Just Use Luck

Every game provides a mechanism to determine the success or failure of a character’s actions. Whether testing abilities, skills, saves, attacks, dodges, or senses, all these boil down to:

"Do I have better, worse, or indifferent odds of accomplishing what I’m trying to do here?"

And so, every roll in a game is a Luck roll. All that changes from situation to situation is the fictional positioning of the character (Luck favors the prepared, after all). If no roll is being made, Luck isn’t being courted. The action is either impossible or it’s a fait accompli.

I wanted this to be the heart of the way Journeyman works. The aspects of a character neither offer an inherent benefit, nor impose an inherent penalty. They merely describe the character and offer affordances for the referee in the moment to determine whether or not they affect the situation. Fezzik's gigantism provides ample advantage when it comes to intimidating a portcullis guard, gives him even odds when wrestling a white ape of Barsoom, but would work against him if he were attempting to squeeze through a narrow cave fissure deep in the Great Underground Empire.

None of this removes the suspense of not knowing the outcome of an action, and none of it removes player or referee agency. So the next time you're in a position to adjudicate a situation, see if you can’t reframe the action to answer a simple question: Who has Luck's favor?

Journeyman: Reborn

After stewing on the previous incarnation of Journeyman, I decided to strip it down to the bone and build it back up to something I think is a light, extensible, and expressive framework that can support any number of settings and genres.

I had a few guiding principles. It needed:

A consistent way to resolve tasks when randomness is needed.

I wanted to avoid minigames and multiple, sometimes inconsistent, subsystems for different aspects of the game. "2d6, roll high" is an extremely simple concept to keep in mind for task resolution.

As little character quantification as possible.

I enjoy games that take a more literary approach to character design, and I wanted to see what players could come up with in an unbounded playing field.

No power bloat.

The protagonists in stories I enjoy rarely get tremendously more powerful as time goes on. Typically, they improve by getting new equipment or gaining allies. I wanted to have a game that explored that kind of growth without such a focus on increasing numbers on the character sheet.

No reliance on any dice beyond d6.

Admittedly, this is a purely stylistic stance. I collect all sorts of dice, and enjoy chucking them when I can, but I relish the simplicity of the d6 and wanted to hew close to the Traveller roots.

[I love you, too, d12, we all know you're the perfect polyhedral die.]

So, I've released its new incarnation, and you can download it on my itch.io page

Introducing the Journeyman Engine

I’d like to introduce you to a homebrew system I’ve been working on recently. I call it the Journeyman Engine, and it comprises elements steals liberally from some of my favorite Odd Borg Hack games.

I was hoping to create a lightweight system that supported rich and flavorful character concepts with enough knobs, buttons, and levers that interacting with the world would be fun but not a burden.

Resolving risky actions

Any time your character is going to try to do something risky, you’ll roll two dice, applying any appropriate modifiers, and compare the total against a range of outcomes:

Die ranks

One die comes from your character’s Ability (Strength, Agility, Wits, Empathy) and one die comes from your character’s Skill. The dice you use depend on the rank of each:

Example

With this, it’s easy to see that Magdalene, a stoic swordsman with weak Empathy (d4) and unskilled in Manipulation (d4) can only hope to succeed at a cost when trying to persuade the noble into acquiescing to her request. That is, at least, without aid from equipment or ficitonal positioning. Were she to supply the noble with enough wine or present the signet ring of the noble’s husband, she might get a +1 or +2 to her roll, opening up the possibility of an outright success.

Pushing a roll

Were she to fail, she could attempt to push the roll, giving her one final chance to succceed, at the expense of rolling her Ability die to see if it is reduced. On a 1 or 2, her Ability die would be degraded one step on the Dice Chain.

Dice chain

d10 -> d8 -> d6 -> d4 -> Broken!

Broken!

When an Ability reaches Broken, the character takes on a condition, appropriate to the Ability. Physical failures result in Damage while Mental failures result in Stress.

The Fae Queen’s Grief

In June of 2020 a group of folks gathered to produce and sell a book of single-spread adventures with the intention of sending proceeds to support a bail fund for protesters targeted and jailed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

My son Lex and I wrote an adventure, and I’m releasing it now on itch as Pay-What-You-Want.

It’s a short dungeon crawl through an ancient holding taken over by mysterious verdant growth.

Family Ties - Session 0: Character Creation

I recently started getting more interested in Ironsworn as the engine for some solo roleplaying. But instead of running in the quasi-Medieval Ironlands setting, I wanted to try a modern urban horror game. Based on some recommendations and feedback, I chose to use the new Starforged system, just removing the starship and exploration aspects, and modifying some of the assets and tables in play.

For setting and mood, I chose the modern world of Kult: Divinity Lost ¹ and set my story in a fictionalized version of Richmond, Virginia. For the purposes of a solo game, I felt it would be best to play as a Sleeper character, slowly coming to the realization that the world around him is an illusion, and occasionally gaining glimpses past the Veil.

Some of the themes I wanted to explore in this game are:

• Family duty versus personal autonomy
• Fate versus self direction
• The id, the ego, and the super-ego

Coupled with all of that, I’ve been binging various horror and personal drama media over the past few months that I felt certain would inform and guide some of the situations I’d run into.

I started to develop a character, Simon Brinkman, who’d be a thinker and a helper. Not too old with a few close contacts he could rely on. The idea of a large family came to mind. Many of the dramas I’ve been watching lately deal with the intrigues of family life. The phrase "the seventh son of a seventh son" tugged at me. To keep things mysterious, Simon would be the unwitting seventh son. His grandfather Llewellyn Brinkman sired six sons with his wife Miriam before she died. His father Matthew might not actually be his father… ²

For his stat spread, I gave him 1 in Edge and Iron, 2 in Shadow and Wits, and 3 in Heart. He’s always been good at finding things, so I made him a Sleuth, and he unknowingly relies on his natural Empath abilities. Soon, his Haunted nature will make itself known.

We create one Bond, his good friend Liz Tollier. She’s a resident in the ER at VCU Medical Center. Simon has known her since high school, and apart from a very brief, very awkward period of dating, they’ve maintained a strong friendship ever since. ³

The last step to getting this story started is an inciting event. In Simon’s case, it consists of two voice mails:

"Hey, Simon. It’s your dad. Say, listen. Any chance you’re free this week? There’s… there’s something I need to tell you. And it should be in person. It’s not… nothing… nothing bad, heh. Always that way, right? But best not over the phone, and certainly not on a voice mail. Call me back and let’s grab dinner. Your choice, my treat. Love you."

"Mister Simon Brinkman? This is Sergeant Dennis Beauchamp with the Virginia State Police. This call is in regards to a Matthew Brinkman. Please call at your earliest convenience. Day or night. Thank you."

In the next session, we’ll witness Simon’s father’s funeral, and see how he handles family he hasn’t seen in years.

1. Kult relies heavily on many themes and ideas found in Gnostic traditions. The world we inhabit and navigate is an illusory construct. We humans have been blindered to our own divinity, trapped in a material cage. A quasi-religious Matrix, if you will. ↩
2. Kult also explores mature topics and uses graphic imagery in its depiction of the world and the inhabitants therein. Throughout my Family Ties posts, I’ll include Content Warnings at the start should these topics and descriptions come into play. ↩
3. Since she’s an initial Bond, we’ll make her Formidable (1 box per progression), and she’ll impart a +3 to any roll where they act in concert towards something. ↩