I haven’t had a regular over-the-table tabletop game in years. In that time, I’ve wandered pretty far afield. Time for a new system, methinks.
Inspirations / Design Goals:
Dice Pools! I haven’t meddled in them yet.
Lots of rolls with a small chance of success! (I’ve been playing Pokemon Pocket.)
Parrying, baiting, and kiting enemies. (I’ve been playing Dark Souls.)
Dice Pools
While a d20 roll generates a flat distribution, a dice pool generates a Poisson curve. Poisson curves are fun because they can model large numbers of rare events, like how many holo cards you get after opening 20 packs of Pokemon cards, how many letters will arrive at an unpopular person’s house on a given day, and how many Prussian officers are kicked to death by a horse in any given year.
Of course everything turns into a bell curve eventually with enough dice rolls. That’s true for Poisson curves as well as for flat d20 curves. (Add enough d20 curves together and eventually you’ll see the bell emerge from the flat muck, proud and unbent.)
Other design goals:
Broadly compatible with all the OSR modules I already own.
Faster Combat:
Single roll attack (no separate attack and damage rolls)
Players act, monsters react (like Dungeon World)
Chainmail HP (1 HP at level 1, 2 HP at level 2, etc)
The Core Mechanic
Roll a bunch of d6s. If you get at least one 6, you succeed.
Optional: If you get more 6s, then you get extra success, or critical success, or whatever you want.
Optional: If you don’t have at least one single die that’s at least a 4 or higher, that’s a critical fail.
The midpoint is 4 dice. This gives you a 52% chance of success (including a 13% chance for an extra success). You also have a 48% chance to fail, including a 6% chance to critically fail. Most rolls should center around 4 dice. See below.
Easy tasks: add one or two dice. Hard tasks: do the opposite.
# of Dice | Fail | Any Success | 1 Success | 2+ Success | Crit Fail |
1 | 83% | 17% | 17% | 0% | 50% |
2 | 69% | 31% | 28% | 3% | 25% |
3 | 58% | 42% | 35% | 7% | 13% |
4 | 48% | 52% | 39% | 13% | 6.2% |
5 | 40% | 60% | 40% | 20% | 3.1% |
6 | 34% | 66% | 40% | 26% | 1.6% |
7 | 28% | 72% | 39% | 33% | 0.8% |
8 | 23% | 77% | 37% | 40% | 0.4% |
9 | 19% | 81% | 35% | 46% | 0.2% |
10 | 16% | 84% | 32% | 52% | 0.1% |
Most of these cluster around what I consider the sweet spot: 20-80% chance of success. There’s a lot of diminishing returns after 5 dice, which I consider a great feature.
Is it fun? More fun that rolling a d20? (I fucking love rolling d20s.) After playing around with it: yes? Four dice doesn’t feel like a 52% chance to succeed. It feels lower. Which might have negative impacts on player confidence (“I don’t think we can do this, guys.”) but positive impacts on how lucky people feel (“I can’t believe we did that, guys!”). A trade-off, maybe. Please let me know what you think.
Anyway, I’m calling is Stargazer, because Poisson is both “fish” and “poison” depending on whether you are in France or in 3rd grade. Stargazers are poisonous fish that are just as elegant as this system. Here’s a picture of one.
STARGAZER
Two columns! Rules on the left, discussion on the right.
