the difficulty is 10 (or otherwise higher than 6). So being a Rito could reduce the difficulty of check made to fly or glide by 7. In this case characters with those features could at least attempt a check made to fly. On the difficult and reduction section of your rules, this could be used to explain why one character can attempt the roll but another cannot.

As with the example, reduction to difficulty should be an aspect of the character as well. If you can fly fine, the mechanical reflection of this should be that you can more easily succeed on flight attempts (ie. lower difficulty) rather than necessarily just rolling more dice. This gives you a second lever by which to differentiate characters.

Walking and running
Usually, characters moving during game rounds may move 1 metre per action on their feet. Many characters have options to move quicker in certain ways.

Walking a meter per second is plausible, but I would both extend the time of a round and the distance here. Otherwise ranged weapons easily turn overly powerful as you're out of melee range at even short distances. Which is accurate for the older games, but a bit awkward for a tabletop.

Success and reduction make sense, but I would explicitly split up reduction by damage type. That way you can specify that, say, that a specific set of armor gives you "weapon resistance 3 and fire resistance 2." That way you don't need to specify the damage "ignores most forms of reduction," for half your damage types.

---

Other than the nit picks above, this looks neat. I like the time breaks, as well as the immediate inclusion of two methods of defending against attack (dodging & parrying). Yeah, they're from Zelda, but it should give evasive and tanking characters a very different feel from each other even as they're being attacked, which some other systems struggle with.

Other than the awkward speed, movement seems solid.

[The Shoeless]

Thanks for the brilliant feedback. It is much appreciated

I like your idea, but I'm pretty sure your multi-dice method is adding in several seconds of time to shave off that half a second.

I think you are right. We will have to make do, though, or come up with a dice mechanic that doesn't need to calculate a lot and will let the character have self-describing critical successes, though. I am open for suggestions.

Allowing difficulty greater than 5 is perfectly fine. [...]

You are completely right. The restriction is unnecessarily complicated.

Walking a meter per second is plausible, but I would both extend the time of a round and the distance here. Otherwise ranged weapons easily turn overly powerful as you're out of melee range at even short distances. Which is accurate for the older games, but a bit awkward for a tabletop.

This will have to be balanced, you are right. First thing to amend this are Surges (see below). The choice between acting and moving will be integral to the feeling of the game, and there will have to be a way for every character to move quicker. Right now, you can move up to 3 metres per round without expenditure of resources, and 6 metres per round when using Surges. A ranged weapons user can fire up to two shots per round when not moving , or one shot plus 1.5 metres of mean movement per round (with three actions and a one action reload), so we can relatively easy see how many shots can be fired before the melee characters catches up (keep in mind dodging allows for movement as written now).

Right now, I am thinking about a Dash as well as a Sprint mechanic, allowing for having the first movement to get a bonus with a Dash talent, and multiple movements receiving a bonus with the Sprint talent (as the character gains speed). This could be as follows:

Dash (talent) | The first time you move in a round, you may move an additional metre.
Sprinter (talent) | When spending an action to move running, you move an additional metre per previous action spent to run this round.

This means a Dasher could move 2/3/4 metres per round with 1/2/3 actions, a Sprinter could move 1/3/6 metres, and a Dasher+Sprinter could move 2/4/7 metres with those actions. (and a potential speed boost of 1 to 3 metres with the respective expenditure of Surges). This would make a character feel much more nimble when building for speed.

Also, I stumbled upon a very important error with the jumping mechanic, as it isn't clear how far a character could jump now. I would change it in this way:

Jumping
A character can jump as an action, moving a certain number of metres in a straight line. Make a success roll. You move a number of metres equal to the successes quality, plus any distance you have moved directly before jumping in the same round. If the character has to clear a certain height during the jump, the roll is made with difficulty equal to twice the metres of height.
You can use an additional success to control your jump and land early.


So now, we more about doubled the movement distance for someone needing to cover a lot of distance in one round while keeping a normal (non-surge, non-talent, non-hero) jump in round-about human proportions:

A normal human could move 2 metres and jump for 2+quality metres for a maximum of 2 metres running and 8 metres jumping. A dasher/sprinter with full use of surges could get to a theoretical maximum of moving 6 metres and jumping 13 metres (which is 4 metres farther than the current world record), and a mean of jumping 9.5 metres, for a mean movement of 15.5 metres and a max movement of 19 metres.

This is a lot more mobility than most battlemats need if you build for it. Plus this gives characters with a good jumping skill a nice choice: Dodge, hop and tumble over the battlefield, with less control (as you have to move in a straight line and might have to move the whole distance) or run for shorter distances, but more accurate navigation. Also very Mario

But of course you are right! We will have to keep an eye on the movement speed to not inapproriately nerf melees. A good cover mechanic could also be useful here.

Success and reduction make sense, but I would explicitly split up reduction by damage type. That way you can specify that, say, that a specific set of armor gives you "weapon resistance 3 and fire resistance 2." That way you don't need to specify the damage "ignores most forms of reduction," for half your damage types.

Thanks! This is so much easier, especially with keeping track on the character sheet and writing down all the talents reducing damage.

---

So, for today, I would like to think about non-combat mostly.

The exploration part of the game will need some more complexity. Right now, either characters are good at climbing and jumping and spotting things, or they are not. This will bar people from exploring or will require them to build for that, relocating resources that could otherwise be spend for awesome fighting skills or magical powers. So lets build a resource that can be used for exploring and fighting, so people can be more flexible for that. This could also be done for the social part, so a talky character may use their talking skills in combat without having to be magical about it.
There is, of course, the possibility to make this something keyed of Heart, but I would like to leave the hit points as a buffer for failure, as a resource management system like DnD is in its core antithema to fast-paced action and favours tactical thinking and clever evasion of dangers. A second health bar like a stamina system would be nice, but stamina is a pain to track and isn't much fun most of the time, as it feels like a penalty to lose stamina for actions more than the player characters being awesome. Let's build in a bonus system like Luck or Edge. This powers physical limit breaking, so even a Mage can jump when the game depends on it. This is the same as a stamina bar, but feels better. We could even build classes focusing on Power/Luck/Edge. Let's also do a Social Luck thing, maybe we will merge them later. Maybe we won't.

Spoiler: Surges and Favour

Show

Surges
Player characters have access to an extra amount of energy and determination to make it through dangerous encounters. Every player has three Surges at their disposal which the player can declare to use once per action to do one of the following things:

• Before making a roll to roll an additional die
• After making a roll to increase one successes quality by one
• On their turn in a round to immediately move 1 metre without using an action

Some characters have access to more Surges or may use their Surges for other benefits.

Once a Surge has been used it can't be used again. A character regains 1 used Surge per day.

Favour
Once a character becomes famous (or notorious) for their actions they gain access to Favour. Favour can be used to acquire a save place to rest in a settlement or to ignore one point of Difficulty on rolls to persuade people to do something for you.

Used Favour isn't regained until the next adventure, but new Favour may be earned during play. Some characters are very good at getting people to like or fear them and gain Favour quicker or may access additional uses for Favour.

I am not sure right now, but this will do. So what has this to do with making characters better at climbing? Apart from the normal die bonus, we can link talents with non-combat uses to this. If you choose a talent that gives you a bonus to a physical niche skill, you are also getting fitter to do everything else (once, but still...) and receive +1 Surge. So a character getting better at climbing gets a bit better at jumping, swimming and fighting. This is an idea we can explore further in the future.

As video-gamey as combat may get, when tabletop RPGs go this path in social encounters, it gets plain boring. I was never a fan of social combat, and there is some inherent problem in social encounters in tabletop RPGs (which some systems control very well, but many don't), which is player/character disconnect and bad game masters. A lot of times, a player who can talk well will get more done in a social encounter than a character who can talk well. This means, there is a chance strong-willed and charismatic players can't play non-charismatic characters, and shy players will have a hard time playing a good party face if the game master isn't up for the task. I often experienced otherwise very experienced game masters give out killer discounts on armor and weapons for a good charisma roll, even when the shopkeeper knew they would also buy for full-price, would never return to the village and did not need the money that bad. Not to forget the impossibility to intimidate even the lowliest back-alley thug out of a fight if the game master has combat statistics prepared for them.

Our solution? Let them. There is no wrong way to have fun. But lets design a system where we give experienced as well as newbie GMs a tool to build interesting social encounters within the system.

So we will have die rolls to get somebody to do something. We will have a comprehensible difficulty mechanic. And we will the same system allow GMs to just talk it out or build in quest hooks when they need to.

At first, the GM will introduce the scene. Describe NPCs in the scene. And either the GM wants the players to accomplish something or the players decide to get something from one of the NPCs. Then they do whatever needs to be done. Maybe this wasn't designed as a social encounter, but the players decide to talk to the vampire ponies instead of fighting them today. And the GM resorts to this algorithm:

Spoiler: Social encounter algorithm!

