Oh, hi there! I didn't see you there! Why don't you come in and learn a little bit about The Awesome System, Billy.
I don't know about the Exalted comparison, I only read a little of that book, but it was just regular WoD stuff, wasn't it? I mean, I never understood the whole "This is your rpg group playing Exalted" meme, since it seemed to be a fairly standard fantasy rpg, just with White Wolf dice-rolling.
My rpg does use exploding dice, which are pretty common in gaming now I think. By the time I'd gotten around to playing Shadowrun, I'd see it in plenty of other rpgs already, so I wanted to take this typical rpg thing and expand on it, which is where stunts and the speed dice system come into it. So, I'll try to explain what makes The Awesome System different from other rpgs here.
A few of these images below are taken from a very sexy and handy comic I'm getting put together to explain the whole process, which I'll post here when it's done!So, for a typical dice roll, you'd be looking at something like the numbers below.
This gives you a roll of 10, which is pretty normal so far, right?
Anyway, if you spend 2 Awesome Points to make the ability a Stunt, you get the following:
Basically, stunts are the glue that hold the whole system together and open up all the cool stuff you can do. I wanted to take it a step further by making Stunts able to be picked up for free under the right circumstances, which is the direction I took the combat system in. In combat, you roll your Speed Dice, which is based on how much Speed you purchased for your character and can be anything from 2 to a million, and place them on the Action Grid to see what kind of actions you're taking. Here's a pretty cool mock-up of how it's going to appear on the character sheet.
The chart there has "Stunt Levels", because the higher your Stunt Level, the better the Stunt is. Basically if you spend your Awesome Points on extra dice, you get a number of bonus dice multiplied by the Stunt Level. So you know, like you spend 3 AP on a Quadruple Stunt, you get 12 bonus dice, for example.
So if you rolled your Speed Dice, you could be looking at something like:
... which, as you can see, would give you two stunts to play around with for free. High dice rolls directly translate into more damage dealt on a 1-for-1 basis, so a large part of combat is planning your combat actions around responding to the kind of roll you got on your Speed Dice. Some weapons have high "Handling" scores, which allow you to move the positions of your actions around, so if you're not happy with your roll you can spread the actions out or bunch them together by spending more Awesome Points, while other weapons can't Stunt, so there's that sort of back-and-forth play and you're doing something different every round. If you have a Stunt at the start and then some regular actions after that, you might want to use your fists or a high-accuracy pistol at the start, then switch to a weapon that can't Stunt quite so well, but has great base damage, like a rocket launcher or a Sledgehammer, for the rest of your actions.
It's really my personal response to the situation in a lot of rpgs right now where every combat round is exactly the same, and you're plugging away at the same kind of attack every time your turn comes up, and it kinda makes you think on your feet. Everyone I've played with has always found it really exciting and used the system to kinda grandstand and blow these crazy actions out of proportion, or do silly stuff like push all their actions into one turn with Handling for a super-mega-ultra stunt that blows all their points.
Hope that explains things!
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Topic: FROCTO MADE AN RPG (Read 3996 times)