YET ANOTHER NSR ADVENTURE GAME

 YET ANOTHER NSR ADVENTURE GAME

-A developmental journey across a hoarder’s mind- 

An Introduction

Welcome everyone!

I’m Matteo (he/him) you can call me whatever. 

As soon as I began designing The Hexcrawl Hack (an overland adventure hack for The Black Hack Second Edition by David Black), I started to think of some stuff than can make the system more fitting to my tastes. 

Note that I didn’t say -nor mean by any means- “better”. I said “more fitting”.

Briefly after some of these thought, I realise that all the changes I should’ve made to accomodate my tastes make up a whole different game that takes things out from all of my favourite OSR and NSR titles I put my hands on. So, if you’re interested, join me along the journey into developing my own NSR adventure RPG.

First and Foremost: The Dice Mechanic

First and foremost, as I said, I had to decide wich dice mechanic I have to design the system onto. Here I’ll breakdown some options:

- Player Facing: Only the players throw dice to overcome difficulties. GM only rolls on random tables.

- Not Player Facing: mainly combat. This is how D&D handles it. Sometimes who’s at the action rolls (like in combat), sometimes you roll to avoid something (saving throws).

Out of this two, I’d prefer the first for two reason, one being of emotions and one of rationality:

- Players roll all that has influence over their characters: they feel like they are in control. Mathematically this statement doesn’t make sense at all, but it works. The GM rolls only on random tables and maybe enemies damage.

- GM may focus on narrative aspect of the game, like making up a narrative way a bear may be writing names on the dust.

Now, for the very meat:

Roll Over vs Roll Under

Roll over means that the PC have some sort of bonus, they roll a die, add that bonus and have to roll over a target number. Roll under usually means that you roll a dice and have to roll under a certain stat. Statistically it doesn’t change much but being aware of your target tricks your brain into thinking you are in control. Also, less need to prep.

Dice Pools

Dice Pools means that every stat on the character sheet is an integer number representing the number of dice you’re gonna roll. A certain number of dice have to overcome a certain threshold collecting a certain number of successes (e.g.: at least three 6s on a pool of 6-sides dices). Too complex on the GM side for my tastes since you can work around both the threshold and the number of successes.

Dice Size

Stats are modelled around the die size. You have to roll over a target number with the given die. You can manipulate both the result of the roll and the target number.

PbtA like

Fixed results, modified roll. In PbtA this means rolling 2d6. Obtaining 2-6 means a failure, 7-9 conditional or partial success, 10+ success. This is pretty predictable and makes bonus stacking actually very good.

The Chosen One

Due exclusively to personal preference and the mentioned illusion of control, I think I’ll choose the Roll Under one. For the very engine I have yet to choose between Into the Odd or The Black Hack.