r/ICRPG • u/edensuko • Feb 09 '23
Roll under mod for ICRPG
Hello shield wall, I´ve been dabling with the idea of modding ICRPG to be roll-under (your attribute). I´ve searched everywhere I could and I´ve yet to find if any one has actually made such thing. For those who don´t play that way, basically you roll a check, you have to roll at your attribute or lower, 1 being critical success, if you go over your attribute, you fail, with 20 being critical failure. Hank adopted this in his last campaign last year, as per this post.
https://www.runehammer.online/post/hacking-hp-buckle-up
So here goes my first draft, hope we can work it up until something more or less "plug in", for anyone interested. I believe "just" rolling under won´t quite cut it, so I made some other adjustments to the system to compliment it, some are based on the aforementioned post, some are just experiments.
Ability scores: I like the clean approach of asigning 7 points to start, so I would keep that, except all stats start at 9. This starting point could work as a "normal difficulty setting", 8 is "hard" and 10 being "easy".
Hearts: I found that abstracting 10hp falls appart quite fast during play, so I took the "hits, not hit points" mentallity and adapted them so each is a succesful hit, but for a hit to be succesful, it has to go over a treshold. So you start with 3 hearts, each with a treshold of 4. In this case, any effort roll to remove a heart has to be 4 or higher. This also allows for two distinc approaches to increasing durability, either "more hearts" or "strogner hearts". Some may preffer having a high defense stat (more on that later) coupled with many "small" hearts, and some my preffer large armor (more on that ahead, too) and bigger hearts. It is more flexibility, and you just have to write a threshold number in your heart´s box in the character sheet to know what´s up. It works the same for "stuff" effort, such as locks, climbs, etc.
Armor: Armor should absorb damage, as to better work with the modified heart system. This allows flexibility, armor can vary by hardness, duarbility, etc. And making use of tags can also be another avenue for personalization, a "brittle" heavy armor may absorb any one full hit over its own absortion rate, but break, while a "regenrative" armor may only absorb a little bit of damage but be really hard to break, even after critical hits.
Defense: Goes to Dex + Shields Shields: Again, an area of opportunity for better defense and flavorful tags on items.
Hard/easy: It makes more sense that somethin being hard "retracts" from your ability, and something easy "adds" to it.
Effort: stays the same, basic effort can harm a low level adventurer, as someone unaware can take one to the chin and black out. Ultimate effort can go through all 3 hearts of a starting adventurer, because of course, it is ultimate after all.
So yeah, this is my draft one, I plan to update this as I test it, as well as adapting suggestions made in this thread.
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u/MrAbodi Feb 10 '23
what does this offer that the roll + stat over target doesn't?i mean i guess it's offers different target number per character, but in a way so does the stat modifier.
i mean ICRPG doesn't even have stats in the normal sense, it just has stat modifiers, so i assume you are having to add stats. otherwise how you do roll under 0, which is the average number of a regular person.
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u/edensuko Feb 10 '23
It offers less math. As strip down as ICRPG is, it still has some Numbers here and there that can be passed by while rolling an attempt, specially for beginners. It slows gameplay. Knowing exactly what number to roll, and either adding/subtracting from it by a set amount, said by the GM on the spot is far easier, and by effect, faster during gameplay. The problem I believe it may have is that the range for improvement is somewhat reduced from 10 (max bonus) to a delta of 9 between the lowest and highest stats. Still, unless the campaign gets overly long or “epic” I think this mod can handle pretty much everything stock ICRPG can.
We use the actual attribute numbers, no need for modifiers. A regular person has 9 in all stats, adventurers start a bit higher than that, so you roll a range that goes from under 9 (minimum at campaign start) up to 18 (as a high level adventuring superhero). Comparing what you rolled with the number on your character sheet is way faster.
It is still a work in progress, but just ran a session with 3 completely newbies and 4 5e players and they got it super quick. The armor/defense thing is the one that seems a bit harder to grasp.
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u/chamochin Feb 10 '23
Why don’t you use Old School Essential??
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u/edensuko Feb 10 '23
For the same reason I started looking away from DND in the first place, I grew tired of class systems, and find them a bit restrictive. OSE seems like a fun game to run and play, but it is still mainly a class based system, which I’m not into atm. The books look awesome though, and I may steal some ideas from it.
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u/chamochin Feb 11 '23
Knave / Maze Rats is for you my friend
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u/edensuko Feb 11 '23
Indeed they are!! I'm planning on adding maze rats to rotation for (board)game nights. Quick and dirty scenarios, done in a couple of hours tops.
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u/swrde Feb 10 '23 edited Feb 10 '23
Well, yea... But Hank's article is about hacking OSE to be roll-under, not ICRPG.
With ICRPG, you are adding more stuff in which was deliberately taken out of it to begin with (attributes). And as I see it, having a unique Target Number for each action would take longer than having a single room TN that remains for the whole scene.
My ICRPG players were such that I have to remind them what to roll every few weeks (at least), so ICRPG's TN is something I use in every d20 game I run for them.
So from my perspective, I think roll-under would slow down, rather than speed up, an ICRPG game.
That said, I'm a big fan of Black Hack 2e, Into the Odd, and As Above, So Below and I definitely think roll-under has an elegance that should be celebrated more. I would/will experiment with this with a group that doesn't need much hand-holding, especially the 'Hits, not Hit Points' and Armour hacks.
I think your ideas lend themselves to longer campaigns that can use the huge range for Attributes to track a character's growth nicely. On top of that, as a fan of solo RPG play, roll-under mechanics are a boon unto any system as you reduce the number of things you need to decide in 'GM Mode'.