itch.io

I've been digging into Messerspiel and Abenteuerspiel. I've been trying to merge and hack them to fit my own preferences. I've found that it's really tricky to make even small tweaks to small games like these because all of the parts are so interconnected to the whole. I wanted to say I appreciate your approach and the changes you made for your game. 

Firstly, I like that you reframed it as Resolve rather than Stress. Stress is a fine word, and it has roots in Blades in the Dark, but I think "Resolve" is a broader and more pertinent word that reflects better how it functions in these stripped-down games.
Second to that, I love how you use the 7-8 on the d8 to give some additional options for the Resolve result. That helps solve one problem I had with the depletion of the pools. It bakes in the possibility of retaining your die which is valuable because it only takes on average 13 rolls of the Stress die to deplete your pool in Messerspiel. That felt a bit harsh to me, so I like that your Resolve mechanic makes it possible to retain the die.
The idea of adding Moments in the spirit of Heart/Spire is just fantastic and gives the players something to navigate towards.
And building up the pool Wushu-style is great.

All around just wonderful work here.

Question/challenge for you: my one misgiving about the Resolve Die is that it's a d8 and breaks the beautiful purity of all d6s LOL. Can you conceive of any way to get the Resolve mechanics to work with just d6s. Maybe for a d6 version the same options are available if they roll a 6? Or do you think that breaks the probabilities in an important way? I still think the d8 design is great, I'm just curious from your perspective if you see a way of making it work with d6s.

I'm not sure if I'm interpreting the rules incorrectly or if there's a bug.

I kept rolling until there were only two dice in my Ready Pool. I eventually rolled a 1 on my Stress Die, which reduced my Ready Pool to one die - just the Stress Die. But then when I went to roll again I was able to select all the check boxes for all of the other dice - they were no longer greyed out. That seemed odd because I had not Rested yet to replenish my dice pool.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding some element of the exhaustion/replenishment rules.

I stand by my original review - this is a fantastic piece of work both from a game design and layout standpoint.

However, something came up in my mind as a critique that I wanted to think through out loud. This is very nitpicky, but in the spirit of sharing thoughts about game design, I think it’s worth mentioning. One misgiving I have is that Rock-Paper-Scissors is historically, for most people, a purely adversarial game. It's very much a "finite game" - you win, I lose - and it always feels at least a little bad to lose or quite bad, if you end up on the wrong side of a losing streak. This is very much in contrast to how RPG story games are typically played as more "infinite games" that try to minimize the feeling of a zero-sum "I win, you lose" experience. With that style of zero-sum experience being the heart of the resolution mechanic I suspect many people may instinctively carry over the sentiment of “it's me vs. the GM" to win the R-P-S throw to get what they want to happen. It's subtle, but it seems likely that many people might have that feeling in their mind as they're throwing out their hand, based on years of playing R-P-S adversarially.

Rock-Paper-Scissors still seems like the obvious and elegant choice for this resolution system because it's always available with no extra supplies and almost everyone is familiar with how to play. What I’m pointing out seems like a distilled version of the “system matters” conversation that happens around different games.

There's little space to spare in the document because you were so skillfully economical with the layout, but I wonder if there's an opportunity to slip in a disclaimer/reminder that even though R-P-S is a win/lose game, RPG story games are a collaborative experience first and foremost rather than the typical win/lose experience of most games.

This is so elegantly thought out and put together. Really fantastic work.

Somebody needs to get this to Deborah - I bet she'd be so excited about it!

I've been eyeing this for awhile and finally picked it up from my LGS. Could I snag a community PDF to go with it? 

The 100 are excellent and I like how you handle Conditions. All around it's just really nice work.

In the Spells section you cite: Betty Bactontine. " Fragmentary Powers v2.0 - A Tarot Deck Generator for Janky Super-powers," Paper Elemental, June 17, 2021.
Alot of Blogspot blogs do not readily come up in Google and I was having a hard time finding it, so I wanted to leave this link here for others in the future:
https://paperelemental.blogspot.com/2021/06/fragmentary-powers-v20-tarot-deck.ht...

This looks incredible. This also reminds me of The Invisibles by Grant Morrison. 
One small typo: In the explanation for Audacity under the Rolling the Dice section you spelled it "Vulgar magik" without a "c" but elsewhere it looks like you spelled "magick" with a "c."

The last sentence of the Special Trait section seems to end prematurely: "It doesn't have to be particularly useful or noteworthy, just different enough from the baseline Big Unit that"

Thank you for this feedback. You're right, there are sections that become walls of text. I'll have to see which sections naturally jump out to me for logical highlights and breakpoints.

Yep, this could be one good option!
The general concept of SCP Foundation and the Federal Bureau of Control were both definitely in my mind as inspirations. I wanted to add a twist that the Anomalies were energy sources like oil deposits. There's a tension between wanting to locate the Anomalies because they're dangerous and AEGIS needs to protect the world from them, but they also want to find them because they're desirable as significant sources of rare energy.
I want to keep expanding the lore and logic of this setting in future updates. Please let me know if you and your players are inspired by the idea and come up with any cool offshoot ideas in your sessions.

Good callout about the usage of 'you' in certain phrasings. I'll have to take another pass to tighten this up.

Thank you so much for this review!
(And I like the style of the four different aspects for review.)