Show

1. The game master knows what the adressed NPC wants to achieve. The shopkeeper wants to keep a margin or get some quick revenue influx or wants to be seen as charitable or patriotic or or or. The wolf-people want to keep their lair a secret and need to bring meet home from the hunt for their young to don't go hungry. The psycholaser megascarab acts just based on instict and can't be talked out of their actions. They decide which of these motivations the NPCs will share freely.
2. The players bring up their demands in a persuasive or deceitful way or try to intimidate their counterparty. The GM talks and shares the motivations they want to share. When the players make a good arguments (based on all the NPC motivations, hidden or not) they succeed. Otherwise, the GM will end the social encounter openly now when there is no chance the characters get what they want. If there is still a chance the players fail, but the player characters may not.
3. The player characters make a success roll to Judge Intent/Sense Motive/Intuition/Whatever, and receive a list with a number of motivations equal to their successes quality (even hidden ones). The players can now act from an informed standpoint and can adress every point in itself (e.g.: "The shopkeeper will give the discount in exchange for the players collect some debts in town, as he needs that margin to pay rent this week."). Maybe the players see a way to compromise ("If you wolfpeople just need meat, how about we give you our mule without a fight and you let us go unharmed?"). Or they are not willing to address these points and decide to let the characters act.
4. The characters may have some way to coerce the NPCs (persuasion, sweet-talking, nagging, lying, intimidation, fast-talking forms of coercion, but some may seem nicer unless you are on the side which will not get their demands met). A success roll for Sweet-talking/Diplomacy/Flex Muscles/Something is made. For each previously unmet point on the NPCs motivations list, the roll receives one Difficulty.
5. Characters may invoke their good/bad repuatation. For each Favour spent, they may ignore one Difficulty.
6. If you get the short end repeatedly, you may realise you are in a one-way relationship. Trying to coerce a NPC (or a group of NPCs) increases Difficulty by one for all future attempts, regardless of success.

I think that suffices for today. Next time we will talk about equipment and inventory. Finally.

[The Shoeless]

Today I want to take a shot at a painless inventory system.

Spoiler: Why do this?

Show

We could just decide not to do this. Let the players just take with them whatever they want. But there is an opportunity to miss here. In a game where exploration should be a reliable source of fun, bringing the right equipment is just another minigame players might enjoy. The challenge is to build a system where:

1. You are limited in what you can bring
2. Everything tracked can be of (fun) use
3. Doesn't kill the fun for players not in it for the exploration part

Good exploration has it's challenges. How near can you get to your destination with a vehicle? A mount? Does it make sense to make a fortified camp? What to take from home, what to leave at camp? Do you have the resources to even think of undergoing the expedition to the fabled Temple of Chocolate Golems?

This is a thing that has been ignored at most D&D and Dark Eye tables I was a playing at, and only got a half-honest nod in Shadowrun games. And even when I am the game master, as soon as one player openly clamors they don't can't be expected to add up small numbers and check if the total is below 60, I usually phase the rules out. Because it is not really important. But it can be fun if we make this a system you can reap benefits from instead of a system that makes you recalculate weights in the middle of every session.

Another reason we want to take a look at this mechanic is because the dice mechanic we are going to use doesn't lend itself well for zero to hero character advancement (each character starts rather competent and may reach the ceiling in specific skills rather quickly). So we need character advancement to be about options. If tools can elevate options or compensate for the lack of a characters training, we need to check how many little helpers a character can bring.

This becomes an optimisation game. And to counteract a "Best in Slot" mechanic, I think I have a neat idea to make sure characters want to not pack their backpacks to the brim with grappling hooks and magic wands.

Spoiler: How others do it

Show

I think I don't need to explain the Pathfinder/D&D approach. It's useful. It helps keeping players in check to not drag around five suits of armor. But it isn't fun. The only fun thing I have encountered relating to the inventory system in D&D was when I chucked it full of caltrops and ball bearings and holy water with a 5e Thief Rogue going wild with tools the DM didn't have a tactic against. Otherwise it is just a chore and a mild punishment for dumping STR and not bringing a mule.
That is, until I played PF:Kingmaker and found some things I really liked. Of course the computer could do the calculations for me, but the genius thing was: The party evenly distributed their stuff not needed at the moment while the character was only really caring about what they wore on their bodies, plus 5 things in a quick item slot belt. A character wanted to quickly quaff a potion in battle? Better have it on their belt, or the potion was quite some valuable seconds away. This becomes a part of encounter preparation and is a fun minigame if you are more on the combat as sport than the combat as war side of thinking. This doesn't eliminate the chore of weight calculations though.
Starfinder had a nice little approach for this with the bulk mechanic reducing the numbers tremendously. You had bulky items and light items. Ten light items would count as one bulky item. The bulky items had bulk values from 1 to X. You just don't want to have bulk reach a certain number. This makes the calculations a lot easier while still achieving the same result. But it was more or less the same as PF, only a slight bit more approachable. You still had to look up bulk from equipment lists and such. Not so fun.
To be honest, I like the inventory in the Diablo series, where everything takes up space and you have to fit it in somehow. But I don't see this doable in a P&P in a fun way.

Spoiler: So how are we going to do this, then?

Show

We want a few clearly definable things:

• A character has to make a choice what to bring to a dungeon
• There is a limit how much heavy stuff you can drag around
• We don't want to calculate anything
• No need to look up tables
• Quick and easy during the session

Also, we don't have a Strength score (or really any score) to key this of from. So no weight calculations. But I like the PF:K beltslots and I like the Diablo slot inventory, so I will try to make something easy out of this.

Inventory alpha version 0.1
Each character can take with them a fixed amount of items. Each item above that, and they receive Difficulty on their success rolls.

Easy.

Let's make it six, because of the dice mechanic and the hex grid, six is just a number that jumps in our face around every corner in this game. Let's make a mental note that the number six should have some significance in the game world as well

So the inventory on a character sheet is six lines. Everything not fitting in there is too heavy.

"So, 6 daggers or 6 anvils or 6 suits of plate armor?"

Well, no. That would be silly. We will make an addition to that rule. You can keep one HEAVY item in your inventory. Otherwise you gain Difficulty on all success rolls. Everyone can count to 1. Each line has a checkbox next to it: "Heavy item?". Neat. This is easy.

"And the archer can have one bow and 5 arrows? How can I go around the countryside with just 6 gold pieces?"

Good point. Let's think about small stuff.

Hm.

When I go around in the real world, I have my money and small stuff in my wallet. That I keep in my trousers or in my backpack. I also have other stuff in my backpack when I go around. So how about this:

An item in your inventory can be a container.

A bag can hold an arbitrary amount of coin sized items. Buttons. Gems. Nails. Arrow heads. We can make this as large as we want, but we can help game masters by setting a limit so they have something in the rules should the players get uppity. Let's say, 50 to 100 coins per bag. But this not important. What is important is that this would make your inventory effectively only 5 items plus your wallet, because nobody wants to not be able to carry treasure.

Oof.

This doesn't go in the right direction. Let's say you can keep containers on you apart from the main inventory. We will try with one backpack and either two bags or one bag and a quiver (for example). But: A bag isn't as accessible as your inventory, and your backpack is even harder to access.

So it goes like this:
You have 6 item slots, one of which may be a heavy item.
You have 3 item slots in a bag, plus space for a couple dozen coins, BUT you have to use an action to retrieve or store these, so you don't want your potions or other stuff here.
You have another six items in your backpack, which may have any number of heavy items, BUT you have to use two actions to retrieve or store these (making it a full round using something from your backpack).
You may have another 3 item bag or a quiver-like item which holds ammunition for your distance weapon.

So you have a quick-slot inventory and some space to store other stuff, but you have to think about what you really need at the ready. You could even say a backpack holding heavy items uses up your heavy item allotment, but I am not sure about that yet.

With the right layout on the character sheet this could be easy even for new players and a nice minigame for others. We can design talents or entire classes gaining advantage from this system - more inventory slots, more backpack slots, better action economy.

Remember you may overpack for global success roll difficulty, so we never reach the NetHack "Your backpack is full" moment to break immersion, but a nice gradual encumbrance system that fits seamlessly into the dice mechanic.

But we still have the five anvils and the five plate armors to think about. The first is easy: Let them. If a game master wants to allow their players to stuff anvils into their backpacks because the rules don't forbid it, I guess that is the game that they are playing and I wish them all the fun in the world. The plate armors are another rules opportunity though:

Trade protection against inventory space. This fits neatly with the system and some fantasy influences out there. Your hero in that TV show wears pauldrons and gauntlets over their cloth robes? Thats two protective items, making their armor better by taking up two slots in the main inventory. You may decide to have a heavy armor item for a lot of protection, taking up your heavy item allowance, but making space for other neat things in your inventory. Or you just stack up your armor, fight without weapons and become the juggernaut.

History nerds may even be happy about this because their is a clear incentive that a knight wears heavy armor and not a shield, because that gets very heavy over time (if the shield is a heavy item, you see?)

Now we don't need to talk about proficiency and stuff. We can make certain playstyles WANT to not wear armor. Mages need their foci at the ready. Rogues need a way to have their tools and throwing knives on their body and can only spare very few slots for armor. But we have introduced other ways of damage mitigation above.

Not that we are planning on mages and rogues, but, you know...

I like this. But we are not done yet.

What about rations?
Yes. Exploration and rations and such. You can keep your rations in a saddlebag or your backpack. That is no fun though. There are tables that go for rations or hunting survival nature trapper dice rolls, or tables that don't track food and drink at all. But why not go a different path and make this fun also? Let's make characters not NEED to eat, but WANT to eat. By shamelessly copying from some classic non-P&P RPGs like Paper Mario or Secret of Mana. Food is healing, for the body and the soul. We make sure characters pack food because it is THE readily available healing item. This makes them not trying to waste time in the wilderness on the way to the dungeon, because their healing items will slowly get used up. And they will not eat dried nuts all day, because they want to take along nice healing items that fit their budget. This will ensure players want to not only pack their tools and weapons, but food also. Because food is useful. We can even make a minigame for hunting and cooking, with different quality food being produced by character talent. Or something.

