Saturday, April 10, 2021

Gooz Bravos

I have this page for GOZR with stats for a few common types of gooz you might encounter in Goozer City. I had the common gooz and the alley wizard and then it dawned on me I needed the common scoundrel, the gooz who is kinda like a PC but not. I decided "bravo" was a term I never used before and it fit. A bravo could be a thug or a thief or a merc.

Quick rundown of what the actual fuck I'm talking about:

GOZR is a hand-lettered, art-heavy RPG project I've been working on here and there for about a year. The core inspirational nugget are the goons that Den works with in the Den sequence of the movie Heavy Metal and Richard Corben's generally awesome weird looking characters. My idea was what if these guys inherited the earth and all the pretty people were dead? Sci-fantasy.

Regarding the stat block:

Threat = Pool of points the GM can spend to let the enemy circumvent the rules, such as taking extra actions or resisting magic.
DEF = Defense, soaking damage.
HP = Hit points.
Size = Duh. "G" means gooz size, or human if you will.
Pack = How many you might encounter.
Dmg = Damage.

I came up with this stat block early in the process and I like it. It's simple, six items you can easily remember. And it covers all the necessary bases for a game like this to function.

More on GOZR as it unfolds I'm standing at around 40 finished pages right now. The original target was 32 and there are still a few more things I need to get around to so this might end up in the 48 page range. Which... is kinda nice. Short enough that you find shit easily.


3 comments:

  1. 48 pages would be good. I feel like my brain will never again absorb a TTRPG system that's as complex as 1e AD&D --- it does it with computer RPGs somehow, maybe because you can play around and test stats and techniques more easily, but reading a TT book I just don't retain the crunch anymore.

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  2. Really like the idea behind GOZR and look forward to hearing more about it.

    That Threat idea is pretty interesting. I like how it's a pretty manageable metacurrency for the GM to use. Gonna have to noodle around on that one.

    Will
    https://tabletop.willphillips.org

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    Replies
    1. GOZR is inspired by Black Hack in the sense that the players roll all the dice. I use the concept of the AC system from D&D as the core mechanic so PCs have 3 ACs on their sheet: Cunning, Magic, and Prowess. Each has a fixed target you roll against on 1d20. Enemies don't have that stat block. If you have Prowess 8 then your target is to roll 8+ on 1d20 regardless of the enemy you're fighting.

      Threat is one of the ways that enemies can be made more... threatening. As GM, I can spend Threat to make extra attacks or ignore magical effects or whatever. So the higher the Threat, the more dangerous the enemy.

      Counter to this is Gooz. Each gooz PC has a Gooz score. This is the player's metapoint pool they can spend to do things similar to Threat. So maybe the enemy uses Threat to ignore your weird super science but you counter with Gooz and make it happen anyway.

      Still need to playtest but that's the basic idea.

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