No Expense Spared

The ‘No Expense Spared’ character sheet for the System I Made Up ruleset used for the playtest on Monday. Assign 3-2-1 to the top boxes, then choose four traits associated with those attributes.

Want to wrestle a giant crab? Then roll Body + Heave. How about working out what all that screaming might be about without getting too close? Maybe a Soul + Sense. Need to cast a quick sonic blast spell? Then get that Mind + Recall sorted sharpish.

Throw as many six-sided dice as your Attribute + Trait. Add more dice if you can justify an advantage, a useful piece of equipment or beneficial circumstance. Roll a 5 or 6, a success; but lose a success if you roll a 1 or 2. Compare against the successes of an opponent if doing something contested.

In combat, the difference between successes on each side contribute to some kind of consequence pool. The GM can draw out of consequences scored on the player characters to ‘hurt’ them with later rolls. So, if you lost a combat earlier, the GM draws from the consequence pool to improve his combatants roll when another foe faces the characters later, or adds to the complexity of the challenge for something else.

So, “I need you to roll to climb the sheer cliff face as a contested challenge. You roll Body plus Lift to get up the cliff face. Climbing is a two dice challenge and the lack of handholds here adds another dice. Thing is Fern suffered a 2 dice failure in the last combat – so, mid-climb a wound tears open. I’m rolling 5 dice for the cliff against your three.”

Even if one person suffered the wounds and you’re rolling for someone else, the consequence pool impacts the whole party. A wounded companion might trip on something when you’re trying to be quiet, or fail to turn up at the right time when you’re completing delicate negotiations with a tribal chieftain.

Anyway… that’s the basics of the SIMU ruleset for you. Not sure how that all came out of showing you a picture of a ‘No Expenses Spared’ character sheet…

Somewhat related articles…

• The Rollplay Engine(impossibleboulder.blogspot.com)

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• 11 Table Rules For Speed(campaignmastery.com)

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