So we can make a raw piece of mystery meat or dried rations or an apple heal one Heart. Sugary food may restore Surges. Healthy food heals Heart. Sweet, healthy food heals both, and extravagant food is better at this because Heart is equally a measure of wounds as of the heros resolve, which will be much better if they stuff their bellies with soul food. A cook at camp can try to improve foods. A hunter or herbalist can try to get new, low-tier foodstuffs. And berry sodas are a useful beverage/potion in combat because they fill up Surges (Wizards and Monks may develop a major sweet tooth, which I find quite funny). It's a sort of whimsical feel, but we want to get a bit of Zelda, and I think we can make this a fun flavour for the game. And it makes the inventory system fun. So crunch and fluff seem quite right to me.

Spoiler: On equipment

Show

So this is how the inventory system works. Now we can go and make some equipment, but I still struggle to introduce lists. Plus, the main thing people look at equipment tables is prices, weights and weapons. Weights aren't really important in the game mechanic. Prices will be, but the pitfall of fantasy game economies and prices in equipment lists are a very contentious field. To keep this from happening, let's make a certain ground rule: The prices should be close to our prices. This may be a little bit weird, as you may want to play in a medieval fantasy world, and we live in a heavily industrialised world with a global market, but I don't think this will break the game. Let's follow this, and for the sake of making this rule work, introduce a fantasy currency. We need spending money and treasure money, because we want to make math a bit easier. Spending money could be fantasydollars. Or Medieveuros. Or something. Let's call them something small. Pips. The average citizen makes most of their day-to-day transactions with Pips. And they pay around a Pips for a small snack. And around 10 Pips for a (non-fancy) meal at a restaurant. If you read this from Switzerland, you go at 4 pips for the snack and 30 for the quick visit at the restaurant. Or you may read this from Japan, and now your prices in Pips are around 2,000 and 10,000. Whatever your players are comfortable with. And now you have an intuition how much this should cost in your game. Or you can look itup. If you have the feeling that a specific item should be hard to produce or come by in your setting, you can easily double or triple that price. If it is more expensive today because there are only few people who really know how to make a battleaxe anymore, half the price. It should be okay. Cool. We have a pricelist. We will make about Dollar or Euro-based table of these in the playable PDF. But now we don't need to look up prices at any point, really.
So: Weapons.

Weapon tables are icky
They really are. Most of the time, I see two different kind of weapon tables in RPGs: Quite useless or hyperdetailed.

5e has a lot of weapons in their weapons table, but they follow the same formula and are mostly redundant. A melee weapon deals 1d8 damage. If it is light, reduce the dice. If it is throwable, reduce the dice. If it uses two hands, increase the dice. If it has reach, reduce again. If it NEEDs two hands, increase again. Now put some make-up on and you are ready. Damage types aren't really interesting, and the Special and Heavy properties don't count for much but an afterthought. I don't say this is bad (for D&D, on the contrary), but we don't need this. Shadowrun and Dark Eye and Dungeon Slayers and Rolemaster have very different, very detailed weapons. And most of the time in such systems, when the minmaxers had their fun, there only remain two or three best in slot weapons and the rest is fluff. We could make this with more love, but:

If there is no boon in a weapons table, we don't need one. If we put too much effort into the minutiae of combat, we run the risk of invalidating other playstyles, and I would like to put a lot of focus on exploration, puzzles, action-movement and social encounters for a change. This also means to do as little as possible on combat simulation while still making it fun and full of options.

And options is what we want. A player character who is the parties weapon specialist or knight or resident fighter should have options in their weapons. Not the "What weapon will I use for this character" kind, but "What weapon should I use for this fight" kind. We can do this without extensive tables. Just by having weapons do +1 damage if light, +2 damage if heavy, another +1 damage if they require two hands to use and have their specialty ready. The specialty, you ask? What to do with additional successes.

Let's try with a brain storm:
A hammer can inflict Stun 1 on a target when you roll an additional success (Bash their heads in)
A dagger can attack the same target again with the additional successes (usually lower) quality. Both attacks are dodged/parried with the same action.
A sword can attack another, nearby target with an additional successes quality (Woooo! Cleave attack!)
A whip can inflict Hinder X, with the additional successes quality X.
An axe can knock the target to the ground with an additional success.
A sling does like the hammer does.
A bow inflict Difficulty 3 on parry attemps.
A lance reduces armor by the bonus successes quality.
...

And so on. But we don't need a table for this. The player buys a weapon and chooses the trick. Or finds a weapon and the game master tells them the weapons trick. The PDF should have a list of such tricks, but we aren't even required to tie them to a specific weapon. Not really, anyway.

I am sure I will end up doing this anyway, but from a game design perspective, we are done with weapons.

And as we know what damage amounts we can expect now, we can make the armor for that. The heaviest, nonmagical weapon has a rollable max damage of 6 (with the successes quality) and +3 to damage. Let's add another +1 from a characters talent or so, and we have a damage of 5-10 per attack. So they heaviest, non-magical armor shouldn't need exceed this.
So a fully armored fighter (so one who is filled up for battle and nothing more) should have one weapon and 5 slots for armor. If we make light armor pieces give one damage reduction and heavy pieces two, we can have a fighter who can have a light weapon and six armor, a heavy weapon and five armor, a light weapon and a shield and four armor, or trade in more armor for one Difficulty on success rolls. 6 armor means imperviousness against unarmed attacks that don't come with some kind of damage boost, and reducing most hits with light weapons to very light scratches. Sounds good to me. If a character can afford (moneywise and inventorywise) to go all tank, they should get some nice survivabilty out of this. Better hope the enemy doesn't have a weapon with armor penetration or a wizard with lightning damage or the like, because then they have nothing at the ready to go against that.

Because we need to talk about Gadgets if we want Zelda dungeons. Weapons that double as mobility enhancers, or exploration tools that double as weapons. Things that give a player options and make the game fun.

But we will do that when we talk about classes, next time.

[Evoker]

One, probably resolvable, thing that might be a problem: you propose that a fighter could use almost all of their inventory for passive damage reduction. But what if they go further? There's nothing preventing them from soaking the -lots penalty for carrying... ten? twenty? thirty?? protective items and being totally immune to weapon damage, even weapon damage from a piercing weapon, necessitating completely armor-ignoring attacks to deal with them, especially if you make specialized armor for taking less damage from fire/electricity a thing. Sure, this hypothetical ball of steel plating wouldn't be able to do anything but survive, but maybe that's all they need to or want to do. And a giant ball of steel plating really doesn't seem to be what you're going for with this system, so you probably don't want to enable that.

It also turns any "you can carry more items" boost into a de-facto "you take less damage" boost, unless you ear-mark some slots as being unable to contain more armor pieces, or set an absolute limit on armor pieces.

[The Shoeless]

One, probably resolvable, thing that might be a problem: you propose that a fighter could use almost all of their inventory for passive damage reduction. But what if they go further? There's nothing preventing them from soaking the -lots penalty for carrying... ten? twenty? thirty?? protective items and being totally immune to weapon damage, even weapon damage from a piercing weapon, necessitating completely armor-ignoring attacks to deal with them, especially if you make specialized armor for taking less damage from fire/electricity a thing. Sure, this hypothetical ball of steel plating wouldn't be able to do anything but survive, but maybe that's all they need to or want to do. And a giant ball of steel plating really doesn't seem to be what you're going for with this system, so you probably don't want to enable that.

It also turns any "you can carry more items" boost into a de-facto "you take less damage" boost, unless you ear-mark some slots as being unable to contain more armor pieces, or set an absolute limit on armor pieces.

True. Let's take a look at this. Difficulty penalties stack up fast, so if you are wearing 6 items over your limit, you can't succeed on a success roll ever. This means no blocking, no attacking, no jumping, etc. This means you effectively put yourself in an iron coffin. Sure, nobody can hurt you, but you can't do anything meaningful either (other than walking at one metre per action).

What can we do about this?

• We could make only the original slots be able to hold armor. This would be easy, but it would be a special rule that only would apply to armor, so it adds very much complexity to a very narrow field. I think this should be easier or broader.
• We could limit the reduction a character can reach to disincentivise this behaviour as it has no use at a certain point. I have no idea how to make this without making the armor system wonky or introducing a "Target armor class" that will be expected of you to meet, which is counteracting the minigame of optimising your equipment.
• We could make it really uncomfortable to play with encumbrance: You need to make a success roll for everything once you are over the limit, and you land prone every time you fail a roll. This would mean, encumbrance 6 would leave you helpless on your back as soon as you do anything other than standing still, with no way to get up and no way to stop people stripping your armor off piece by piece. Or just leaving you to starve. This would work for everything related to inventory, but is a more complex rule. On the plus side we get the "I stand up and immediately topple over because I packed wrong." trope.
• We could just let it fly as an amazingly one-sided way to equip yourself and be embarrassed as soon as you encounter a ladder, uneven floor or a narrow pit.
• If we add ways to mitigate Difficulty and make this viable, we could identify this as a first order optimal strategy and need to implement viable counterstrategies (Did you know a skilled blow with a quarterstaff can crack heads INSIDE helmets?). This would be the game development optimum as we don't prohibit a playstyle, but make it not an unbeatable one. This way, the game master can implement a villain using this tactic, and players feeling mighty or clever for defeating them ("The armor on this megagoat seems to be impervious, and the beast slowly but sure-footedly stomps on to ruin the kings wedding. What do you do?")

From a challenge perspective, I like the last point the best. I am afraid of pitfalls, though, and we should definitely think about this to find a fun way to do it. So why not define encumbrance like this:

Spoiler: Inventory and encumbrance

Show

Every item you wear on your body beyond your inventory maximum (default 6) as well as every item with the heavy property you carry beyond the first makes you encumbered and suffer 1 Difficulty on all success rolls. When you are encumbered, when you fail a success roll, you always suffer the Knockdown condition in addition to all other effects a failure might encline, and you need to make a success roll when you try to move at least one metre or stand up.

