My home group using their own game system they developed called FAST Freestyle Story Telling RPG - FAST Games | DriveThruRPG.com . It’s a great system but has never been fully play tested so it’s a bit rough around the edges. Also, having played it for many, many years now, it gets a bit samey at times. It uses d6’s where 2-5 generate 1 success point, a 1 zero successes and a 6 two success points. So it’s less random, especially if you only roll skill (1-7). So it’s common to have a DEX and INT that are the same, and e.g. you might have Thief and Spy the same (so 9 and 3) so you end up rolling the same number of dice. The main rules designer has been trying a 2d6 system out, where it’s attr + skill + good die - bad die, where good 6 bad 1 is a crit success and good 1, bad 6 is a crit failure. It does add more randomness in.
Anyway, the group has been pestering me to run Legends of the Five Rings (but using FAST). So I started work on some significant rules tweaks. I’ve toyed with the good-bad dice rolling system which is probably easier. I also have a version that uses Roll and Keep, but with success points, I’m not sure rolling one extra die is useful enough. I used Troll to calculate odds, and e.g. for 7k2 and 8k2, average roll is still the same number of successes – you’re just about 6% less likely to roll under and 6% more likely to roll higher. In another words, there’s virtually no difference. So I’m toying with rolling +2 instead, but that might be slightly too good. Keeping an extra die is significantly more powerful – basically, it’s like a +1 to the result. So honestly, I’m about ready to toss it all. Probably easier to just give out +1s or +2s. I should add I’m trying to keep the math down, so attributes would be 2-4 and skills would be lower too.
Anyway, that all seems like a lot of work, and I’m dreading having to plan combats out, etc. so I’ve been looking at other systems out there. That’s how I stumbled across PbtA. Now I’m looking at Hearts of Wulin as a possible starting point. Or City of Mist, where a card could be clan, family, etc, another the “class” such as bushi or shugenja. And could have another to track “fun” stuff like Shadow/Lying Darkness, Raint, Glory, Honor, etc. And another card could be stuff to make the character more unique.
But I’m not sure how to deal with combat. I don’t thikn CoM will be interesting enough. Something based on the three stances system from Avatar Legends might work. I haven’t tried combat in Urban Shadows 2E yet (I’ve played one game of it and made one roll in it – one of the best games I’ve ever played – loved the political/moral choices we had to make).
Anyway, so I have my eye out for interesting systems/playbooks/moves. And I need to play more PbtA type games, etc. before trying to run one. But fun times!!
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