Some months ago, I hosted a couple sessions of a home-brew dungeon crawler with (of all people) my wife and a young couple we know. The couple had played Star Wars 5e once but were otherwise new to roleplaying games. My wife rarely plays games of any kind and was very dubious at first but became much more interested when she realised that it was intended to be cooperative rather than competitive. They all got stuck in and we had a really good time. Sadly, life has since got in the way and we've yet to have a third meet-up, but I learned a lot during those two sessions.
The adventure was a loose adaptation of the Tomb of the Serpent Kings, with something of a more sci-fi rather than purely fantasy bent. The system was an admittedly confusing mash-up of Apocalypse World: Burned Over, Freeform Universal and so1um, with strong notes of the so-called Old School Renaissance. In fairness, I was probably trying out too many ideas at once.
From Apocalypse World came the concept of "playbooks," of which there were six: Alchemist, Bard, Fighter, Healer, Ranger and Thief. The couple chose the Bard and the Thief and my wife chose the Healer. Each character consisted of three descriptive tags—two chosen by the player and one chosen by the ref (i.e., me)—a selection of gear, and a handful of special "moves" that, whilst evocative, saw almost no actual use. I also experimented with the notion of bonds (links) but they had little bearing on the game.
Each player also received 2-4 NPCs consisting of a name and brief adjective-noun description, plus their choice of an extra item of gear from their playbook. This was broadly influenced by the OSR and proved crucial, especially during the first session: there was a singularly satisfying moment where the party recklessly triggered a stone hammer trap and I got to use my Stamp of Death on their only military-type NPC.
I also made some use of All Dead Generations' Exploration Die to keep things moving, though the players were incredibly lucky with the results each time.
By far the most heavily-used mechanic in both sessions was to ask a closed Yes-or-No question and roll 1d6—or 2d6 and take best/worst depending on the situation—with the outcome as follows.
- No, and…
- No.
- No, but…
- Yes, but…
- Yes.
- Yes, and…
This proved incredibly versatile and we used it for pretty much every scenario imaginable. Each player had their own set of distinctly-coloured dice, which they rolled themselves. Often, the character's "class" or one of its tags was enough to establish advantage/disadvantage and the results felt believable.
The flaw with this system was that when it came to actual combat, I felt like I was "pulling my punches" far too often, not deliberately but more as a side-effect of its loosely-structured nature…
But that's a story for another day.
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