Road Dogs (Reivers of Cartoumme) devlog

So I've had two play-tests of this rule-set, and I'm still making big decisions around how to sort this rule-set out.

The basic idea behind the game I'm working through is Roll a D20 + a number of D6 dice and trigger success or failure and bonuses. Success is based on the D20, bonuses are triggered on the D6 and are associated with the number value associated with the skill.  There are no hit points and stuff works off a thing called exhaustion which reduces your skills and abilities and affects your rolls, if your exhaustion reaches 0 for any ability you are defeated from the conflict. Simple tests don't defeat you but can exhaust you.

First Play-test

The mechanics used for this one was you get to roll a D20 +D6 dice and choose how your D6's will be used, hit a location, trigger a skill or equipment bonus etc, by default if you choose nothing the D6 adds to your D20 roll. Target Number for your D20 was 14. Rolls were opposed rolls vs monsters etc. The mechanics actually worked fine, but it ended up being very swingy, turns out adding more dice will do that. 

My design goal was simple rolls/mechanics and interesting choices and decisions for your tests, not more swingy-ness so some work was needed. 

Second Play-test

Changes: I decided to separate the D20 and D6 values: D20 is success or failure, D6 is for bonuses (or penalties if you fail). Exhaustion is still a core mechanic and your Abilities determine o your D20 determines success your D6 determines bonuses (and penalties on failures) a roll of 1 on a D6 exhausts your dice regardless of success or failure.

Pros: some interesting decisions were getting made, the mechanics of D20 success/failure, D6 bonus/penalty worked pretty well. Skills system worked pretty well. 

Cons: things dragged and got a bit too roll heavy. Action was kind of slow and stuff was moving forward and backward in increments rather than anything really being impactful. Exhaustion around abilities created indecision and frustration, because once some players got down to 1 on an ability they basically froze and got frustrated because they could get out of a situation.

Take-aways: Make the bonuses super impactful like superpowers but they only trigger when that number is rolled. Remove the exhaustion requirement for testing skills you don't have so you don't trigger that frustration and player freeze. 

Design #3

A few of the take-aways were easy to commit, others required some real work. Building out impactful skill bonuses was difficult, but I did get it sorted.

For the main take-away on the skills system I decided to use the amazing Best Left Buried for inspiration, and I think they have turned out to be pretty interesting. Unfortunately it's also added quite a bit of rules overhead that is not going to be conducive to a 1 page rules-set so I have to make some choices.

Onward

I like the skill bonuses and want to keep them, I've decided to lean into the high impact nature of these bonuses and make things quicker and more impactful. This may embrace the swingy-ness I was unhappy with from the first play-test but I'm thinking of targeting a one-shot experience rather than a fully developed RPG so dig in on  impactful changes of fortune.  

It's looking very unlikely that I'll have another play-test opportunity before submission with 7 days to go, so I'll need to make some impactful decisions, get things reduced and start pushing the display. Luckily the display should be the easy part once I have the rule-set in a good place, but it still takes time so this will be the last best revision, hopefully, and then on to design work.