Then, we can give every class some different talents to influence the inventory game. The heavy melee types may carry an additional heavy item with the right talent. Skirmisher types get another inventory slot. Utility types may access their bags without actions, gaining them effectively three main slots that can't be used for armor (because armor doesn't help when you have it in your back). And some scrappy brave hero types just get a way to Surge through the difficulty a limited number of rounds. Or something.

And now to something new:

Spoiler: Make the party a party

Show

I have gm'ed and played in some very fun games where all the fighter types were a bundle of hit points and a strength score and all wizards where a fountain of magic points, where we went dungeoncrawling and killed some dragons for their hides and goblins because they were there. This can be fun once in a while, but we don't need to build for this type of game. These just happen when the dungeoncrawling rules work out.
I played in parties where the players became friends or friendly rivals and bested dangers to not only save the world but also each other. Those were very fun and I remember them fondly.
I also played at tables where there was a rich story going on and everyone had just these nicely done characters with quirks and voices but I had the feeling that the characters didn't like each other that much. The players did like each other, mostly. The characters were at least two-dimensional. But apart from the social contract of the game, they had no reason to travel together. Sure, the fate of the world was at stake, or the blacksmiths brother had gone missing. But this was more of a strength in numbers kind of party. And that felt like missing a step, because every player and the GM worked hard at building the foundation to something that wouldn't come together. Of all unfinished campaign in my life, the majority were that type of games, because everybody invested and didn't get the full returns, so people got tired and tried something else. And those things mostly don't happen in my campaigns anymore because I do some things to force the party to become intertwined. And I would like to build some of the things into the mechanics of this game to help GMs craft bonds between player characters. In a way that doesn't fell forced or invalidate the classical dungeoncrasher or beer and pretzels tables.

First things first: This willnot be a bond or character trait thing. I mean, we can do that. But people need to decide for themselves how they want to play their characters, and most players will have a pretty neat idea how they want their players to work. The only thing we need is for the characters to interact with each other in a low stakes environment. Of course, you can give depth to your character when telling everybody of your long lost sibling, or how orcs murdered everyone you loved, or that you send half of your earnings home to your parents whenever possible. That's cool, but it's not a job of the game mechanic. We need a way to give characters scenes were they can interact without making it about the fate of the world, but about them being people. A mechanic that handles creature comforts. And we don't want this to be all fluff, because table time is valuable, so if there is a rule for it, make it worth it for optimisers and dungeoncrawlers. Give the players something valuable to do in low stakes situations and shine as a person rather than a fighter or a mage, and we naturally give the players some opportunity to become friends.

We don't need to do this for the action parts of the game. Dungeons and fights gain a nice focus already with round-based time. Also, social encounters in town have their fair share of characters showing who they are. We want a fun downtime gameplay mechanic. With the added bonus to give some sense of time to wilderness travel and staying in town. A thing were characters can make themselves useful. We already talked about cooking to upgrade your healing items in the thoughts about inventory, and I would like to expand on this thought.

We will replace the natural healing at rests that is so rampant in many games with the rest/camp action minigame for wilderness travel. This should lend itself well for staying in town, to:

Making camp
When making camp, the characters will handle most things themselves. Setting up or finding shelter, keeping equipment working, feeding mounts and preparing and eating their rations and catching some sleep are things that work out well unless the game master introduces obstacles or dangers to this. Every rest, characters will cross of one food item from their inventory.
Apart from this, characters have enough time to complete two camp actions per rest. These can include things useful for the party, useful for themselves, or useful for the camp. Some examples include:

• Gather food | The characters spends a camp action to make a success roll. On a success they find something edible, represented as a raw food item healing one Heart, at the game masters discretion. Talents may improve on this, and specialise the character in fishing, hunting or gathering herbs and roots with better effects. The terrain may make this difficult or impossible for unskilled scavengers.
• Prepare food | The character may prepare a meal from raw foodstuff. On a success roll, a character may combine the effects of two or more raw food items into one, creating higher quality prepared food items, or may increase one raw food item into one prepared food item healing one additional Heart. On a failure, the food is ruined. Characters who are good at this may do incredible things, like preparing low level food items from nothing or making exquisite meals with additional effects.
• Entertain | Reciting a story or doodling away on a musical instrument, a character may try to get the camp feeling on. On a successful roll, all other characters gain an additional die for their camp action. A very skilled entertainer can reach additional effects.
• Tend wounds | A character with some medical training can make a success roll to heal one additional Heart for a wounded character. Skilled physicians may achieve better results or tend to more patients at once.
• Maintain equipment | A character may use their time to make sure one equipment item works at peak efficiency. On a successful roll, all success rolls with one designated item are made with +1 quality for the next day. Skilled handymen may repair broken equipment or build entirely new contraptions.
• Early night | A character may spent their camp action to get some extra sleep in to restore one Surge.
• Gourmet/Glutton | A character may eat another food item. On a successful roll, they gain the Heart from this food item as extra Heart for the next day.
• Help out | A character aids another character with their camp action, giving them another die for their success roll.
• Watch and learn | A character tries to learn a camp action talent by watching another character doing it. Here we could implement a non-stressful learning technique.
• Fortify camp | A character sets up traps and snares around the camp. Should the camp be attacked, they can make a free attack roll against a random attacker before the attack starts.
• Gambling (per game) | Two characters can bet on a game and make contested success rolls to determine the winner.
• Prepare spell | A character can fill a spell into a small flask to use it later, or give it to another character as a throwing weapon. This takes up magical resources and needs a successful die roll. On a failure, things could get explosive.
• ...

And so on. This list should never be final, and GMs should make experimentation an incentive. This doesn't force anybody to interact with each other, so it can be a couple of die rolls at each day of wandering or each rest in a dungeon if you are not interested. But we introduced some skills a character can have apart from swinging swords and throwing fireballs, showing off their 'civilian' life. We also - and this is important - create the opportunity for people to talk in an environment with less tension. Let the guitar player really doodle on a guitar, or play a quiet song on their phone at the table. Let the cook describe their new creation. Let the gamblers decide to cheat, and build a reputation as a scoundrel. Let the doctor cuss at their patients for their repeated recklesness. Plus, we introduced a sense of time to describe travels. And a neat way for the game master to introduce terrain changes. And camp encounters.

Camp encounters
Most people think ambush by raiding parties or predators here. But this gets boring really fast. Plus, this game is not entirely build as a resource management game, so we don't need to wear players out. Do a raid if the characters are being chased and caught up with, or to make a point how dangerous their current location is. But don't overdo it. Instead, make some (not every) rest something to remember. Prepared adventures should give out some ideas what may happen in camp, or at night. Maybe a fairy will sneak into camp and start to dance right next to the musician, or nab some insignificant amounts of food right from the cooks spoon. Maybe their is an aurora that night. Maybe some other wanderers travel the same road and join for some friendly conversation. Let the players handle the scene after you set up the scene from there. And then, sometimes, let a hungry eaglecat prowl around and attack when the fire burns low. Because adventure. But most importantly, let the characters be people for a change (if you want to have a game about a party of characters. If murderhobo suffices, remember, you can just make the rolls whether they find more food or heal more Hearts).

In town
Procuring food in town is less of a problem, most of the time. Make a rest in town about finding rare equipment to buy ("Monkey paws half price? I never noticed that shop over there. I looks quite old. Was it there yesterday?"), spend some quality time over at the tavern or make some friends (e.g. increasing Favour), earn some free food and board with their entertainment skills or make a quick coin. The idea stays the same, but town actions are not as interesting, as there is a reason to stay in town most of the time, and less need to stay together outside of the planned encounters.

And now, this:

Spoiler: Classes and Talents

Show

We want to have a lot of talents at the ready to support different playstyles and warrant a certain variety in these playstyles. But half a page, two pages or twelve pages of talents will always leave a new player guessing what they should take to play the hero they envision. Classes help a lot with going at a certain build, and every talent will be related to a class. But not all will be exclusive to that class. E.g. a bruiser/fighter/knight will have nice exclusive talents for fighting related stuff, and non-exclusive, recommended lesser talents to really specialise. Other classes may poach from the non-exclusive talents to broaden their repertoire.

As player characters start out with three dice for most rolls to ensure a base level of competence, they will have three dice left to reach the mundane level of 6 dice for a task that still has a chance to fail (albeit a very low one). This means, a class could get you a +2 to your shtick in an exclusive talent, and a +1 in a recommended talent that is free for others. Or a class could get you a global +1 for all things considered your strength exclusively, plus some goodies, and the non-exclusive talents get you either the goody or a narrowed down plus +1. Talents can also do other things for you when not modifying dice pools. But they should work on this power level.

So, to go at the classes, we need to take inventory what players could specialise in, and then go from there to make specialised classes and hybrids.

Things players do from the top of my head

• Fight monsters
• Move around
• Support allies
• Manage inventories
• Manage Surges
• Cast spells
• Make friends, allies and enemies, collecting Favour

So we have 7 things classes want to be good at. In the initial post we had some class ideas, so lets expand on that:

Spoiler: Fighting | The Bruiser

Show

We want the bruiser to be able to fight. They need to be able to be a threat in melee, and they need to be able to pick up a weapon and some nice armor to be more of a threat. We want their specialised talents to go into the following:

• Better fighting without focus on the type of weapon used
• Being good at parrying stuff
• Have more Heart than others
• Being able to have heavy armor and a heavy weapon -> More heavy items allowed
• A way to catch up to the enemy -> Some movement bonuses

Their non-exclusive talents could be weaker stuff:

• Better at fighting with some weapons
• Some parry bonusses
• Slightly more Heart

Spoiler: Fighting | The Deadeye

Show

Someone who can rain some hurt down from afar. As fighting from a distance is quite the nice tactical advantage, we don't want to make it too powerful, but a valid option for the specialised class.

