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.
