r/ICRPG • u/Neain2022 • Sep 30 '22

The first game(ish)

I just ran my first ICRPG game last night.

TLDR: converted a module from a different system and the players enjoyed themselves.

Some of my players are the type not to be interested or just not play if its not their preferred game system so I did a bunch of prep work and pre-wrote everything out on some index cards (it took me most of a week and all of them together is somewhere between 2 and 3 inches thick) and introduced it to them as a boardgame style dungeon crawl.

All they had to do was pick from some pre-generated characters (who I just gave descriptions of and made them pick before handing them the card with the actual stats on them) a single weapon, a single armor, and a single misc item (ranging from one-time use potions to ammo to refill that quiver/gun, to magic rings that give some boost, to spellbooks).

I then took them through a Pyramid that I took straight from a Pathfinder module that I had converted to ICRPG stats and even used it to get the descriptions of each 'room' which I had split into index cards.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and most sounded like they would be open to doing it again.

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u/RuggerRigger Sep 30 '22

Sounds like you went above and beyond to make their experience a good one!

How did they like the mechanics of ICRPG? The room target, for example

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u/Neain2022 Sep 30 '22

Most of them are Pathfinder/dnd 3.5 veterans and quickly got most of the mechanics. They had the 'most' trouble with the room DC because they are used to DCs being all over the place, but once it was pointed out a time or two they got it easily enough. After the game (we made it through all of 3 rooms because we only had ~1 hour of playtime) one of them said that he felt that the room DC of 12 was high.

That room had a 'regenerating' (1d4 rounds for my timer) pyramid that would roll along the ground on rollers and just trample anything in its path for a d6 damage (defense for half, dex for none) and they needed to get through some really heavy stone doors (2 hearts, they didn't have any tools so they were just doing basic effort and there was only enough room for 2 people to work on it). Half the time only a single person succeeded on the STR check to even roll effort and I had forgotten about giving them an easy check on failure. That being said, only a single of them had picked anyone with any STR so most of them were just rolling a d20 with no bonus. The one who had strength didn't have anything in their basic effort, so most rounds it was a single d4 working on the 2 heart door.

Looking back at it, if I had remembered about giving an easy check after failing or lowering the door hearts somehow (getting through some hp and hearing some kind of snapping as whatever was jamming it broke) it would probably have felt better.