• More dice with ranged weapons
• Trick shots
• Some way to eat actions to supercharge shots (eat up actions to counteract too much kiting :))
• Making specialised ammunition
• Some options to lay traps and create ambushes

The non-exclusive list could include:

• Some climbing skills to get up to high places quickly
• Some dice with certain ranged weapons
• Some way to come up with fresh ammunition when out

Spoiler: Movement | The Acrobat/Monkey/Cat

Show

Let's get fancy with the class that is quick. If all they can do is move around, they will only be useful in jumping puzzles. Give them some things that feel like they are quick.

• A nice movement bonus per round
• Balance and Dodging bonusses
• Jumping bonusses
• Things to do with additional successes while dodging or jumping (Tackling people down, Counterpunches, Getting into a blind spot)
• Some disorientation tactic to use the speed against large monsters or large groups of monsters, so they can take the initiative instead of only reacting to stuff

The open list is everything characters want when they want to get more mobile

• Additional dice for dodging, jumping, balance, sneaking, climbing, swimming, the like
• Some slight movement bonusses

Spoiler: Support | The Brave

Show

The Link. It is tempting to just slap a Bard in here. We want the character to be somewhat competent at some things and very competent at helping others.

• A way to remove Conditions from others, maybe while doing cool stuff -> Additional successes can be used for condition removal
• Designating enemies for focus fire. Leading a charge or finding weak points
• Stay in the game. A way to keep on trying even when others give up. Maybe a special heal from Surges or a way to keep in the scene with negative Heart
• Stereotypical heroes need a heros weapon. Be very competent with a bound weapon. A Sword Of Destiny type talent group
• Give others bonusses by cheering them on

I am struggling with the open list here, as this class seems to have its own shtick. Some things everybody wants to learn without them being a shining beacon of hope.

• End conditions on yourself
• Use Surges to retry throws? This is one of the things that bogs the game down but can build up suspense, I don't know wheter this would be a net gain

Spoiler: Inventory | The Polymath

Show

A crazy mechanic/alchemist/inventor type. They can build some of the more useful items and give them to others, or use them themselves with higher efficiency.

• Build or repair certain items: Magnetic shields, net throwers, taser rods, grappling hook cannons, helicopter hats, rocket boots, bombs. You name it.
• Training for whole groups of inventions, making the talent work with "All things electric" or "All things combustible"
• Being able to weaponise their inventions in resourceful ways
• Improving mundane equipment with extra bonus action uses
• Improving bag size or bag action economy

The open list is mostly just "+2 dice to success rolls with rocket boots" or "+1 die to repair stuff". Things that are useful for the characters who use the gadgets, but don't build them. But as this is the Polymath, we also want to build in some science knowledge.

• Knowing medicine can be a boon if you want to heal someone
• Anatomical knowledge will help a great deal to damage certain enemies (a favoured enemy mechanic?)
• Brew your own poisons, and identify them.
• Knowledge of metallurgy and gem stones helps at appreciating your treasures correctly
• History, Architecture, ... The unadventurerlike talents can be made more interesting with +1 Favour (respected scholar) or +1 Surge (action professor).

Spoiler: Surges | The Adept

Show

Someone who has a Jack-of-all-trades vibe on them. They can do incredible things with Surges. They get many Surges.

• A talent for way more Surges
• Being able to use more Surges on the same action
• Being able to do extraordinary stuff with Surges, like keeping under water for long times, or jump up roofs. This would be an interesting group to do.
• Surge-powered buffs. Maybe a Chi-Strike feature were Surges can supercharge attacks or elemental up for a scene (Fire resistance, poison attacks, and so on)

The open list is our spot to give every character gain more Surges together with some of the talents we want them to take.

• +1 Surge and +2 dice in... Swimming
• +1 Surge and +2 dice in... Climbing
• +1 Surge and +2 dice in... insert thing you need characters to do but would be otherwise too boring for a talent.

Spoiler: Spells | The Enchantress

Show

A mage character. Talents open up certain spells. The powerful ones are exclusive, as are talents modifying what those spells can also do. The trick to make magic feel "hard to learn" would be to make the dice pools stay small.

• Spell: Transpositions/Short range teleports
• Modification: Take someone with you on an additional success
• Modification: Open a magical shortcut between to points for people to walk through
• Modification: Long range teleports instead
• Spell and modifications: Time clones | freeze a copy of you in time and return to that place, that health, that condition status. Gets harder the longer ago it was cast.
• Spell: Compel someone to move closer/farther away
• Spell: Glamour | Make something look like something else
• Modificaton: Make something invisible instead
• Fill up spells into containers to consume or throw at someone
• Get more dice for your spells by concentrating more actions for casting.
• Combine spells into one action for ramping up Difficulty
• Use additional successes to choose additional targets
• Concentrate for X actions before casting a spell to receive X bonus dice on the success roll.

The open list is our basic magic. Each talent represents one Condition that can be cast on a target, and sticks on a successful roll. Only mages can use more of these in one spell (with each success allowing another effect).

• Push with a spell. Additional successes push farther
• Blind/Hinder X, where X is the success rolls quality.
• Lightning attack with a spell.
• Inflict Stun 1 with a spell. Additional successes inflict more Stun.
• Inflict Knockdown with a spell
• Set something on fire with a spell
• Parry by spell
• Insert condition here and adjust by strength of condition...

Spoiler: Social | The Wayfarer

Show

This will be a challenging class to make look fun. The Wayfarer can do amazing stuff with Favour, and gain more Favour. But Favour as designed right now is a none-renewable resource. So we need to make the Wayfarer have some other skills as well. Lets make him the class that excels at social stuff, camp actions and managing the backpack part of the inventory, so they can do fun stuff with non-Polymath equipment.

• Using the backpack just takes one action instead of two.
• They can use Favour to influence the story in little ways. Make NPCs react better (old friends). Knowing a guy (black market contacts). Getting appointments (unused favours). The like. Could be fun, could be game breaking. This is were this class will shine or fall. There could be even combat boons ("You don't want to kill me specifically, there is a bounty on bringing me in alive..."; "Do you know who my boss is? Save everyone some trouble and just drop the sword!")
• Throwing a round to say hello. Using money to get a foothold in town easily, trading gold for favor
• Quartermaster. Using influence to commandeer or scrounge up equipment. Use Favour to buy stuff. Should not end in a cycle with the previous talent group (there should be a net loss for switching Gold to Favour to Gold)
• Bonusses to judge character and coercion rolls.
• Knowledge of the widely travelled. Giving nice bonusses to rolls remembering details or information gathering.

The Wayfarer is a travel specialist, but not the only one travelling. Some things that non-specialists will like are found in the open list:

• Bonus dice to travel related stuff. Navigating the wilderness, riding, captaining vehicles.
• Packrats can fit more stuff into their backpack when they have the time
• Being better at camp actions is found here (more on camp actions below)
• Narrow bonusses to social success rolls.

This is really raw and drafty for now. We will have to write the talents down soon.

On talents for camp actions
As talents will always be a valuable resource for characters, we will need to make sure investing in these will not be a trap. Giving out Surges or Favour could work here, but we will miss an opportunity here. Camp actions can also be a source of a teacher/pupil-relationship. A good cook can teach their talent to someone else with a camp action (remember, these are in the game to forge bonds between characters). This should be dependent on a success roll, but not on a single one, else everybody could do anything everyone else can do after a couple of days (after months on the road together, I can see that. It would even be a sort of accomplishment and something new additions to a travelling group could try to achieve to "fit in"). Then again, this is a really interesting idea for any talent really (Boromir teaching the hobbits the fundamentals of sword-fighting, a mage showing an apprentice the first cantrips, and so on...). But this will seriously hurt any controlled character advancement if players just stay in town until everyone has learned every available non-exclusive talent in the group. So we will have to limit this in a way. We will have to talk about character advancement.

Character advancement
I noticed the trend to abandon experience points in new systems over the last decade or so, and even many tables even doing away with them in systems built around XP. This idea is in no way new, there were many games that didn't have them for nearly as long as games advancing characters have been around. Growing on achievement is a nice feel, really. And a good incentive for roleplaying a personal quest for sweet bonusgrowth (which has a lot more flavour to it than 50 roleplaying XP). Burning Wheel had a nice idea with a P&P-version of skill advancement on use, but that got silly quickly ("I will close my eyes for the rest of the combat to collect some hard successes and failures, else I will not advance."). The Call of Cthulu "see if you succeeded way to learn anything this adventure" is also nice, but will rob a player of the accomplishment of learning something cool after an adventure arc (which is cool for the CoC flavour, but not what we should be going for). I think advancing after a story arc has a nice, Zelda-y touch. Focusing on character growth, we can also try to hand out bonus talents for personal goals. And we can hide advancement behind puzzles without breaking the feeling of the game.

Lets say we do it like this as an early version:

1. Each character starts with 3 talents, 6 Heart, 3 Surges and 0 Favour.
2. When the adventure arcs big obstacle is overcome, every player receives +1 Heart and one talent to spend freely
3. When players complete (GM-designated) sidequest, they receive one Learning Point.
4. One Learning Point can be used to learn a talent from a character willing to teach it. This needs a camp action/town action and a successful roll on Learning and Teaching from both parties respectively, increasing the Difficulty for this talent for the learning character by one for each failure. Non-player teachers may charge for teaching services.
5. Two Learning Points can be automatically used to select a new talent freely.
6. A character completing their personal story arc receive +1 Heart (At the GMs descretion. There should either be an attainable goal for every character or none in the game).
7. There are artifacts in remote places that give the characters consuming them +1 Heart. These are often at hard to reach places. Sometimes, they are used as a highly valued trade good between monarchs.

