An Introduction of Sorts

I wake. Mayhaps I am a robot. Perhaps not, difficult to say; my sensor array is cloudy. Do humans have sensors? Do robots say “mayhaps”?

This blog is about the development of a rules-light OSR-inspired tabletop role-playing game. Characters are robots - probably - who scavenge for spare parts in the ruins of a strange city.

Updates

Draft 0.2 of the rules is ready to go. Draft 0.1 was playtested and found to malfunction.

Draft 0.2 includes:

The basic rules, a few pages.
Some notes for the Referee.
A (very) basic character sheet.
A micro-setting, Mother’s Little Helper.

What updates are in the works?

Longer adventures.
A guide to using an irl city for RitR games.
Some art.
Thoughts on running your robots as characters in OSR modules. Can robots handle the Borderlands? Can you use the activation->max d6 mechanic alongside another ruleset? Does this even make sense as a thought experiment?

Tools: When is the building going to fall?

I hate to answer questions during a game; I prefer to pose them. When I really need to know the answer to an important question in the game, I like to let the dice gods speak when possible and convenient. So, here are two ways to decide when the building is going to fall.

Method 1: Use a dice pool timer. Give the building a rating 5-10. Begin with 1d in the pool (all are d6). Each time a character does something risky or shaky in the building, let them save DEX to see if they can avoid shaking the building. On a failure, roll the dice pool timer. For each die that shows a 4+, add another die to the pool. Whenever the timer is rolled and there are a number of 4+ values equaling the building’s rating, it collapses.

Method 2: Use a Jenga tower with 12 layers, mentally label them from bottom up 1 through 12. Each time a character does something risky or shaky and fails a DEX save, roll d12. Remove a Jenga block at or below the layer of the tower with the rolled value. The building collapses when the Jenga tower collapses. I know, I know, this is not to the taste of some because it relies on a player’s dexterity. That’s why Method 1 is up there!

Game design notes

Themes and characters first. But after that, the character mechanics just burbled up naturally, a meld of a few different ideas. First, from Ben Milton’s Knave, characters are what they carry. That seems to be at least as true for robots as for any organic being. Second, an economy of hit dice. I’ve been playing around for a while with the idea of hit dice that are more dynamic, and represent something more like the character’s energy instead of … whatever they represent. Robots with energy cells seem to match this concept pretty well. After that, two questions for nearly everything: Is it carried? and Is it charged?. Skills are carried but not charged; they may change in the future. Tools are carried, and the cooler ones are charged. Energy cells themselves may be carried in a future update (3 to a slot? still kicking this around), bringing up a really tricksy thought experiment: if you have to carry your hit dice with you, but you can choose to store some in a safe location and only take a few…would you do that to free up some inventory slots? For robots, this is a pretty realistic consideration, or at least for my hyper-flexible and configurable robots.