Characters
Everyone has the regular 6 stats, unless you prefer that they have 4 or 3 or 8. Stats are all set to 4 (the average). Then, for each stat, roll 2d6. For each 6, increase the stat (up to 6). For each 1, decrease the stat (down to 2). If you want exceptional stats to be more/less common you can change the size of the die. Alternatively, just roll a d6 to see which stat is higher than average (5), and roll another d6 to see which stat is below average (3). | Each die here is worth a +2 modifier in other systems, which is pretty big. Maybe just limit yourself to the 3-5 range unless you want to have really strong and really weak skills. It really sucks to have low numbers. 3 is rough. 2 is brutal. However, diminishing returns means that you can give players 6s and 7s and they won’t be able to abuse it too bad. |
Everyone starts with 4 points spread across 1-2 skills, based on their background. | 4 in a skill gives you a 50% chance of success, but remember that the default assumption is that you’re making this check in a dungeon while orcs kick down the door, not if you were practicing your profession in town. Like if you have “Cobber 1” on your character sheet and you want to make some basic shoes out of leather scraps over the weekend, I wouldn’t even make you roll for it. Rolling is only really for stressful situations (where orcs are imminent) or ambitious projects (fancy shoes). |
After each session, each player rolls a die for each time they attempted a skill in a dungeon, or had an interesting training montage in town. Up to 5 dice can be rolled this way–in the same skill or in different ones, whatever. If you get a 6 on your roll, you advance a point in that skill. That’ll get you up to 7 ranks in a skill. Above that, you’ll need to find the appropriate legendary NPC and get your Skill Quest assigned. | I like the little “roll for skill-ups” minigame at the end of each session because (1) players get to review what they did, and (2) players only get to level up in skills that they actually performed. It’s like a miniature level-up after every session. |
Everyone has HP equal to their level. 1 HP in Stargazer = 1 HP elsewhere. Fighters get +1 HP, but only if they wear heavy armor. | I know this is a big departure from the norm. It has the benefit of being really fucking simple, though. |
If you hate that, and you want to differentiate between different types of armor: Heavy Armor: Sacrifice to reduce any incoming damage by 1 HP, but you sink in water. (Fighters also get +1 HP.) Light Armor: Sacrifice to reduce incoming fire/Reflex/Dex/AoE damage by 1 HP. Wizard Robes: Sacrifice to reduce incoming magic damage by 1 HP. (Wizards can also restore 1 MP at lunch.) | I’ve actually cooled on armor over the years. I don’t think it’s a super-interesting part of the game. There’s rarely any interesting decisions to be made there, and players usually just gravitate to whatever fits their character concept. HOWEVER, I know that people hate it when leather armor and plate armor are the same mechanically. Hell, even I feel the urge. Note that these are all active effects. (Passives are boring. You could say that Light Armor gives you +1 to save against AoE. Don’t do that.) Yes, this is kind of an extension of “all shields shall be sundered” but I like these rules because (1) I like active mitigations more than passives on average, (2) I like things that help survivability at low levels, and (3) I like item breakage/consumables. It helps players know when it’s time to leave the dungeon without having needing anyone to die first. |
Initiative & Turn Order
Surprise rounds (against the players) are usually caused by the players knowingly taking some risk. Examples: moving faster than exploration speed (basically tiptoeing through the dungeon), going into an area with a known enemy, going through some vulnerable environment. Surprise rounds typically don’t deal damage, but instead impose some situational penalty. Examples: enemies might run for help, barricade a door, or take the high ground. | It’s no fun when you get surprised, enemies get critical hits, and you die without ever having a chance to make any decisions. Feels bad, man. Surprise rounds are still useful as Bad Consequence of Player Decisions, though, so I do believe in deploying them. I also support being a little cruel with surprise rounds (especially since they’re the consequence of players taking a known risk, rather than just bad luck). |
Every round, every player gets 1 turn. Players take their turn in any order that they want. The round is over once everyone has taken their turn. | No rolling initiative. Just straight to the part where the players open the door and you get to shout “ORCS! WHAT DO???” Faster is good, I think. I’ve been playing a lot of games with newbies, and stuff like initiative sometimes serves as a psychic barrier–one more layer of “what-is-this-rule-again?” cruft before they get to thinking “okay-what-do-we-do-about-orcs?”. |
When you make an attack, you roll a bunch of attack dice (details below). The number of 6s is equal to the damage that you deal. | Single roll, no calculations. We do lose out on a useful distinction between accuracy and power, but alas, no treasure was reached without great sacrifice. |
After each player turn, there is one monster turn. This is true no matter how many monsters there are. Minions are also an exception. For example, goblins take 2 turns after every player turn. This also assumes that there is a line of scrimmage in combat. If the players are completely surrounded, they may suffer more than the typical # of attacks. | Okay, this looks simple, but there’s a few interesting consequences of this rule. First, it balances out different party sizes. If a party of 3 is fighting a pair of ogres, the ogres make 3 counterattacks. Party of 6? 6 Counterattacks. So if your run a game for an unusually big/small table, this will help things feel appropriately scaled. Second, it’s a boon for solo bosses, who won’t get screwed by the action economy as much. Third, it makes fighters more relevant in combat, because they’re the ones with the best armor and HP. But more on that below. |
