Crisis And Bravado

 So, I'm writing an RPG for my gaming group.

It's intended to be:

1. Fast
2. Silly
3. Violent

We've had a lot of fun playing various systems, most recently I managed to drag a three page adventure from the Troika! rulebook into lasting 9 months by randomly generating D20 rooms for every floor of the fictional hotel they were visiting.

One of the things we liked about Troika! was how the skills worked. The players quite liked not being constrained within the "Perception", "Acrobatics" etc mold, and quite enjoyed the sheer level of bullshit they could have with skills like:

• "Dead Animal Economy" - which let them barter anything they'd killed
• "Dominant Position" - allowed them to psychologically break someone and have them following them around as a subordinate NPC.
• "Simian Cardiac Surgery" - allowed them to perform open heart surgery on a Mandrill.

They liked that aspect of the rules, but wanted something slightly crunchier, so as an experiment I thought "Fuck it, I'll write one".

And thus, what I'm currently calling Tunnel Pricks was born. The name exists because typically my players are Murderhobos who spend their time in tunnels.

 

 

The mechanic I started with revolved around two concepts, which were "Crisis" and "Bravado".

Crisis mechanically functions like that feeling you get when everything is completely going to shit. Every time a player fails on ANY test, their Crisis level goes up. The dice range for critical failure on a D20 in Tunnel Pricks is 1 + Crisis, so the risk of critical failure increases every time you fail. 

A critical failure, as well as causing whatever you did to go wrong also triggers a roll on the (currently named) Crisis Resolution table, which includes events which cause the Player Characters to verbally abuse their colleagues, increasing their crisis. This bit is currently WIP, but I'll probably go into it in a later post.

Bravado is mechanically the opposite, except that you can only boost your Bravado with Critical Successes, where the range on a D20 is between 20 minus Bravado and 20. I'm tinkering with what would happen if you end up in a weird situation where Crisis and Bravado clash, but meh.

Both Crisis and Bravado can be Bought/Spent by the Referee to give advantage/disadvantage on Test Rolls too.

Other than Crisis and Bravado, the characteristics I've used:

• Muscle
• Intellect
• Nimbility
• Gregariousness
• Endurance

These were picked because I can acronym them into a rude UK slang term. There's nothing wrong with being purile.

The skill system will be flexible, so that if you wanted to have skills like "Skink Wrangling" or "Umbrella Analysis" we'd be able to do that as it'd just add positive modifiers to skills.

I had a lot of fun writing the Bestiary for this, which I'll probably go into on a later post too.

We've had a few rounds of playtesting that have helped me work through the character creation process (which is currently in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure book). And we'll carry that on for a bit until I give myself a nice break and play Demon City for a bit (which again, I'll go into on a later post).