I am not completely happy with this, but it is something to go on for now. Giving out Hearts on the end of a dungeon or big scene may be important to prepare characters not specialising in combat to survive the typical evergrowing curve in a campaign. Should teaching and learning be learnable in the game? Which classes would be on the receiving and which on the providing end? But we can teach stuff without breaking out of the curve. And you can't just wait until a talent is learned, it becomes impossible after too many tries, and you have to look for a different talent to learn.

Camp action should maybe be the talents that boost learning. That would be a nice circle: Spend talents to later learn talents a lot faster and easier.

This is it for today. I think most things in here need some refining. And next time we will need to lock down on the talents.

[The Shoeless]

Let's take a look at the first talents, then.

First of all, combat talents need a quick check, as unusable combat will make for very short and frustrating games.

The boring talents would be increasing the dice pools. The exclusive talents will be more powerful for the fighting classes, the less strong ones would be pickable by every class so fighting classes can add extra oomph and all others can become competent with a weapon:

• Fighter | You gain +1 die for success rolls to attack and parry.
• Defender | You gain +1 die for success rolls to parry and dodge.
• Dodge and roll | You gain +1 die for success rolls to jump and dodge.
• Marksman | You gain +1 die for attack rolls with distance weapons or thrown objects.
• Shield specialisation | You gain +2 dice for success rolls to parry while holding a shield.
• Sword specialisation | You gain +1 die for success rolls to attack and parry with bladed weapons.
• Hammer specialisation | You gain +1 die for success rolls to attack and parry with blunt weapons.
• Ferocious attacker | You gain +1 die for success rolls to attack in melee combat.
• Calm defender | You gain +1 die for success rolls to parry.
• Personal weapon | You gain +2 dice for success rolls to attack and parry with a certain weapon. You may assign another weapon on the start of the next adventure, or at the GMs discretion.
• ...

So far, so good. Remember every player character starts mildly competent with 3 dice for all actions, while 4 dice are already quite dependable, 5 dice are very dependable, comparable to only missing on a 1 or 2 on a d20 if no Difficulty applies to the roll, and 6 dice are like missing only on a nat 1 but rolling with advantage. 7 and 8 dice can't be failures if Difficulty doesn't apply and should be hard to attain for new characters.

So let's model a combat with two melee combatants of roughly equal skill, Alf and Beth. Both have three actions. Alf wins initiative.

Scenario:

They start in melee distance. Alf can just decide to strike at Beth. Beth has no actions yet and has to rely on Alf missing or her armor withstanding the blows. Alf can go all out if he has a good chance to finish Beth of with three attacks. If he doesn't, he will want to save some actions for Beths counterattacks, as he will want to parry or dodge those.
He decides to go all out and attacks. He lands some solid hits, but Beth is still standing, and now it's her turn. She can go all out, but she is hurting, so she decides to attack once (Alf has no actions left to defend) and save two actions for Alfs turn. She hits, and she rolls high. An additional success pushes Alf back one step.
Alf now has to think. He needs one action to engage in melee again. And then he will have two attacks against her two defenses.

This looks quite alright for a simple combat. A miss is a real cost, as it doesn't only mean you wasted an action, but your opponent didn't need to spend their action for a parry or dodge. You will have to be mindful of your opponents action when you decide what to do.

And now we will need something to do for people. As actions are valuable, martial talents should give people options to do more (reflecting training, speed or straight up feats of strength). Having more actions would slow the turns down even more, though, and add more sources for mistakes on the players as well as the GMs side. Let characters do something more when they roll additional successes. There are some very interesting options:

• Riposte | When you successfully parry, you may use an additional success to make an attack with the additional successes quality.
• Shield bash | When you successfully parry with a shield, you may use any number of additional successes to push your assailant back one metre.
• Disarm | When you attack or parry with a weapon, you may use your additional success to try to disarm your opponent.
• Sweep | When you attack with a weapon, you may use an additional success to inflict Knockdown on your opponent.
• Step up | When you attack with a weapon, you may use an additional success to immediately move 1 metre without an action.
• Feint | When you attack with a melee weapon, you may use additional successes to impose Difficulty 1 on Parry rolls against your attack.
• Pounce | When you jump, you can use an additional success to attack a character or object in your path with the additional successes quality.

And so on. This will make combat more interesting, as you will have rider effects on good rolls that you can't rely on, but will change the action situation tremendously. These will become more reliable with a larger dicepool:

Dicepool	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Chance of rolling success	0.16	0.45	0.72	0.91	0.98	1	1
Chance of rolling additional success	0	0.03	0.16	0.44	0.75	0.95	1
Chance of rolling multiple additional successes	0	0	<0.01	0.06	0.26	0.59	0.89

Increasing in a skill would thus entail getting larger dice pools and finding something smart to do with your additional successes. We can have a lot of conditions being dished out here. And defensive actions get more important even when we are heavily armored, because we want to defend against the riders even if we won't receive damage from an attack. Armor still frees us from having to use defensive actions against every attack, though. Which is nice.

Also, with pushing and shoving and movement eating actions, we have some movement on the battlefield (as is fitting for an action RPG). We will not know if we will be standing where we are standing when our next turn comes around, and we will not be able to foresee if our next attack sends our opponent tumbling (which is an automatic rider, as written in the basic rules). If we now have some explosions and moving platforms, we can have a straight up Zelda fight. Which is nice.

I think it will not be too powerful to give bonus attacks on additional successes, as they can still be defended against, are most often lower quality (read: damage) and can't utilise additional successes themselves (as there is no roll for them). These are ways to sting back at your assailant and make them use actions to defend themselves when it would be their turn to be on the offensive. This could get to Swashbuckling levels of fencing, as two combatants may use all their actions in a duel at once while the rest does their thing.

This also means a front-line fighter will quickly be out of actions when facing multiple enemies, which will keep them from doing something valuable. This means PCs and NPCs can be pinned down when overwhelmed (which, again, is nice flavour) but we will need talents to address this. The Acrobat, Bruiser and Brave classes, which will be in the thick of combat when needed, will need some other kind of mitigation. There should be some Difficulty included to make enemies more probable to use up actions when they attack, but this should not be a simple passive rider, as this would be boring. Let's see what makes people harder to hit:

• They are moving quickly
• The take cover
• They are in a defensive formation
• They feint

So an Acrobat could have a talent imposing Difficulty to hit them when they move a lot. The Bruiser could raise their Shield or Weapon and just go full turtle as an action, which give Difficulty until they move again (they should also have some resistance against being moved against their will, being a tank and all). The Brave could go the route of supporting nearby friends and get safety standing by your teammates.
We can also think of a way to make several attacks blockable. This could be "free parries", but I see a problem with the order of actions. You would need to wait and see how many people want to attack you. It is better to make a class-independent talent that bolsters your defense when you parry:

• Stand against the tide | A bruiser can take an action to assume a defensive stance until they move or are moved at least one metre. While in this stance, attacks against them suffer 2 difficulty.
• Zig-Zag | For every two metres an Acrobat moves, all attacks against them suffer 1 Difficulty until their next round.
• Safety in numbers | All attacks against the Brave suffer Difficulty one for each friendly nearby character.
• Master Parry | When you successflully parry an attack, all attacks against you suffer Difficulty 1 until start of your next round.

Also, we could think of binding specific targets with a grapple here. Grappling rules are a wonky, complicated mess in most systems, and I don't have a better idea. Let's just not make a system, but assume most of it is automatic:

Grappling
A creature can choose to enter a nearby unfriendly creatures space with an action. While two creatures are in the same space, they will hinder each other by grabbing and wrestling each other. A creature in the field of another creature suffers Difficulty 3 on all success rolls and gains the Encumbered condition as long as the other creature is about at least the same size.

So both combatants will hinder each other in close quarters, assuming they will dodge, wrestle, kick and bite at the top of their respective abilities. Leaving the field requires a success roll if the wrestling opponent is not significantly smaller (we may have to formalise this at a later point). As this an action, a melee fighter may opt to engage in a wrestling match as a reaction to someone closing in on them. The dodge action works well if you want to react to someone grappling you, as you can then move out of the field afterwards. Trained grapplers could take some talents dealing with this kind of fighting:

• Weasel | When you are in the same field as an opponent, you don't suffer the Encumbered condition.
• Overpower | When you are in the same field as an opponent, you ignore one Difficulty and your opponent suffers an additional Difficulty 1.
• Hugstab | When standing in the same field as an opponent, attacking with a one-handed non-heavy weapon ignores 1 difficulty.

It's a high talent cost, but going into a wrestling match with a same-sized enemy, dagger in hand, could be a quite valid tactic now, especially against enemies with superior combat capabilities. A mobile character has better defenses against this than a heavy hitter, making them feel more capable of defending against being pinned down. A heavy hitter would need to move out with an action and a success roll or try to hit their opponent so hard they send them flying.

Not un-nice so far, I think.

What about combat at a distance? This is a powerful way to fight in a game where hitpoints are low and characters tend to be slow. The limiting factors of distance weapons as written down for now are these:

• You need ammunition, meaning you can't attack forever with the limited inventory space.
• Bows and slingshots are hard to keep 'loaded', so movement shouldn't be possible (is this rule too complex? It would be a nice opportunity to do "1 action reload weapons don't allow movement, 2 action reload weapons allow movement"-options (Bows vs. Crossbows, essentially).
• You need an action to reload, meaning you can attack 3 times in two rounds when doing else.
• You can't parry with a distance weapon without it running the risk of breaking.