However, monsters get a -2 (cumulative) penalty if they take more than 1 turn per round. So they take their second counterattack at -2, their third counterattack at -4, etc. The exception to this is boss monsters, who only get a -1 penalty. (Boss monsters also get a special boss action at the end of the round.) | Basically, an enemy’s first attack is their deadliest one. Each counterattack they make afterwards is weaker and weaker. |
If you hit an enemy, they gotta target you back with their counterattack. However, once someone misses their attack roll, the enemies are unrestricted, and are free to target whoever they want for the rest of the round. This only applies to melee attack. If someone shoots an orc with an arrow, the orc is not obligated to chase you down across the battlefield. Also note that this doesn’t stop enemies from pulling levers or running away. It just means that: if they’re going to attack someone, they need to attack the person that just hit them. | This represents the players controlling the tempo of battle, keeping pressure on their enemies without giving their opponents opportunities for clever tactics. However, the real purpose of this rule is to empower fighters to set the pace of battle. Since fighters are the most likely to land their attacks, and can handle damage the best, it makes sense for fighters to make the first couple of attacks. Sure, the players can attack in any order they want, but you probably want the fighter to attack first, and afterwards you probably want to attack the same person the fighter did. Downsides: (1) This creates a little bit of overhead, since the DM has to keep track of whether the players have missed an attack roll this turn yet. (2) Potentially straining credulity with “Why can’t the dragon attack that guy?” |
Action Dice
Players have 3 Action Dice every turn, that they can spend on whatever actions that they want. You can split your AD across a movement and an attack. Or you can put all of your AD into a full attack action. | I think this is pretty easy to explain to newbies. “You have 3 dice to spend on actions every turn. You can split them up, or you can spend them on the same thing. The more dice you spend on a single action, the more effective you are at it.” |
When you spend AD on something, you don’t just spend those dice. You also roll your bonus dice. Lots of stuff has bonus dice, recorded on your character sheet.: A fighter might have Attack +3 and Move +1. If the fighter spends all 3 AD to make a Move action, they’ll roll 3 AD, plus 1 from the table above, for a total of 4 AD. If they get at least 1 six, they succeed. This gives them a 52% chance of success. If the fighter wants to split their action, with 2 AD going towards the jump and 1 AD being used to attack the orc on the far side, they’ll instead roll: 2 AD + 1 from Table = 3 dice for Movement 1 AD + 3 from Table = 4 dice for Attack Translated, they have a 42% chance to make the jump and 52% chance to hit. | So the best way to look at an attack roll is by considering both the hit chance and the average damage done. Level 1 character has Attack +1 giving them a 52% chance to hit something if they spend all 3 dice on it (and rolling a total of 4 dice). This feels about right. They’ll also deal about 1 HP of damage if they hit (equal to 1d6 elsewhere), so that’s about spot on. This is roughly compatible with all of my OSR modules on the shelf, so that’s cool. Character damage will eventually scale a little bit higher as they level up compared to other OSR systems (since they improve both to-hit and damage), but that’s okay–I don’t really give out magic swords +2 so it should be fine if the characters do little more damage than before. |
You deal 1 point of damage for every 6 that shows up on your Attack roll. If you deal less than 1 point of damage, it counts as a miss. Otherwise it’s a hit. | If converting to other OSR games (or GLOG), each HP here is worth 3.5 HP there. Each +1 to Attack Dice here is worth: +1½ point bonus to Attack Roll, or +½ point bonus to Weapon Damage Single roll is nice, but you lose a useful distinction between accuracy and power. |
You have bonuses for:
| I’ll add more to this list as I think of them. |
You get +1 to your attack bonus:
| At level 1, this is very close to OSR expectations. It scales a bit faster, but with the level 4 cap it should never feel like the characters are OP. Like a level 4 fighter will do roughly 2x the damage of a level 1 fighter but that sounds okay to me. |
You get +1 to your Movement bonus:
| Acrobats can have more. That’s kinda their thing. |
You get +1 to your Parry bonus:
| I want to keep a tight lid on defensive moves and healing. Both of those things slow down combat, but I want to leave a little room for them. |
Movement is usually a binary–do you make the jump or not. Alternatively, the DM can just state that running into the next room takes 1 AD, climbing onto the table takes 2 AD, etc. | |
You can also dedicate dice to Parrying. Each success here reduces incoming damage by an equal amount. Example:
| Since this is usually trading dice on a one-for-one basis, it doesn’t give any net advantage to the player UNLESS they have a shield. If they have a shield, they will want to be setting aside 1 AD for parrying every turn against a foe that is similar to them. However, it’s still a potentially interesting choice, since they might be better served by just using their full attack against weaker opponents (when they don’t care about reducing incoming damage). |
Monster Stats
Monsters get 1 HP for every HD they have.
