RP6

I wanted to write the simplest roleplaying game possible, and have it use only a single D6 for everything.

(Okay: I WANTED to write a sawed-off version Ocean Bastards, my wet tactical combat cyberpunk game, but as ever I couldn't make it fit and still seem like fun. So I had some Ideas in the shower late one evening and resurfaced the next day to make this instead.) 

Interestingly enough, the first draft of this game is much more complicated - it's included in the PDF downloads, and it has all sorts of faff with refresh conditions and different modifiers and stats and a setting, of sorts.

I spent the morning on it and it wasn't really working, then I remembered an incident with a friend of mine when I was running Spire for her:

I make everyone copy out a short form version of their abilities onto their character sheets because a) it saves us having to reference the book and b) it forces players to understand their own rules a bit. (That's the dream, anyway.) Ziz - that the name of the friend, she's in the Spire example of combat too cause I thought her name sounded cool - was playing a Bound, who are our sort of Murder Batman class, and their core ability is called SURPRISE INFILTRATION. Here's the text of the ability in full:

Surprise Infiltration. Nothing can keep you out. Once per session, insert yourself into a situation where you are not currently present, so long as there’s some conceivable way you could get in there.

Which became:

Surprise Infiltration. Once per session, I can appear anywhere if I can convince Grant that it's fun to do so.

We made the point at the time that, really, most rules can boil down to "I can do this if the GM says I can." We have certain bits set down as rules, so it's an inviolable right that you can add your Strength modifier to Strength rolls when you're playing D&D, but there's equally enough GM fiat and jiggery-pokery behind the scenes that setting the Target Number higher can completely negate that modifier. The dice sit in the middle as a charming arbitrator, and to remove some of the perceived responsibility from the GM, but they're in charge and you're gambolling for their favour.

(There's been some recent discussion about GM authority, and rulings instead of rules, and Mother May I roleplaying in general in the sort of blogs that have far too large an average post wordcount for me to read without getting distracted and wandering off. It feels like the sort of thing the OSR crowd get all fizzy about.)

Anyway, to grossly oversimplify it: all roleplaying games are bullshit and are an exercise in framing fictional concerns modulated through the prism of social interaction between players and GM. So when I was writing the simplest possible one, I wanted to say the quiet part out loud and condense almost all the rules into "convince the GM that it's a good idea." RP6 is that. (Dull name, I know. I figure the 6 looks a bit like a G, and it uses a D6, so.)

It leans heavily on FKR, or Free Kriegsspiel Renaissance, which draws on two-centuries old Prussian wargaming rules to bear the weight of a fictional world. FKR uses a high-trust, often diceless system where the players say things and the GM tells the players how those things go. (It originated as an military training measure: junior officers would command imaginary armies against each other, senior officers would adjudicate results, and presumably they all drank out of big metal mugs of beer with lids on during.)

It's pretty much the purest form of roleplaying you can have, and everything else we do as games designers is guide rails that push the story, tone, pacing etc. in different directions. (Not that "pure" implies "best," here. Unprocessed sugar cane is all well and good but I can't make a cake with it, can I?)

The other thing I want to mention about complexity is: I have been listening to Til Death Do Us Heart, which is our new Actual Play podcast. I'm in it as a sort of wet, dark-elf-shaped bag of drugs that calls itself Castor Scrift. Here he is:

It's very good - Naomi has done a stellar job of editing our evening blather into tight, 45-minute episodes, often with self-contained plot arcs - but crumbs if I don't physically recoil with discomfort whenever someone uses a rule I wrote. It just seems to get in the way of the storytelling: everyone's having a great time describing the world and their characters, and they're roleplaying and gosh it's fun, and then you gotta find the right number of dice to roll and look up the rules and roll for stress and roll for fallout and pick the fallout and and and and. Makes me want to pull off my own fingers. Horrible business. Let us tell the story.

(Completely different when it's unrecorded, mind. Use my rules all you like then. But if I'm listening to a podcast featuring my work, I usually enjoy it a great deal up until someone rolls a dice and then turn it off out of shame.)

SO: RP6 is also an effort to come up with something that would stream well. It has a single mechanic that you could probably communicate to someone in a crowded bar or the scant 15-minute window before live play starts, and most of that mechanic is conversation anyway.

I've written long enough. Have a look at the game. I'm happy with it, even if there's no goblins or goats or crowboys or sad beautiful vampires or audacious heists in this one.

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