Game for 30-something newbies

[Bert]

Hi all,

I'm putting together a game for a bunch of 30-something newbies who have developed an interest in tabletop RPGs through playing CRPGs. They're all rather sheepish about it, which is kind of funny. Still labouring under teenage peer pressure after a few decades? Nice! The Geek Within always wins...

Anyway, I thought I'd use a rules-lite die-pool system I developed on the back of tinkering with games such as The Pool and Risus. Action resolution is simple. You roll a number of dice (d6s) equal to your attribute score (1-5), with results equal to or less than your skill (also 1-5) regarded as good. Performance in any given instance is based on how many good results you have compared to a difficulty rating (which is random roll for both passive and active tasks). It works plenty good, as does the rest of the system - althought there's not that much more to it.

I've chosen a rules-lite system so as not to overwhelm the players with arduous character gen, dull-ass number crunching or overly complex rules. This is likely to end up as a regular thing, the first regular game I've had in ages, but I've never used a rules-lite system for anything other than one-offs before. I'm concerned that a low-res system won't be able to deal with in-play character development.

Has anyone had any experience of running a fairly long-running rules-lite low-res campaign? How did in-play character development work out with a low-res system? Did the graininess and/or simplicity lead to problems?

At present in-play development of skills is as follows: if you consistently produce a number of good rolls above the expected average (five rolls in a row) then your character is already performing as if they had a higher skill score, so their skill score automatically increases by 1 and the process repeats.

I've been thinking about adding something from the current game I'm working on, slightly adapted, to try and give the players a bit more to work with. These are Storylines (e.g. Wanted For Crimes He Did Not Commit [4], Unknown Parentage [2], Seeks Revenge Against Lord Umbriel [3] etc.) which are freeform thingies that allow players to have creative control over self-defined sub-plots. When you want to implement a Storyline you roll a number of dice equal to the Storyline score, with good rolls on 3 or less. You spend good rolls on adding new plot elements - NPCs, chance events etc. If every die comes up good the Storyline score increases by 1 to a maximum of 5. If every die comes up bad 1 die is transferred to a new Storyline linked to its parent.

If the graininess is going to be a problem, would anyone care to comment on whether they think this system will make up for it? From what I know of Hero Wars I gather it has something similar, although its nowhere near as grainy. Anyone have any experience with this?

I've spent too long playing games with percentile skills to have any intuition about this kind of thing outside of one-off just-for-fun games - which is pretty much all I've played since having kids.

Bert