| Good enough. I’m also a big fan of most groups of monsters having a leader with +1 HP, just to give some texture to the encounter. |
Monsters have Attack dice equal to 3+level. Give them other stats as needed, bearing in mind that 4 dice = 52% chance of success. | 3 Attack dice is roughly equal to attacking with a 1d6 dagger and having a 50% chance to hit. Weirdly enough, this scales weirdly well with OSR expectations for ogres and 1d12s and all sorts of other stuff. |
Clumsy monsters have bigger penalties for subsequent counterattacks. Instead of the normal -2 cumulative per counterattack, they might have -4. For example, a clumsy ogre (Lvl 4) might have a first counterattack that uses 7 Attack dice, but its second counterattack will only use 3 Attack dice. | Needs playtesting. This is just to sharpen the distinction between the first attack and the second attack. And the third. Our poor ogre doesn’t get to make more than 2 counterattacks. |
Combat Options
There’s more ways to attack an enemy than to just attack them. You can also:
| I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls. I love it but 30% of that game is just strafing around some big armored fuck and waiting for them to take a swing at you. |
Group Attacks If multiple people attack the same target at once, they put all of their dice together in a single bowl. They get +1 Attack dice for every person beyond the first. Roll all of the dice as one huge pile. If you do damage, everyone describes how they used teamwork to kill bad guys. After the players attack, the surviving enemies makes the same numer of counterattacks as normal (1 per player). | Narratively, I think this is a win. You look at the roll, you see that you’ve done 4 damage to the dragon. The DM tells you it’s dead. Awesome! The 5 players get to narrate how they do some cool bullshit to use all of their abilities together to kill it. Credit is shared along with high-fives. Efficiency-wise, also great. A whole bunch of people can attack simultaneously, turning 10 dice rolls into 1. Much faster. Mechanically, it’s always advantageous for players to attack as a group instead of individually, since they have a better chance to kill it before it makes any counterattacks. The few extra dice are nice, but the real benefit is killing the enemy before it can hit you back. Of course, if there are multiple enemies alive, you may waste your turns overkilling one enemy when it would have been better to spread it out. |
Baiting Normally you attack, and are then counter-attacked in return. However, you can bait an enemy into attacking, and then you can perform the counterattack. If you do this, you get to make a critical hit. Your d6s explode. For every 6 you roll, you can grab another 6 and add it to the roll, with each of these also being able to explode recursively. | This might not seem like a lot, but this is a flat +20% bonus to average damage per turn. That’s a lot! However, the risk is that the enemy might flat-out kill you before you get to counterattack, so there’s a balance to be struck here. Don’t counterattack if you think that the enemy has a good chance to bring you to zero. You also don’t want to Bait an enemy with only 1 HP left. What’s the point of exploding a d6? |
Smart enemies can make an Int check to see through your baiting attempt, and will be free to attack someone else (not necessarily you). | Maybe. Needs playtesting. |
Kiting The whole party all spends an action die backing up into an adjacent room (or area). The monsters make their attack(s) normally as they would during Baiting, except that the players get to roll +2 free Parry dice during the enemy’s attack. | Needs playtesting. This rule might be shit. The idea is that kiting an enemy is a great defensive maneuver against a tough opponent, and that cautious players will want to kite enemies instead of fighting them toe-to-toe. |
When you kite enemies, roll for random encounters normally. There’s always the chance of bumping into more enemies. Smart enemies might see through your kiting attempt, and might just use a ranged attack or something. | Works best against stupid enemies, and enemies without melee attacks. The risk of bumping into a second encounter is pretty harsh, but maybe kiting will be a good idea for (1) very tough fights or (2) in a relatively safe area. I’ll get back to you after playtesting. |
Bosses
Bosses make an additional attack at the bottom of the turn, after everyone has gone. After they have made this attack, they telegraph the next one. For example, a dragon might inhale deeply, signaling that they’re going to breathe fire on their next boss attack (after everyone has had a turn). | All my bosses have telegraphed attacks now. I honestly think it’s the best way to keep fights feeling dynamic. |
Whenever a boss fails a save to a save-or-die spell or effect, it can choose to take 3 damage and instead suffer a minimal version of the effect. For example, instead of being petrified, a boss might just have a limb turned to stone. Or it might just be petrified for a single round. | I also highly recommend this one for bosses. Save-or-die effects are still very useful since they deal 3 points of damage and inflict some other penalty. It helps your bosses not get one-shotted by bullshit, but still pay a hefty penalty when they escape petrification. |
Spellcasting
It takes 2 action dice (AD) to cast a spell. These are different than magic dice (MD) which are used to cast the spell. MD are tracked the same as the GLOG. Each MD that is rolled as part of a damaging spell will deal 1 HP of damage as long as it shows a 2 or higher. AoE spells give enemies a Dex save for half. | Needs playtesting. |
Dungeoncrawling
The Underclock starts at 7 and counts down to 0. Each time you roll on the Underclock, roll 6 dice. Each time you roll a 6, decrement the Underclock by 1 point. If the Underclock count reaches 1 and you roll a 1 at the same time, the players get an Omen of what the next encounter will be. | Kinda ugly but all of the parts are there. |
If you need more rules just refer to GLOG version 16.
