Wandering Adventure Party

There are loads of ways to tinker. If you want to run it for kids, use d6s and suddenly it feels like a light-hearted and easy game (significantly easier to get successes with smaller dice pools).

The math is hardly impossible, but at least for d10, someone else has done the math. https://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/nemesis/probability.html

I used to have a better link where someone had a graph that gave a better sense of width likelihoods. Long story short, the curve is highly centered on twos and threes, and anything bigger is laughably unlikely unless you have special “master” dice.

EDIT: I FOUND IT!!!

Chance of Reign

Based on an opinion voiced in an Exalted forum, I picked up the hardback of Reign, a game self-published by Greg Stolze. Stolze is the co-author of the incredibly good Unknown Armies and wrote the best “how to run a game” chapter that I’ve ever read (published in the …

Asteroid (asteroid.divnull.com)

Good grief. I made the system by instinct and the “poke it with a stick until it hollers” method. Maybe I shouldn’t have admitted that. Ah well. I’ma hit “submit reply” anyway.

Greg Stolze, upon reading this analysis

That’s a lot of non-trivial math. Do I understand it, I hear you ask? Nice weather we’re having today…

Ah yeah, totally understand. In that case I’d recommend the ORE Toolkit (same system, but written by fans and slightly more designed around homebrewing and tweaking the underlying system for tone and lethality).

https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1401/25/1401252784488.pdf

Oooh, have you heard of Wild Talents? It has everything on your wishlist. It’s possible to create overpowered abilities, but you’d have to set out to specifically do that - and the GM would then have to say yes to it. If you’re trying to be OP in a sneaky way, it’s just not gonna happen.

I played that a few times. I love the early game lethality and gritty realism. I’ve heard Mörk Borg (sp?) is carrying that torch nowadays, have been meaning to try it.

Yes! Thank you!

One Roll Engine is my obsessive small-time RPG system. I’ve always loved systems where you get to roll a heap of d10s, but more importantly it has a highly expressive and generalizable core mechanic that allows everyone to roll at once without taking turns, and attacks resolve in a dynamic fashion so that initiative order, damage, hit location, and contested rolls all happen in one roll. It’s great for gritty, fast-paced, lethal combats where you can give players a lot of freedom to get creative and stay engaged. It has great rules for easily killed mooks as well, so you can quite easily have huge numbers of enemies and allies all in one battle, and it takes far less time to resolve each turn - and a far greater proportion of that time is people talking about what they’re going to do. Reign uses ORE, and that includes rules for running companies (gangs, businesses, armies, entire countries even). I’ve used ORE variants to run occult horror, mecha, low-magic fantasy, slice of life, robot sci-fi, and more over the years. It’s a great system and I can teach 85% of what you need to play in just a few minutes.

Play with temperature more. Your oven likely has warmer and cooler areas. Also, a warmer start with a longer, lower finish could achieve the browning you’re after.