Woah. Long time, no see.

Alright, my last post said I was ready to playtest. I'm not sure that was true, and after some thought I realized the game was sort of a mess and it didn't really have a place. I needed to figure out where it fit into the world of Rpgs. ExplorerMan! then sort of went into hiding. Will it now come out of it's hibernation? Maybe.

I've recently been finding a number of one shot, rules light, stupid fun Rpgs. Either beefy ones like He Who Laughs Last, longer games like Three Days Until Retirement, or short wonders like Havoc Brigade or Lasers & Feelings. It has struck me that ExplorerMan! would fit well into this model.

I'm hoping to compress and rejigger the rules on this a bit and come up with a way to revive the game in this style. Perhaps I can feed a bit of Fiasco into it.

Some rules goals:
-Stupid numbers of dice. Everyone loves rolling a bucket load.
-Bonus dice a la Savage Worlds.
-Above all, KISS

With luck, I will see you soon

Got it!

Okay, while lying in bed last night, I found a solution to my dice dilemma. I want to use 2d6, since d6 are easy to find, and 2 is a nice round number.

So.

Our target numbers for rolls will be a your fate+type subtracted from a Director assigned Difficulty, meet or beat. Any Awesome bonus you have is also subtracted. With a Fate of 5, Type of 3, and...5 awesome points, if the difficulty is 20, you have to roll a 7 or higher on 2d6.

In addition, once per session, a player may roll 1d6, after a failed roll. No matter what the difficulty is, if the player rolls a 6 on this, the failed roll becomes a success.

I like this will work pretty well. Unless any of our lovely commenters can come up with issues, I think it's time to wrap this game up into a nice little package, fill in the missing holes, and start playtesting.

Dice and other thoughts

We need to figure out what we should be rolling. If we assume a Fate of 5 and a Type of 3-5, that gives us...10 points. Since we want the Awesome score to be equalish to this, that means a starting character (if they are awesome enough) could be rolling against a 20 target, with no difficulty modifier. This seems high.

I really like the idea of using d6's. They are everywhere, you can steal them from any of dozens of board games, and you can buy them in packs of a million for a few bucks. Of course, to even make it a challenge, you're already rolling like 4d6.

That leaves us with bigger dice. If you want, say, a 75% chance of success on a "normal" roll with no modifier, given a target of 20, that's a top roll of 27ish . That gives us...1d30? 2d14? Not exactly common dice, even among the niche roleplaying dice. If we were releasing a shiny boxed set, maybe. If Game Science or Koplow were slipping me freebies, maybe. 3d10 could do, but I really don't like exceeding 2 dice, unless the more dice you have the better you are. 2d12? d12s are...I don't know. I have a million of them, but I have a problem when it comes to dice.

The other option is to reduce the scores. 2 for a fate. 2 for a primary type, 1 for a secondary type. That gives us a default of 10, when the Awesomeness is included. 2d8 is a nice throw, here. Difficulty modifiers are probably going to be commonly thrown in by Directors, which might slide us down to regular targets of 7 or so in the beginning, which would give us about a 50% shot with 2d8, so that's a real possibility. This also assumes we figure out how to make players actually be Awesome, without becoming Boring.

This is probably going to have to come out of playtesting, methinks.

I've been looking over how we calculate health. Fate + 2(Primary + Second). That's...math. Depending on where our final stats fall in, maybe just stick with Scene Health being Primary + Secondary, and Adventure Heath being Fate. Straight up.

Once we get a few more things ironed out, I REALLY need to get working on some of the settings and adventures. This is the important part of the game. The whole idea behind our rules is that we don't want them to be in the way of what makes the game fun, the story. Roleplaying is, after all, collaborative storytelling. I have a lot of ideas, just need to make them cohesive and get them together.

Thoughts on some potential fixes/changes, etc etc

The amount of adding in combat still bugs me. We can make it simpler, cleaner. I think that I'd like to just abstract away anything to do with the baddies. Joe Mook has a 1 modifier in combat. Bill Commander has a 5 modifier. Period. Equipment and fate are rolled in. Rules for creating "new" bad guys can go into how to figure this out, but we want a clean, single number.

For that matter, I'm thinking some sort of stat to add to the sheet that is the sum of Fate and Type, for commonly used ones. Kill skill (or whatever) - Bad Guy Mod - Difficulty + Awesomeness. Cleaner than before, but might be muddied under actual game play.

About the awesomeness.

I think we've covered something like this, before, but this is basically just a bonus you get for doing something awesome. Whether it's a mundane task described awesomely, an awesome task described mundanely, or (best yet) an awesome thing described awesomely, it all applies.

This game is about light rules and cinematics. It behooves us to pump up the cinematics. I'd like to weigh the Awesomeness mod heavily against the Fate + Type part. Since we still don't actually know what dice we're rolling, it shouldn't be too hard to wedge this in. Say you have a Fate + Type of...eh, 8. The thing you are trying to do pulls 4 off of that, so you have a target of 4 to roll. If we're on a d10, that means that you only have a 40% chance. I want a lot of Awesomeness bonus points handed out. We'll have to have a chapter (or section..or something) dedicated to this. Examples of things that are awesome, how to decide how many points to hand out, etc. I'd love it if the target was 4 on a d10, roll under, and the person knocked the target up to an 8 because of something. Some games out there will give minor bonuses for this, I want big bonuses.

Bonuses could be given for coming up with a solution that the Director did NOT see coming at all, bonuses for describing it in a particularly cinematic way, bonuses for the act itself being awesome. Bonuses should not be given for doing the same cool thing over and over until it becomes mundane. Creativity should be rewarded.

There were questions in previous posts about including a setting in the core book. I'm now leaning towards no. Better to put out a lean book of rules, and let the players cherry pick the setting(s) they want.

I keep coming back to this game...it's just fun. Hopefully I'll get it put together and out there so that other people can have fun, too.

Combat

I may have said this before, can't remember.

Combat rolls are as follows:

For minions and lieutenant types, it's:
Fate + Type + Equipment - Baddie Fate - Difficulty

For Captains and Boss types, it's:
Fate + Type + Equipment - Baddie Fate - Baddie Equipment - Difficulty.

Baddie Fate varies based on the rank/evilness/strength of the baddie, obviously.

I'm a little concerned about the number of numbers, here. However, players will be adding their Fate plus the relevant types all of the time, so those shouldn't be hard. I'm thinking of presenting the Baddie roll as a single Difficulty modifier. The Director will determine the Difficulty, where Difficulty == Baddie Fate + How hard the task is + any equipment. Thus, for combat rolls, you'll just see:
Fate + Type + Equipment - Difficulty.

Simple enough. No one will have HUGE numbers in Fate/Type/Equipment, so hopefully people can add 5 + 2 + 3 and get something sane (17, right?)

As always, seeking simpler numbers.

Say...

Maybe we should get this rolling, again.

ExplorerMan! shall not be stopped!

Change Becomes Us

Well, we haven't even started gaming yet and things are changing. As I was writing up the information needed to play, I noticed that combat involved way too many numbers.

We're trying to keep it so that the Director need never roll, but rather leave all that up to the players.

So, the change we are looking into is to reduce baddies to a simple difficulty. BBEG's and the like will have an equipment "score," but all the others are a simple, flat number. We are dropping their fate/type/equipment scores. That difficulty score will be used on the to hit rolls in combat, as well as the avoid-being-hit rolls.

The underlying goal of this game is to be simple. A critical eye will be cast upon all of our rules, trying to cut out any bloat or other items that slow or complicate the game. There's a couple other things I think could be reduced, but I can't really see how to do it cleanly. We'll figure it out in playtest.