Another newsletter, another bout of progress on my TTRPG projects. But before I get to those… Just in case you enjoy both TTRPGs and sumo (it’s possible, I do after all), you might be interested in my other substack Sumo Stomp!
The March tournament starts this Sunday and Sumo Stomp! is the best place to follow along with all the action.
Ok, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Here’s what I worked on since the last time you heard from me. Don’t have a lot of time to work on these things this week, but I was able to add a little something. And just a little something each week is the goal. Anything more than that is a bonus.
Steam Thieves
(Steampunk x Forged in the Dark, Ashcan here [link])
The next section in the system reference document is Rolling The Dice. There’s nothing I really need to add/change here at this point. There might be more drastic changes to the rules later on that force a revision here, but at the moment I’m thinking all these rolls will feature in STATSM.
Here’s that section:
Rolling The Dice
Steam Thieves and the Soaring Metropolis uses six-sided dice. You roll several at once and read the single highest result.
If the highest die is a 6, it’s a full success—things go well. If you roll more than one 6, it’s a critical success—you gain some additional advantage.
If the highest die is a 4 or 5, that’s a partial success—you do what you were trying to do, but there are consequences: trouble, harm, reduced effect, etc.
If the highest die is 1-3, it’s a bad outcome. Things go poorly. You probably don’t achieve your goal and you suffer complications, too.
If you ever need to roll but you have zero (or negative) dice, roll two dice and take the single lowest result. You can’t roll a critical when you have zero dice.
All the dice systems in the game are expressions of this basic format. When you’re first learning the game, you can always “collapse” back down to a simple roll to judge how things go. Look up the exact rule later when you have time.
To create a dice pool for a roll, you’ll use a trait (like your Finesse or your Prowess or your crew’s Tier) and take dice equal to its rating. You’ll usually end up with one to four dice. Even one die is pretty good in this game—a 50% chance of success. The most common traits you’ll use are the action ratings of the player characters. A player might roll dice for their Skirmish action rating when they fight an enemy, for example.
There are four types of rolls that you’ll use most often in the game:
Action roll. When a PC attempts an action that’s dangerous or troublesome, you make an action roll to find out how it goes. Action rolls and their effects and consequences drive most of the game.
Downtime roll. When the PCs are at their leisure after a job, they can perform downtime activities in relative safety. You make downtime rolls to see how much they get done.
Fortune roll. The Operator can make a fortune roll to disclaim decision making and leave something up to chance. How observant is an NPC? How far does the fire spread? How much evidence is blown away before the Coppers can seal the porthole?
Resistance roll. A player can make a resistance roll when their character suffers a consequence they don’t like. The roll tells us how much stress their character suffers to reduce the severity of a consequence. When you resist that “Broken Arm” harm, you take some stress and now it’s only a “Sprained Wrist” instead.
Now I’m thinking about a sumo board game… Maybe it’s with frogs trying to push each other off a lily pad. That would be neat.