Magic takes more actions to gain a good dice pool and a heavier talent tax to start, but it will circumvent the need of ammunition at least. An archer would likely be carrying some arrowheads in their bag to be able to refill ammunition, but ammunition recycling would be a very useful talent. Also, if distance weapons are slow, we want to have something that makes shots count. I would be hesitant to give out a talent to mitigate the reload action, as this would double an archers attacks with one talent. Which would be a must-have. And must-have talents are bad game design.

• Strong core | You can move with a loaded bow or sling. You may fire distance weapons during an unfinished movement action (this will still take an action) and move the rest after the attack.
• Drilled marksman | You can ignore 1 Difficulty on attacks with distance weapons.
• Field repair | You can use a Surge to return a broken distance weapon to an operational condition for the rest of the scene.
• Steady aim | As an action, you can ignore 2 Difficulty on your next distance attack this round.
• Skilled hunter | You may use an additional success when firing a distance weapon to make the projectile reusable at the end of the scene.
• Fletcher | You may fill your quiver with fresh projectiles as a camp action, provided you have the base materials (usually, arrow-heads will be enough).

I don't know whether the struggle for ammunition will be a fun mini-game, but it is a necessity for making ranged combat somewhat comparable. Making ammunition hard to come by, but in a way purchasable with base materials could make arrowheads a universally useful pseudocurrency between adventurers, soldiers and tribes. Someone will need them at some point, so they have worth, and are transportable like a coin. I like when rules have implied flavour.

This is a pretty nice way to see whether combat can work. I will run the numbers. Maybe it will be necessary to have some conditions not be easily purchasable by additional successes but rely on their own actions to afflict. Also, each class should have a way to get rid of certain conditions with success rolls or Surges. More on that when we take a closer look at magic, next time.

[The Shoeless]

And now: Magic.

Spoiler: Basic magic system

Show

The base spell is magic not exclusive to a character class. This means you can pick up spells at any point in time by purchasing a talent giving you access to it.

• Base spell: Damage | You may attack a character or object with magic as an action, dealing damage equal to your success rolls quality.
• Base spell: Hinder | You may blind or bind a character or object with magic as an action, inflicting the Hinder X condition with X being your success rolls quality until start of your next round.
• Base spell: Blast | You may knock over a character or object with magic as an action, inflicting the Knockdown condition on a successful roll.
• Base spell: Push | You may send a character or object flying with magic as an action, inflicting the Pushed X condition with X being your success rolls quality.
• Base spell: Stun | You may blind or bind a character or object with magic as an action, inflicting the Stun 1 condition in a successful roll..
• Base spell: Buzz | You may distract a character or object with magic as an action, inflicting the Unfocused condition on a successful roll until start of your next round.

The looks of the base spell could differ for everyone, so some characters may shoot plants and vines from the ground, others may fire lasers out of their eyes or go about with eldritch skeletons holding down their foes.

This is quite easy a system. The trick with magic will be that you need to concentrate on a spell to get a decent dice pool. There are no talents to give you further dice.

Action: Incantation
You may spend your action concentrating, giving you +1 die on success rolls to cast spells this round.

So you can fire of a spell with one action hastily with 3 dice, or do with two actions and 4 dice, or a full round with 5 dice. This makes magic feel like something you need to focus on.

We can even add magic implements or other items just giving a character access to one of these talents, so a fighter type may have a wand in their pocket when they need to stun something from afar.

To make the system fun for specialists means we have to add some tricks:

• Advanced spellcasting | When casting the base spell, you may use additional successes to add another effect of the base spell you can cast with the additional successes quality.
• Wand specialist | When using a magic implement to cast a spell effect you also have the talent for, you gain +1 die for the success roll to cast it.
• Widen spell | When casting a spell, you may use additional successes to choose another target for the spell.

This makes AoE possible, and magic a very versatile tool. Speaking of AoE, we may want to have some lingering effects for battlefield control:

• Maintain spell | You may forgo your first action at the start of every round to keep a spell active for that round.
• Ray spell | Before casting a spell, you may decide to cast the spell as a ray to make it radiate in a straight line from your position with a length of 1 metre instead of targeting a character or object. You may use additional successes to increase the length by a number of metres equal to the additional successes quality. The spell lingers until the start of your next round or until you move.
• Sphere spell | Before casting a spell, you may decide to cast the spell as a spherical area centering on you with a radius of 0 meters. You may use additional successes to increase the radius by a number of metres equal to the additional successes quality. The spell lingers until the start of your next round or until you move.
• Mobile spells | You may change the direction of a lingering ray spell originating from you with an action, and lingering spells originating from don't end when you move, but move with you.

These should be exclusive talents for the Enchanter class, though, as to not impede on their shtick.

How do lingering spells work?

Rule: Entering a lingering spell
When an object or character enters the area of a lingering spell or a lingering spell hits them, they are affected once if they can't dodge the spell. If they don't leave the area until start of their next round, they will be affected again.

This opens the questions about how to defend against magic. Dodging a spell should be an option, as will dodging entering a lingering spells area. Parrying spells... wow. I don't know really. On the one hand, this will be the main defense of certain classes. On the other hand: How do you parry entering a ball of magical lasers?

This I will have to think about. But we can give out some talents to increase magic defenses:

• Spellbreaker | Spells targeting you receive Difficulty 1
• Magic resistance | Damage and conditions from spells affecting you are reduced by 1.
• Sunder spell | You can cast a spell to destroy another spell as an action.

We can increase on this, but it will work nicely.

Spoiler: Advanced magic

Show

Then there are the advanced effects for the Enchanter class or being accessible by magical items. These include:

• Transposition | You can magically teleport X metres, where X is the success rolls quality.
• Time shift | You can sequester a character or object out of time for a number of rounds equal to your success rolls quality. While sequestered in time, the affected can't move and can't be in any way affected by external forces.
• Compel | You can inflict the Compel 1 condition on a successful success roll.
• Glamour | You can make an object look, feel and behave like another object of comparable size for a number of rounds equal to your success rolls quality.

With some talents modifying these:

• Shift | You can use actions at your normal movement rate to increase the distance moved with your Transposition spell before reappearing.
• Grab from time | You may at any time choose to end a sequestered object or character with an action by touching it.
• Invisibility | You may choose to make an object invisible with you Glamour spell.
• Dominate | When using your Compel spell, you may use additional successes to inflict the Compel X condition on one of your targets, where X is equal to the additional successes quality.

This will become quite powerful quickly. With three talents at character creation, an Enchanter may choose to go all in with one spell or take a broader selection of spells. And then go on from there.

The drawback of magic is the action invest to get a spell out reliably. The multitarget and linger effects paired the action-robbing Conditions Stun, Push, Knockdown and Compel will quickly make this a net gain for the team. Spending three actions to rob the enemy of 2,4,8 or 12 actions will quickly become the bread and butter of the teams Enchanter.

An Enchanter with many talents will become very powerful, being able to make certain points on the battlefield dangerous or inaccessible and raining down damage and multiple conditions on many targets at once. This should be the feeling of the class, though. The question is whether we want to give them protective spells, too. This would be thematically appropriate, but could make the game suffer from the old caster supremacy problem quickly.

I will have to sleep over this.

[sandmote]

Random commentary:

• The Bruiser. The catch up mechanic should apply when pushing/shoving an opponent away (probably moving up for free). So the movement is in relation to anyone you're guarding rather than to outspeed opponents.
• Acrobat. I would maybe make sprinter a trait of the Acrobat, but make it "you can move two meters instead of one if you have already used an action to move this turn." Maybe also apply the attack benefit of the Mobility feat from 5e d&d.
• Brave. I do not like the idea of having a link class. Classes should be particular strategies link or others use, not him as a whole. Maybe if you're "Leading a charge or finding weak points," mechanically this is because your character gives their allies bonuses, creating a stronger charge or weak points. So this class does take influence from link's heroism, if not his usual combat style.
• Polymath. You don't seem to have any version of a healer, so I'd maybe have support for a polymath that uses cooking. Or give cooking to the wayfarer?
• Adept. Maybe a talent that lets them reduce the difficulty caused by any one environmentally danger? Otherwise these might work better as racial or general traits. Like, "+1 Surge and +2 dice in Swimming" for a Zora, and fire resistance for a Goron.
• Enchantress. Maybe break magic into separate spheres? To limit the power of any individual caster. Although I think the more important factor would be to make sure there are non-magic systems with their own capabilities.
• Wayfarer. See the 5e d&d ranger 3.5e bard for potential issues. Also, the narrow social benefits should be class based, rather than all tied to one class. For instance, give the deadeye bonuses for spotting anything shady in town, and the brave ways to help another character make a social check. I think putting this sort of bonus to a class is going to force you to overly limit class and other bonuses.

On character advancement, I'd make rules on how to make those checks for 1 learning point. A GM not bothering to limit them very much could make the party horribly unbalanced if one player makes a bunch of these rolls and another fails too many. Automatically getting +1 heart without heart pieces for smaller events is a bit odd.

One or two actions to prepare the hookshot?

[The Shoeless]

Random commentary:

That's not random. This is very valuable feedback! Thanks

The Bruiser. The catch up mechanic should apply when pushing/shoving an opponent away (probably moving up for free). So the movement is in relation to anyone you're guarding rather than to outspeed opponents.

Yes! I would like to give every class a specific movement bonus that corresponds to their specific flavour. Stepping up to an opponent you just send tumbling is quite fitting. Something in these lines will be added. Movement bonusses for other classes I still struggle with.

Acrobat. I would maybe make sprinter a trait of the Acrobat, but make it "you can move two meters instead of one if you have already used an action to move this turn." Maybe also apply the attack benefit of the Mobility feat from 5e d&d.

