Is it still May? Good. I don't have much time, June will start soon, and I just realized I didn't write an article here all month long. Could I just live with it and have May 2025 be skipped by this blog? Yes. Will I allow this? I suppose we'll see within three hours from the moment I started writing.
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| Cover Art Details: It's a riff on the Three Card Monte. Left to right, the characters represent a King of Spades, a Queen of Diamonds, and a King of Clubs. Since the Three Card Monte is usually about distracting the viewer with enough motions to confuse them, the idea here is that the Queen of Diamonds is distracting the onlookers while the Kings do their job in the shadows. Considering I've had at least one person comment exclusively on the Queen and not on the Kings, she's doing a fine job. Art commissioned from Geo K. |
All Things Considered
Those who know me are well aware of the fact that I enjoy the Now You See Me movies a lot. A group of magicians performing various incredible feats for the good of people against the powerful elites of the world. What's not to love?
This project started when I signed up for Scribble's Random Resolution Jam. The only condition for participating in it is to randomly roll for the resolution (as the name of the jam suggests), and then build a game around that. I will admit here, though, that I rerolled my result twice. The reason for that was that I had already made games with those resolution mechanics. The dexterity test is present in Fae King, a game I did very recently, while the strength-based resolution was done in Porters' Journeys, which might be old. Still, I didn't really feel like making another game about exercising. The third roll is what I accepted, though: dice-as-character-sheet, 5d6.
I dabbled with several concepts, some of which I might do in the future, so I'll keep them to myself for now. Eventually, I settled on "magicians doing cool stuff". The premise behind 5d6 used as a character sheet is, as far as I understood it, that you don't need a character sheet. Or, that would be theory. In practice, you'd need to make modular dice for this, each of which would have sides big enough to fit in all the rules. And I doubt anyone would do that with dice sized like regular playing dice. In our world, you'd likely need 5d6 and a character sheet that lists your Aspects.
Now, each magician in my game is defined by a selection of five Aspects from the following categories:
- Crew - magicians' assistants,
- Role - who you are within the team,
- Props - items that you use with your hands and would usually belong to a magician's show,
- Tools - items that you use with your hands and aren't typically seen at a magician's show,
- and Gear, equipment that's worn and would usually help with a magician's show.
How do we turn this into a 5d6 dice pool? Simply put, we roll all the Aspects' dice, read out which ones succeed, and which ones we just can't do right now, and only then do we pick out which actions we pursue. A default Aspect die has three Blank sides that mean you were too slow to act, but get a chance to improve the die after the mission, two Effect sides that do some basic stuff, and one Flourish side that does an extra good outcome. As you progress, you swap out Blank sides for Effects, and Effects for Flourishes. That being said, to do this, you must roll and select a Blank side. So, the best possible Aspect die you can have is one with four Effect and two Flourish sides, after which point you can't improve it anymore.
Two key mechanics to talk about are Prepare and Distraction. Prepared Aspect's die can be rolled twice, keeping the better result, but you can only prepare one, and this must be done when nobody is watching. Distracting makes people watch you or whatever you use for distraction, letting others prepare.
As for effects that can affect a player negatively: Heat will make your character more recognizable, Wounds limit how many Aspect dice you can roll, and Restraints prevent you from taking actions other than trying to free yourself.
Beyond the missions, the game needed something to do in the spare time. For that, I came up with what I called Networks. Inspired by Slugblaster, each Network provides a player with a simple storyline to play out between the missions, with several story beats. In the end, the player gets a choice to make that defines their character a little more, and as a reward, they will get a Knack - a simple ability that improves their character one way or another.
With all this, I also included plenty of GM guidelines on how to run the game, including example storybeats for the networks and obstacles they could use in a mission. Finally, there are random roll tables for things like names, magician outfits, and some other details too.
Look at the time, it's past midnight already. I could cheat and publish the post saying it's published on May 31st, one minute before midnight, ... but I'll keep it honest. I missed my mark, and that happens sometimes. Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!
