Another project I’m working on is a tabletop roleplaying game (ttRPG – for those who don’t know what that is, D&D is the most popular ttRPG) called Lady Luck’s Chosen Few. It is intended to be a rules-lite system that is easy to pick up and easy to play. The creation of it began a few months ago after reading a blog post by The Angry GM (post itself here) about disregarding Tabletop conventions (such as ability scores) to create a better system.
In short: the article explains that when sitting down to create a Tabletop RPG, you should not ask yourself, “How am I going to handle ability scores?” but rather answer the question that ability scores were created to answer, “How am I going to resolve situations that characters get themselves in based on chance, where the character’s capabilities are taken into account?” Another way to word this is, “How is action resolution handled?”
From the problem this article presented, the idea evolved into: I want to make a ttRPG that is easy to pick up and play, is more oriented to low-fantasy settings (magic is limited or extremely dangerous and mythical creatures are a rare sight), where death lurks around every corner, combat can be easily resolved in a few minutes (thereby lowering its prevalence in the system), and character creation is based on a character first mentality, rather than stat-based.
After the jump is a brief introduction to the rules so far.
Character Creation
A staple of the game itself is that the player’s characters (PCs) are extraordinary, not because they were born that way, but because they made themselves that way by garnering the attention of some cosmic force which now guides their path. Character creation requires determining 3 simple things: what your character looks like, how they behave, and what the life event was. None of these have to do with rules or game mechanics.
After determining those three things, play can begin. But, obviously, there needs to be some way to define a character’s capabilities through game mechanics, otherwise, everyone’s the same.
Action Resolution
Any action that has a higher than ~20% chance of failure requires the roll of a standard six-sided die. Before the action is rolled, a certain threshold is determined by the Game Master (GM – controls all the NPCs [non-player characters] and the environment). If the player who is controlling the character rolls at or above the pre-defined threshold, their character succeeds in whatever they were trying to do. If they roll below that threshold, they fail. Each roll can be affected by a character’s ‘Aptitudes’, which apply to different situations on a case-by-case basis. Any given aptitude will, at most, affect a player’s roll by 1.
Practically, any injury received counts as a death blow – a roll is made to determine if a character survives that death blow.
Character Capabilities
To represent their connection to some cosmic force, a given character has a stat known as ‘Luck’ (hence, the name of the game). They can use this luck in two ways: spending it (lowering the current value) to increase a roll by however much is being spent, or burning it (lowering the max value to gain an aptitude).
Characters also start with a Wealth stat (that can only be burnt) which is used to determine what equipment they can have.
I will likely put the rules for this system on its own page of this blog as I am able.
Xavier Makes 