As there are no real opportunity attacks, the attack benefit from mobility is not applicable here. The sprinter talent will just go into normal movement rules. If somebody moves a lot in a round, they need to cover a lot of ground.

Brave. I do not like the idea of having a link class. Classes should be particular strategies link or others use, not him as a whole. Maybe if you're "Leading a charge or finding weak points," mechanically this is because your character gives their allies bonuses, creating a stronger charge or weak points. So this class does take influence from link's heroism, if not his usual combat style.

Sorry for not being clear here. Of course this will not be Link. It just leans heavily on certain concept of a chosen hero of legend. For reference, I aim for the class to feel somewhere between a Cleric, Bard and Paladin (with the caveat we are not trying to modify DnD or another system here, but to create something new). Playtest will show us more.

Polymath. You don't seem to have any version of a healer, so I'd maybe have support for a polymath that uses cooking. Or give cooking to the wayfarer?

Cooking is for everybody, but it will be supported by non-exclusive talents on the polymath and wayfarer talent lists, as they are thematical. I don't think we need a dedicated healer in this system. Every class will have ways to counter or circumvent conditions that will be most crippling for them, and using healing items should not be class-specific. Remember this game will focus on exploration and movement next to the fights, and there should be minimal resource management going on.

Adept. Maybe a talent that lets them reduce the difficulty caused by any one environmentally danger? Otherwise these might work better as racial or general traits. Like, "+1 Surge and +2 dice in Swimming" for a Zora, and fire resistance for a Goron.

We did not talk about a concept of ancestry/race/culture yet. Those could be done by giving access to certain exclusive talents, or by giving out certain race-talents, yes. I like your idea of having the adept have some "elemental affinity" type going on if they want to go that path.

Enchantress. Maybe break magic into separate spheres? To limit the power of any individual caster. Although I think the more important factor would be to make sure there are non-magic systems with their own capabilities.

We limit the power by making spells talents, and build up power by making spell talents boost each other. The power curve of casters in different systems often derives from their magical abilities being something they can do on top of things every character can do. By giving each class their own cool and fun thing to do, and binding the power of the enchanter to the same progression as everybody else, this will be less of a problem.

Wayfarer. See the 5e d&d ranger 3.5e bard for potential issues. Also, the narrow social benefits should be class based, rather than all tied to one class. For instance, give the deadeye bonuses for spotting anything shady in town, and the brave ways to help another character make a social check. I think putting this sort of bonus to a class is going to force you to overly limit class and other bonuses.

I agree that every class should be able to learn something thematic to do with Favour. The Wayfarer will have a lot more focus on favour, though. Issues with the bard and ranger aren't in what the classes are trying to do, but what the game expects from the classes. The 5e Ranger is in no way a bad class, but its strengths are in another pillar of the game than any other class, so the ranger feels off - they are prepared to play a game no one else wants to play. 3.5 bard didn't have a specialty, they had everything but weaker; don't make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that the Wayfarer would be a bard because it is the social class. Again, this will not be a D&D clone, and we try to break things up a little to introduce aspects to a tabletop game that other systems did not bother with or did only half-heartedly.

On character advancement, I'd make rules on how to make those checks for 1 learning point. A GM not bothering to limit them very much could make the party horribly unbalanced if one player makes a bunch of these rolls and another fails too many.

You are absolutely right. Sometimes, because something is cool doesn't mean it should be in the game. I would like to have player characters teaching each other stuff, but this involves some major risks.
On the other hand, the scale of numbers is small enough and broadth of talents is large enough that I don't see "balancing" as a primary concern in the game. It should be the concern that anyone, at any time, can do something cool and useful and fun. A 20-talent bruiser and a 5-talent-bruiser are not worlds apart, and the 5-talent-bruiser may even have things they can do better depending on talent choice.

Automatically getting +1 heart without heart pieces for smaller events is a bit odd.

Depends on when you started to play Zelda games

One or two actions to prepare the hookshot?

Yes.

[D&D_Fan]

What kinds of magic and damage will there be?

Spoiler: Ideas for magic types

Show

These aren't schools of magic, but rather types.
Ambient
Harnessing the raw magic around you.
Invocation
It involves invoking the names of powerful beings.
Runes
Craft runes into objects to give them special power.

Spoiler: Damage

Show

Acid
Cold (same as heat)
Decay (necrotic, but more natural)
Heat (has exceptions with degrees: an elemental might be able to survive anything of that type, but a dragon is vulnerable to extremes)
Holy
Mental
Natural (from environment, or natural effects that damage you such as falling, or organ failure)
Physical (bludgeon, pierce, slash)
Shock (electric)
Sonic
Unnatural (magical, or extradimensional)

[D&D_Fan]

Also what about races?
There are some basics:

• Human
• Elf
• Dwarf
• Optional: Hobbit/Gnome/Halfling/Kender
• Optional: Saurian/Dragonborn/Lizardfolk
• Optional: Robot/Undead/Plant/Ooze
• Orcs, Goblins, and Kobolds
• Obligatory other thing: Gith/Kalashtar/Planetouched
• Optional: Beastfolk

Are you going to give them set in stone scores and numbers like +2 Intuition and x3 Aesthetic, or give them abilities instead, like Sleepless/Trance, or Flight, or Element affinity, or Adaptability, or Cold blooded?

Also, any lore yet?

Also, the setting up camp and activities is a great idea. It would greatly improve downtime.

[The Shoeless]

What kinds of magic and damage will there be?

Spoiler: Ideas for magic types

Show

These aren't schools of magic, but rather types.
Ambient
Harnessing the raw magic around you.
Invocation
It involves invoking the names of powerful beings.
Runes
Craft runes into objects to give them special power.

Thank you for your feedback. The question when adding something to the game is: Why though? As of now, each spell is a talent. We can categorise talents into types, and then let other talents affect all talents of that type. This lends well to a deck-building philosophy, where a character can, through synergies, get large bonusses to certain actions. This counteracts having each talent have a use for itself, so you harm characters building for options instead of specialists.
This is not in itself a bad thing, on the contrary. But we will have to ask whether the game will gain from this. It is advisable not to add things because others have done it, and just adding things on top of other things because they seem cool can be harmful to the game if those things don't add anything cool to the game. So: Why add types of magic instead of just spells that do what we want magic users be able to do?

Spoiler: Damage

Show

Acid
Cold (same as heat)
Decay (necrotic, but more natural)
Heat (has exceptions with degrees: an elemental might be able to survive anything of that type, but a dragon is vulnerable to extremes)
Holy
Mental
Natural (from environment, or natural effects that damage you such as falling, or organ failure)
Physical (bludgeon, pierce, slash)
Shock (electric)
Sonic
Unnatural (magical, or extradimensional)

Same thing here. Damage types are sensible when you try to build a minigame of resistances and vulnerabilities. I encountered to purposes for such: A kind of Rock-Paper-Scissors type of combat (see: Pokemon), which is cool if you try to eliminate the enemy roster before they eliminate your roster. With every player having a list of strengths and vulnerabilities to damage types we have a chance to add team play, but also run the risk of making players irrelevant in certain encounters. I would rather go the route of having something fun to do for every player all the time.
The other implementation is for resource management games like D&D, which lead with any encounter being beatable in a certain way and asking the players to solve an encounter with as little spending of resources as possible. Having the right resistances to save HP or dealing the right damage type to cut combat short are pieces of the big puzzle. With relatively low numbers and only little health on the player side we can't be going for this mechanic. There is nothing wrong with a holy warrior just dealing 5 damage instead of 5 holy damage. It would be interesting if the damage types work as a tool box like in Shadowrun, where acid destroys armor on top of dealing damage and electricity hitting initiative as well as health. We can add similar rider effects for different types of damage, but we should tread carefully and add damage types when they are useful, not adding a list and later think about what they mean.

In short: As we are creating something entirely new, we can go ahead without caring for tradition and can cherrypick the cool things we see on the way. Before adding something, we should ask "Why" first. And then maybe not add it anyway.

Also what about races?
There are some basics:

• Human
• Elf
• Dwarf
• Optional: Hobbit/Gnome/Halfling/Kender
• Optional: Saurian/Dragonborn/Lizardfolk
• Optional: Robot/Undead/Plant/Ooze
• Orcs, Goblins, and Kobolds
• Obligatory other thing: Gith/Kalashtar/Planetouched
• Optional: Beastfolk

Basics are for chumps The world should add some options for players just being tired of playing humans. We don't need to go Tolkien or Greenwood or Roddenberry or anyone though. Maybe just add a cool little tool for game masters fixing up a race/ancestry on the fly?

"You want to play as a 4 foot bunny person? Well yes, I can do that, give me two minutes..."

Are you going to give them set in stone scores and numbers like +2 Intuition and x3 Aesthetic, or give them abilities instead, like Sleepless/Trance, or Flight, or Element affinity, or Adaptability, or Cold blooded?

There are no scores in this game. I would say a race other than human is only worth adding a mechanic to if they feel different from being a human. Just adding some boni or weaknesses leads to little humans, pointy-eared humans, metal humans... This will be hard to balance, but it could go like this (only an example, not something I am really planning to add):

A robot character is superhumanly gifted at the tasks they were build or programmed for, but they lack the imagination and intuition to improvise tasks not in their intended skillset. A robot receives +2 quality on all success rolls, but they can only attempt success rolls they have 4 or more dice with.

Also, any lore yet?

I am working on it :) There is a thread in the world building sub-forum to get a nice foundation going. The lore is important to make some of the finer decisions for the game, but the mechanics should work for themself first (from a game dev perspective. From a GM perspective, this pains me greatly).

Also, the setting up camp and activities is a great idea. It would greatly improve downtime.

Thanks! I am not quite sure this will work the way I hope it to, but it is worth a shot.